Need to remember some important facts for that big presentation at work? Clench your right hand while preparing to remember. When giving that talk, ball up your left hand and you’ll call to mind those details, no problem.  

That’s the finding from a new study authored by Ruth Propper, an associate professor and director of the cerebral lateralization laboratory at Montclair State University. Propper has long been intrigued by how body movements impact how the brain works. While most people realize that the brain influences the body (the brain tells your arm there is an itch, and you feel it), less is understood about how the body sways the brain.

Past research suggests that clenching our hands can evoke emotions. When people ball up their right hands, for example, the left sides of their brains become more active, causing what’s known as “approach emotions,” feelings such as happiness or excitement. By squeezing the left hand, people engage the right side of the brain, which controls “withdrawal emotions” such as introversion, fear, or anxiety. (It probably seems like these might be less useful, but they come in handy in dangerous situations.)

Propper theorized that if clenching hands impacted feelings, these gestures might influence the brain in other ways.

To learn how hand clenching influenced memory and recall, she asked 51 right- handed subjects to memorize 72 words and randomly assigned each person to one of five hand-clenching groups or a control group that did nothing. Only righties were included because lefties exhibit better episodic memory overall so they’d have an unfair advantage. She found the perfect combination for better memory and recall occurs when a subject clenches his right hand while memorizing and balls up his left hand while trying to recall the memory. 

“It is interesting to compare to not clenching at all. It’s almost 15 percent better [to clench right then left] than sitting there,” she says. 

While a 15 percent improvement is on the edge of being statistically significant, Propper notes 15 percent can be the difference between an A and a C on test.

Propper admits that more research needs to be conducted on how bodily movements enhance brain function, but she recommends that people try squeezing their hands to aid with memory.

“I would say that it would be worth trying,” Propper says. Take parking your car in the parking lot.  “(A)s you park you can clench your right hand and when you are trying to find it, clench your left hand.”

The paper appears in PLoS One. 

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If you’re a college student thinking of cramming for finals, you might want to adopt a more restful strategy.

Scientists have shown that sleep plays a crucial role in memory. As the brain goes down for the night – or even for a nap – what’s been experienced during the day is carefully sorted through and then filed away in permanent storage for easy access later.

Building on that discovery, German researchers have shown in an intriguing experiment that the improvements in memory that we get during our slumbers be boosted even further if we’re exposed to a very specific kind of sound when we’re in deep sleep.

The researchers suspected that little clicking sounds played in synchrony with our brain’s natural oscillations during deep sleep might pump up the oscillations, thereby improving sleep – and also memory.

“Imagine the sleeping brain as a swing which oscillates slowly back and forth,” says study co-author Jan Born, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Tubingen. “The auditory stimulation acts as a gentle nudge of the swing at its highest point [to enhance] the down swinging direction.”

For the new study, Born and his colleagues asked 11 volunteers to memorize 120 word pairs. The words in each pair were related to one another to make them easier to remember, so, for example, “brain” might be paired with “consciousness” and “problem” with “solution.”

In the evening, the volunteers were tested. A researcher would say one of the words from the pair and the volunteer was to try to remember the other.

Then the volunteers were sent off to the sleep lab where their brain activity was monitored throughout the night.

In the first part of the experiment, clicking noises were played through headphones when volunteers reached deep – or slow wave – sleep. In the morning, they were again tested on how well they remembered the word pairs.

A week later the volunteers were again brought into the lab and the experiment was run exactly as it had been the first time, except that there were no clicking sounds during the night.

To see whether the sounds had improved memory, the researchers subtracted the scores from the evening tests (taken before sleep) from the scores from the morning tests.

In both parts of the experiment, morning scores were improved over evening ones. When there was no clicking during the night, people, on average, remembered 13 more word pairs in the morning than in the evening. But the biggest difference was when people were exposed to clicking during the night. They remembered 22 more word pairs in the morning than they had in tests the evening before. That’s almost double the improvements brought on by sleep alone.

So, will college students be rushing out to buy new-fangled headphones that click in the middle of the night?

Not just yet, Born says.

“The creation of head phones that automatically apply auditory stimuli following the stimulation protocol presented in our publication is possible, [but] not so easy,” he explains. “There is ongoing work on these applied frontiers and therefore the development of such devices in the long-term is not so far-fetched.”

One big hurdle to developing a memory enhancing device is that the clicking sound must be in rhythm with the brain’s oscillations. And that, currently, requires the sleeper to be hooked up to an EEG in a sleep lab so brain waves can be monitored.

In the meantime, specialists may want to use the new method to improve sleep quality in people who are restless during the night, Born says.

“The most obvious application for our finding is in clinical settings, in order to enhance the slow oscillation sleep rhythm and thus improve slow wave sleep in certain forms of insomnia,” he explains. 

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Got a bad memory? The brain has a unique way of helping you forget.

Say you’re on a date and you trip and fall so your dress rides up and he sees your underwear. Or your boss tells you that for the third year in the row there will be no raises. Both of these experiences feel uncomfortable, but what do you do to forget these awkward memories? Researchers found that we use two different ways -- suppression or substitution -- to avoid thinking of uncomfortable or unhappy memories.

“We assume that, in everyday life, healthy people will use a mixture of both mechanisms to prevent an unwanted memory from coming to mind,” says Roland Benoit, a scientist at the Medical Research Council, Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at University of Cambridge, via email. “We did not know whether the processes of direct suppression and thought substitution can be isolated, and which, if any of them, would actually cause forgetting.” 

Roland and his co-author, Michael Anderson, asked 36 adults to participate in a memory exercise where half suppressed memories and the other half substituted new memories. The researchers hoped to understand how we voluntarily forget and how it affects general memory. The subjects were tested during magnetic resonance imaging procedures, or MRIs, allowing the researchers to observe how the brain works during suppression and substitution.

While both processes cause forgetting, a different region of the brain controls each one. When people suppress memories, the dorsal prefrontal cortex inhibits activation in the hippocampus, which plays an important role in retaining memories.

“It thus effectively breaks the remembering process. This, in turn, disrupts the memory representations that would be necessary for recalling the unwanted memory later on,” Benoit explains.

When it comes to substitution, the brain works a bit differently -- the caudal prefrontal cortex and midventrolateral prefrontal cortex form a network of sorts that works with the hippocampus to swap out new information with details people would soon forget.

“By just looking at how well people forgot memories, you couldn’t tell whether they had done direct suppression or thought substitution,” Benoit says. “These mechanisms are based on different brain systems that work in opposite fashion: One (direct suppression) by ‘slamming the mental break’ to stop the remembering process and the other (thought substitution) by steering the remembering process towards a substitute memory.”

Even though people exploit both to forget those nagging, unwanted memories, actively overlooking unpleasant events can negatively impact how we remember. But Benoit notes that learning how people deal with unwanted memories helps them understand how people with traumatic memories, such as PTSD sufferers, cope with remembering. 

“It is perfectly natural for people, upon encountering an unwelcome reminder, to try to put the unpleasant reminding out of mind. We all have experienced this.  Intuitively, it feels as though we solved this problem.”  

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While most of us have trouble remembering the details of even the most important days of our lives, college student Aurelien Hayman can recall every moment of his life, no matter how mundane.

Give him a year and a date and he can tell you what day of the week it was, what the weather was like -  even what he ate for breakfast.

“I can just remember these sorts of things without even trying – and without them having any importance,” Hayman told TODAY. “I just remember them.”

Hayman is one of a small group of people who have extraordinary ability to recall specific details of events, even ordinary days, that happened years ago. TODAY has interviewed several of them over the years, including actress Marilu Henner, who stunned Meredith Vieira in an interview with the vivid recall of the last time they’d brushed past one another.

Though the phenomenon has only recently been identified, scientists have given this special kind of memory a name: Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, or HSAM.

Because it’s so new, there’s been little research on the topic. But in July of this year a study of 11 people with HSAM was published in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, interviewed  11 people with HSAM and scanned their brains. And while the researchers did identify nine brain areas that seemed to be different in size and shape from those of volunteers with typical memories, what really caught the researchers’ attention were the differences in behavior.  

People with HSAM tend to obsess over events (even mundane ones) more than the average person. They ruminate over what happened during the day and organize everything in their minds over and over again.

In fact, they often report “habitually recalling their memories, a seemingly compulsive tendency,” noted Aurora K.R. LePort and her colleagues. “Every night before bed one participant recalls what occurred on that day X number of years ago. Another recalls, while stuck in traffic, as many days as possible from a certain year.”

Memory expert Dr. Gary Small believes we should study people like Hayman and Henner to help people who are losing their memory due to disease or old age.

“We are involved in memory training techniques to teach people to try to improve their memories – and of things that individuals with extraordinary biographical memory seem to do instinctively,” said Small, director of the Longevity Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “The Alzheimer’s Prevention Program: Keep Your Brain Healthy for the Rest of Your Life.”

“I think that probably their brains are wired so that they can naturally do what we teach others to do to improve their memories: focusing attention, creating associations and giving those associations meaning.”

While a perfect memory might seem like a gift, some people find it a real burden.

Jill Price, 46,  wishes she couldn’t remember everything quite so well. She is plagued by her inability to escape unhappy memories that are so detailed that they feel like they just happened.

“Thinking about something from 20 years ago that means absolutely nothing to me today, but still bothers me or still upsets me,” Jill said.  It’s like yesterday. It really is.”

But for Hayman and most of the people in the new study, HSAM is a gift.            

“As a group they view their autobiographical memory ability as a positive attribute,” LePort and her colleagues concluded.

Hayman himself only recently realized that his memory was out of the ordinary.

“Now that I know it’s something special, I think I’ll sort of value it more,” he told TODAY.

Related stories:

Where are my keys? Expert tips for remembering

Joy Bauer's memory-boosting smoothie

Marilu Henner talks about her steel-trap memory

In the study, researchers told two short stories to 33 people. After one story, the participants sat in a room with their eyes closed. After the second story, they played a computer game. Seven days later, the people who zoned out were able to recall more of the story details. After learning something new, your brain automatically replays the information to form a new memory. But learning something new interferes with this process, the study explains.

Your move: When you learn something new, close your eyes and take a break. You can review what you just learned, think about what you're having for lunch, or replay the events of last night's date--just don't take in any new information. For more ways to improve your memory, check out these 27 Ways to Power Up Your Brain.

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By Sara Cann
Men's Health

Chomping on gum all day long won't just annoy your cube mate--it'll muck up your memory, too. Researchers at Cardiff University in the U.K. found that people who chewed gum had a harder time memorizing lists of letters and numbers than those who didn't chew.

Why? Researchers believe that the motion involved in chewing impedes your brain's ability to memorize serial lists. Just like tapping your finger or foot may distract you from accomplishing the same task, continual movements like gnawing on gum can also interfere with your short-term memory. Let's test how good your short-term memory is. Memorize the following words: Nun, teddy bear, professor, pencil, banana, friend, soup.

In 10 minutes, see how many of the words you can recall. If you can't get all seven, then follow this expert-approved plan to boost your short-term memory--no gum needed. Use these tricks to memorize that hot girl's digits, directions to a buddy's place, or the names of your new coworkers. (For more great tips, read How to Remember Everything.)

1. Pay attention
It takes about eight seconds of intense focus to process a piece of information into your memory, says Men's Health Mentalist Marc Salem, author of The Six Keys to Unlock and Empower Your Mind. So make sure you're not texting or checking Facebook when you're being introduced to someone or need to remember something. "If you're easily distracted, pick a quiet place where you won't be interrupted," says Salem.

2. Create a mental picture
Your brain is hardwired to remember things visually, says Gary Small, M.D., author of The Memory Bible. So soak in the context of your conversation: The clothes the person is wearing, the characteristics of their face or body, and the atmosphere of your location. "Context gives information more meaning," Small says. All of these clues may help you put together pieces of information later. (Learn 10 more ways to sharpen your mind.)

3. Tell a story
Using the contextual clues you've gathered, create a story around the info you're trying to remember. Take the words up top: Did you just try to repeat each word to sear it into your memory, or did you link the words with a story? (For example, the professor pointed with his pencil to a picture of a nun drawing a teddy bear who was eating soup with his friend, who had a banana.) The more emotional you can make your story (like linking a stranger's name to a family member's), the more likely you'll remember it, says Small.

Related: 27 Ways to Power Up Your Brain

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Nice to meet you! ... What's your name again?

Tired of finding yourself in that awkward situation where you recognize someone's face, yet you can't recall their name? New research in Psychological Science sheds some light on the phenomenon.

Scientists recently discovered that a face's features, more than the entire face per se, are the key to recognizing a person.

"In the past, it was believed that we look at faces holistically in order to recognize the face," says Jason M. Gold, coauthor of the study and associate professor of psychology at Indiana University. "But surprisingly, we found that the whole was not greater than the sum of its parts."

Avoid a Memory Meltdown

But how can you put this ability to hone in on features to good use? We reached out to Scott Hagwood, author of Memory Power and four-time National Memory Champion, to teach you how to utilize that memory of yours and never forget a name again.

Wordplay
The key to remembering someone's name is making a connection between their name and something that you can easily remember, says Hagwood. So right off the bat, see if the name itself does the work for you. Alliteration and rhyming can be very helpful, says Hagwood. For example, you remember Lucy due to her luscious lips (alliteration), or you were introduced to Cole, who has a large facial mole (rhyming).

Form a trigger
Let's say you meet "Henry," yet this isn't the first "Henry" you know. Since you have an old Henry in mind, try to form a connection between the new Henry's features and the original Henry, says Hagwood. By drawing this parallel, this conditions the brain to use that feature as a memory trigger. A weak example: Both men have short hair. "Since hair styles can frequently change, it's not the wisest choice to make connections to," says Hagwood. A better method: Pick something you despise about old Henry and compare it to the new. Maybe Old Henry has absolutely horrible skin, yet the new once looks like he just stepped out of a Clinique ad.

A simple way to get an individual's name to go hand in hand with their face is to say their name aloud in conversation. This technique practices mindfulness and can condition your brain to associate the sound of their name to their face, says Hagwood. Just don't overdo the repetition, otherwise the interaction feels forced.

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By Natalie Wolchover
Life's Little Mysteries

Our brains balk at the thought of four-dimensional hypercubes, quantum mechanics or an infinite universe, and understandably so. But our gray matter is generally adept at processing sensory data from the mundane objects and experiences of daily life. However, there are a few glaring exceptions.

Here are five common things that unexpectedly throw our brains for a loop, revealing some of the bizarre quirks in their structure and function that usually manage to slip under the radar.

Doors
Do you ever walk into a room with some purpose in mind — to get something, perhaps? — only to completely forget what that purpose was?  Turns out, doors themselves are to blame for these strange memory lapses.

Why you forgot what you were just doing

Psychologists at the University of Notre Dame have discovered that passing through a doorway triggers what's known as an "event boundary" in the mind, separating one set of thoughts and memories from the next, just as exiting through a doorway signals the end of a scene in a movie. Your brain files away the thoughts you had in the previous room, and prepares a blank slate for the new locale. Mental event boundaries usually help us organize our thoughts and memories as we move through the continuous and dynamic world, but when we're trying to remember that thing we came in here to do… or get… or maybe find… they can be frustrating indeed.

Beeps
Which bugs you more: the whine of a digital alarm clock, the sound of a truck backing up, or the shrill reminders that your smoke detector is running out of batteries? Fine, they're all terrible. Beeps are practically the soundtrack of the modern world, but they're extremely irritating because each one induces a tiny brain fart.

We didn't evolve hearing beeps, so we struggle to grasp them. Natural sounds are created from a transfer of energy, often from one object striking another, such as a stick hitting a drum. In that case, energy is transferred into the drum and then gradually dissipates, causing the sound to decay over time. Our perceptual system has evolved to use that decay to understand the event — to figure out what made the sound, and where it came from. Beep sounds, on the other hand, are like cars driving at 60 mph then suddenly hitting a wall, as opposed to gradually slowing to a stop. The sound doesn't change over time, and it doesn't fade away, so our brains are baffled about what they are and where they're coming from. 

Photos
Just as we didn't evolve hearing beeps, we also didn't evolve seeing photographs. Like your grandmother learning to use the Internet but never developing an intuitive feel for it, we consciously "get" photographs, but our subconscious brains can't quite separate them from the objects or people pictured.

Case in point: Studies show that people are much less accurate when throwing darts at pictures of JFK, babies, or people they like than when throwing darts at Hitler or their worst enemy. Another study found that people start to sweat profusely when asked to cut up photographs of their cherished childhood possessions. Lacking millions of years of practice, our brains fail when it comes to separating appearance from reality.

Phones
Do you ever feel your phone vibrating in your pocket or purse, only to retrieve it and be met by eerie, black-screened lifelessness? If, like most people, you occasionally experience these "phantom vibrations," it turns out it's because your brain is jumping to wrong conclusions in an attempt to make sense of the chaos that is your life.

Brains are bombarded with sensory data; they must filter out the useless noise, and pick up on the important signals. In prehistoric times we would have constantly misinterpreted curvy sticks in the corny of our vision for snakes. Today, most of us are techno-centric, and so our brains misinterpret everything from the rustle of clothing to the growling of a stomach, jumping to the conclusion that we're getting a call or text, and actually causing us to hallucinate a full-on phone vibration.

Wheels

Ever noticed how car wheels can look like they're spinning backwards in the movies? This is because movie cameras capture still images of a scene at a finite rate, and the brain fills in the gaps between these images by creating the illusion of continuous motion between the similar frames. If the wheel rotates most of the way around between one frame and the next, the most obvious direction of motion for the brain to pick up on is backwards, since this direction suggests the minimal difference between the two frames. [Why It Took so Long to Invent the Wheel]

However, wheels can also appear to spin backwards in real life, too, which is weirder. The leading theory to explain the "continuous wagon wheel illusion," as it is known, holds that the brain's motion perception system samples its input as a series of discrete snapshots, much like a movie camera. So our brains are effectively filming their own movies of the external world, but not always at a fast enough frame rate to perceive the wheels in the scene spinning the right way. 

For scientific explanations of five more brain farts, click here .

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By Maren Kasselik
Men's Health

Have you ever walked into a room and realized you don’t remember what you’re doing there? Yeah, us too. Well thankfully science finally explains why: It’s the doorway’s fault, a new study finds.

“When you go from room to room, your brain identifies each room as a new event and sets a new memory trace to capture the new event,” says study author Gabriel Radvansky, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Like a chapter marker, doorways end old episodes and begin new ones, as far as your brain is concerned. This makes it difficult to retrieve older memories because they’ve already been filed away, Radvansky says.

Radvansky suggests physically carrying a reminder of what your intent is: “For example, if you want to go from the living room to the kitchen to get a snack, you may forget why you went to the kitchen when you get there because this is a new event, and you may have been distracted. But, it would be easier to remember if you walked into the kitchen with something to remind yourself of what you wanted, such as a bowl.”

Don’t keep bowls in the living room? That’s OK. Form your hand into a bowl shape when you walk to the kitchen. If you’re going from room to room to fetch a pair of scissors, hold your index and middle fingers in a scissor shape to help the memory stay intact.

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