Three Uses for Rosemary

Use Rosemary stalks to skewer meats and vegetables as they actually contain the same oils and scents as rosemary leaves.

Pick the thickest stalks, scrape off the leaves, and pierce them through a couple of inch-sized pieces of meat, lamb, chicken, or fish and it infuses flavor from the inside.

For more delicate fish, you could also layer a bunch of stalks to create a lattice and add some slices of lemon, then put the fish directly onto this homemade roasting rack for additional flavor.

Add rosemary stalks to a fireplace for a natural forest smell in your living room. In many complementary medicines, the smell of rosemary is said to give you more energy. It was also used by the ancient Romans as incense and by the Elizabethans to improve memory.

Climb a Tree to Get Smart

Dynamic activities like climbing a tree could be a simple way to improve your working memory, according to new research.

Researchers found activities that require awareness of the position of different body parts and strength to complete movement, are linked to benefits of an individual’s working memory. These activities include anything from climbing a tree to balancing on a beam.


They evaluated participants between the ages of 18 and 59 while testing their working memory before and after the completion of various dynamic activities, such as climbing a tree, walking on narrow beams, running barefoot, and navigating obstacle courses. The study found that participants experienced a 50 percent improvement in their working memory after completing these exercises. Just a few minutes of such activity can produce beneficial effects on working memory.

“By taking a break to do activities that are unpredictable and require us to consciously adapt our movements, we can boost our working memory to perform better in the classroom and the boardroom,” study leader Ross Alloway said. He emphasized that by doing physical activity that makes us think, we are exercising our brains as well.


Those in the medical field say working memory helps humans actively process information, making it easier to perform day-to-day tasks and often increasing performance. The findings were published in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skill. Some of us are already smart enough to not climb a tree.

Memory Help

Do you ever have a song in your mind, but cannot remember the singer, or group, or title? You can call your friends or you can go to this site, hum a few bars into your mic and it will tell you all you need to know LINK.

You might have had times when you are discussing a movie or an actor and the answer is on the tip of your tongue, but you cannot remember exactly. Go to this site LINK, type whatever you remember and someone will help you out.

Maybe you have seen a picture of something or found a strange item in your garage, but do not know what it is. You can go to this site LINK, upload a picture, and someone will tell you what that thing is. Unfortunately there is no site yet to tell you where you put your keys.

Memory Tricks

Have you ever wondered if you closed the garage door, or turned off the stove. How about putting out food for your pet, or watering the plants. Aging reduces these mundane acts far to the back of our consciousnesses. If these niggling things bother you from time to time, try clapping. When you close the door or other mundane activity, clap your hands. Alternatively, you can say it out loud, "I closed the garage door."

Sounds silly, but your mind will file those actions away much more prominently than the act itself. When you doubt whether you turned off the stove, your mind will rapidly remember you said it out loud or clapping.

Here is another mind trick for those times you go into another room to find or do something, only to discover you forgot why you are there. Going through the doorway is like passing through a barrier and it changes your thought process. When you decide to go to another room to retrieve an item, say it out loud, "I am going to the kitchen to get some potato chips". Of course, that is one activity that I would never forget, but you get the idea.

Wordology Cryptomnesia

The emergence in the mind of previously learned information that is treated as a new, original idea is cryptomnesia. A fragment of a song or a line of poetry comes to you, for instance, that you think you have invented, until someone else informs you it was Seeger or Lennon. The act of remembering, without knowing that is what you are doing.

It was first used by the nineteenth-century psychologist Théodore Flournoy, who studied mediums, psychics, and others. The ability to generate vivid recollections of past lives under hypnotic regression is, perhaps facilitated by cryptomnesia. From Greek kryptos, “hidden,” + mnesia, “memory.”

Rosemary for Memory

Scientists have found that aromas can profoundly affect people's cognitive abilities. In a 2003 study, psychologists asked 144 volunteers to perform a series of long-term memory, working memory, and attention and reaction tests. Some subjects worked in a scent-free cubicle, some in a cubicle infused with essential oil from rosemary, and the rest worked in cubicles scented with lavender oil.

Those in the rosemary-infused cubicles demonstrated significantly better long-term and working memory than those in the unscented cubicles. Also, those exposed to the smell of rosemary reported feeling more alert than the control (scent-free) group.

Participants working in the lavender cubicles reported feeling less alert and those in the lavender-scented cubicles performed worse than the others in tests of working memory.

If you need your brain to perform at its best, you can try placing a rosemary plant on your windowsill. Research also shows that eating chocolate may improve memory and cognition, because it is rich in antioxidants called flavanols.

I Forgot

Did you forget why you went into the kitchen? It may be more location than age related. Researchers in Notre Dame conducted several experiments on rooms and their effect on memory. Subjects in the study were divided into two groups and given a simple task while traveling the same distance. The only difference is one group went through a doorway and the other did not.

They found that people who traveled through the doorway were three times more likely to forget their task. Researchers concluded that our mind perceives doorways as “event boundaries” and that decisions you made in that room are “stored” there when you leave. That is also why it is easier to remember if you go back into that room. That presumes you remember which room you came from.

Older Brains and Remembering

A new study has found promising evidence that the older brain's weakened ability to filter out irrelevant information may actually give aging adults a memory advantage over their younger counterparts.

Other research has already shown that aging is associated with a decreased ability to tune out irrelevant information. The current study showed that older brains are less likely to suppress irrelevant information than younger brains and can link the relevant and irrelevant pieces of information together to use this knowledge for subsequent memory tasks.

The older adults showed a 30% advantage over younger adults in their memory. Because this type of knowledge is thought to play a critical role in real world decision-making, older adults may be the wiser decision-makers compared to younger adults because they picked up so much more information. I knew that.