Top 10 Ways to Improve Your Memory

­­The human brai­n is like a library that stock­s memories instead of books. In some ways, that makes the hippocampus, the part of the brain most involved in memory, the brain's librarian. The hippocampus has the most responsibility in this cranial library, juggling the new releases of short-term memory while cataloging materials for the permanent collection of long-term memory. It's not the only part at work, however, in storing these chapters of our lives. Different kinds of memory are stored in different areas of the brain. With such a large system, the brain needs a system of encoding and retrieving memories.

10. Drink in Moderation

Before you settle in to read this article, you may want to get yourself a glass of wine. Surprised that such debauchery begins our list of memory improvers? Well, hear us out. Memory and alcohol have an interesting relationship.
First off, you'll notice we didn't advocate bringing the entire bottle back with you. Too much drinking handicaps the memory, as anyone who's ever woken after a binge with a fuzzy recollection of the night before can attest. And one component of a DUI test shows how over-consumption of alcohol can immediately affect the brain: Even simple mental tasks like counting backward and reciting the alphabet can become tricky under the influence. Alcohol abuse will have a negative effect on the cells of the brain related to memory.
But as long as you're not pregnant and able to maintain control of how much you drink, there's evidence that light to moderate alcohol consumption can improve memory and cognition. Though more research needs to be done, some studies have found that moderate drinkers do better on certain tests of memory and cognition than non-drinkers and heavy drinkers [sources: Victoroff, Minerd]. There may be some long-term effects as well. A French study that followed almost 4,000 people over the age of 65 found that light drinkers, who consumed up to two glasses of wine a day, were 45 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than non-drinkers [source: Victoroff].
But as we said, don't start tipping back beverages if you have certain risk factors, such as a family history of alcoholism. No one is recommending that teetotalers start drinking, either. Resveratrol, one of the flavonoids in red wine that's believed to have special benefits for blood vessels, is also in red grape juice.
If you tend to drink when you're sad, head to the next page for some information on how your blues affect your brain.


 9. Seek Treatment for Depression


Anything that causes major stress in life, including anxiety or anger, will eventually eat away at the parts of the brain that are responsible for memory. Chief among these stressors is major depression. Depression is often misidentified as a memory problem since one of the main symptoms of the condition is an inability to concentrate. If you can't concentrate on schoolwork or the information needed to complete a task on the job, then you may feel as if you're constantly forgetting things. As it is, you're not even able to concentrate long enough to learn them in the first place.
Depression causes an increase of cortisol levels in the bloodstream, which in turns elevates the amount of cortisol in the brain. With the help of brain imaging devices, doctors have been able to see how that increased cortisol diminishes certain brain areas, chief among them the hippocampus [source: Tan]. One study showed that people who had been depressed, even if it was years ago, had suffered a 12 to 15 percent loss in the hippocampus [source: Victoroff]. Since the hippocampus is the clearing center for short-term memory, prolonged depression demolishes the brain's ability to remember anything new.
Additionally, depression affects the types of things a person is able to remember. While everyone's brain is selective about which memories make it into long-term storage, people with depression seem only able to retain negative memories [source: Crook]. That means there's a neurological reason why a person with depression remains obsessed with the one time a loved one forgot a birthday or anniversary, even if it was remembered every other year.
But happy memories needn't be lost forever to someone battling depression. Medications for depression, including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), have been shown to jump-start the process of cell regeneration in the hippocampus [source: Tan].
The next item on our list can help fight depression while it improves memory as well.

Kerry Arrives in Africa With Agenda

Secretary of State John Kerry starts a five-day visit to Africa today with a focus on security that includes reining in the conflict in South Sudan. Kerry at a meeting today in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, agreed with East African foreign ministers that a peacekeeping force must be swiftly deployed in South Sudan.
“A legitimate force, that has the ability to make peace, needs to be on the ground as soon as possible,” Kerry told reporters. The Ethiopian, Ugandan and Kenyan foreign ministers said they must work out the details on the “timing, manner and size” of the force, said Kerry.
Violence has roiled South Sudan, the world’s newest country, since December when President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar and other leaders of staging a coup, a charge they deny.
The conflict has taken on an ethnic dimension, stoking grievances between Kiir’s Dinka tribe and Machar’s Nuer group. The fighting has left thousands of people dead and displaced more than a million. Both sides have flouted a cease-fire signed in January, according to United Nations peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous.
President Barack Obama has prepared an executive order that would allow for sanctions against individuals in South Sudan whose U.S. assets could be frozen and whose travel there would be barred. A U.S. official, who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record, said a list of individual names was being discussed and could include Kiir and Machar.

Sanctions Support

Kerry, whose trip will also take him to Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, will be working to persuade South Sudan’s neighbors to apply sanctions as well. Without regional support on sanctions, the official acknowledged that any U.S. move to punish South Sudanese leaders will be less effective.
Kerry will also meet today with African Union leaders to focus on security issues in sub-Saharan Africa, including finding further steps to ease long-standing conflict in Congo and in the Central African Republic.
Kerry’s African Union meeting, the fourth high level dialogue with the continental body, will also touch on issues of governance, corruption and development, said the U.S. official, who is travelling with Kerry. While Kerry’s strong focus on the trip is peace and security issues, he will also emphasize the importance of human rights and freedoms.
Throughout, Kerry will be working on arrangements for the first U.S.-Africa leaders’ summit, which Obama has planned for August.

200 kidnapped girls being forced to marry their militant captors

Angry parents take their protests to the streets, calling on the government and kidnappers to bring their daughters home. Desperate families have even taken the search for the over 200 missing girls into their own hands.

LAGOS, Nigeria — Scores of girls and young women kidnapped from a school in Nigeria are being forced to marry their Islamic extremist abductors, a civic organization reported Wednesday.

At the same time, the Boko Haram terrorist network is negotiating over the students’ fate and is demanding an unspecified ransom for their release, a Borno state community leader told The Associated Press. He said the Wednesday night message from the abductors also claimed that two of the girls have died from snake bites.

The message was sent to a member of a presidential committee mandated last year to mediate a ceasefire with the Islamic extremists, said the civic leader, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak about the talks.

The news of negotiations comes as parents say the girls are being sold into marriage to Boko Haram militants. The students are being paid 2,000 naira ($12) to marry the fighters, Halite Aliyu of the Borno-Yobe People’s Forum told The Associated Press. She said the parents’ information about mass weddings is coming from villagers in the Sambisa Forest, on Nigeria’s border with Cameroon, where Boko Haram is known to have hideouts.

“The latest reports are that they have been taken across the borders, some to Cameroon and Chad,” Aliyu said. It was not possible to verify the reports about more than 200 missing girls kidnapped in the northeast by the Boko Haram terrorist network two weeks ago.

“Some of them have been married off to insurgents. A medieval kind of slavery. You go and capture women and then sell them off,” community elder Pogu Bitrus of Chibok, the town where the girls were abducted, told the BBC Hausa Service.

Outrage over the failure to rescue the girls is growing and hundreds of women braved heavy rain to march Wednesday to Nigeria’s National Assembly to protest lack of action over the students. Hundreds more also marched in Kano, Nigeria’s second city in the north.

“The leaders of both houses said they will do all in their power, but we are saying two weeks already have past, we want action now,” said activist Mercy Asu Abang.

“We want our girls to come home alive — not in body bags,” she said.

Nigerians have harnessed social media to protest, trending under the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.

There also has been no news of 25 girls kidnapped from Konduga town in Borno state earlier this month.

A federal senator from the region said the military is aware of the movements of the kidnappers and the girls because he has been feeding them details that he has gathered on a near-daily basis.

“What bothered me the most is that whenever I informed the military where these girls were, after two to three days they were moved from that place to another. Still, I would go back and inform them on new developments,” Sen. Ahmad Zanna is quoted as saying at the Nigerian online news site Persecond News.

Zanna said some of the girls are in Kolofata in Cameroon, about 15 kilometers (nine miles) from the border with Nigeria. He said one of the insurgents had called a friend in Borno state to say that he had just got married and was settling in Kolofata. Zanna also said three or four days ago Nigerian herdsmen reported seeing the girls taken in boats onto an island in Lake Chad.

 Another senator from the region said the government needs to get international help to rescue the girls. The government must do “whatever it takes, even seeking external support to make sure these girls are released,” Sen. Ali Ndume said. “The longer it takes the dimmer the chances of finding them, the longer it takes the more traumatized the family and the abducted girls are.”

About 50 of the kidnapped girls managed to escape from their captors in the first days after their abduction, but some 220 remain missing, according to the principal of the Chibok Girls Secondary School, Asabe Kwambura. They are between 16 and 18 years old and had been recalled to the school to write a physics exam.

The failure to rescue the girls is a massive embarrassment to Nigeria’s government and the military, already confronted by mounting criticism over its apparent inability to curb the 5-year-old Islamic uprising despite having draconian powers through an 11-month state of emergency in three northeastern states covering one-sixth of the country.

The military trumpets a success in its “onslaught on terrorists” but then the extremists step up the tempo and deadliness of their attacks. More than 1,500 people have been killed in the insurgency so far this year, compared to an estimated 3,600 between 2010 and 2013.

President Goodluck Jonathan, who is from the predominantly Christian south of Nigeria, has been accused of insensitivity to the plight of people in the north, who are mainly Muslims.

People from Nigeria’s northeast feel that they are being punished because they did not vote for Jonathan’s People’s Democratic Party — the entire region is held by opposition politicians, said Aliyu, of the Borno-Yobe People’s Forum. “The northeast zone is in flames and nothing is being done because we didn’t vote PDP,” she said. “Women are raped daily, our children are being carted away like animals and sold like chickens, they (extremists) burn schools, they burn mosques, they raze entire villages.”

She said it would take decades to rebuild from the destruction that has forced an estimated 750,000 people from their homes, some into neighboring countries, fleeing the terror of the zealots as well as abuses by the soldiers.

The military’s lack of progress in rescuing the girls indicates that large parts of northeastern Nigeria remain beyond the control of the government. Until the kidnappings, the air force had been mounting near-daily bombing raids since mid-January on the Sambisa Forest and mountain caves bordering Chad.

Aliyu said that in northeastern Nigeria “life has become nasty, short and brutish. We are living in a state of anarchy.”

Nigerian Blast Near Capital Leaves Nine

A bomb explosion near Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, left at least nine people dead and 11 others injured today, the country’s emergency agencies said.

The 11 are unconscious and are “receiving treatment in various hospitals in Abuja,” Emmanuel Okeh of Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps and Manzo Ezekiel of the National Emergency Management Agency said in a joint statement e-mailed to reporters. They revised their earlier statement that 8 people had died. 

The blast occurred near the location where an April 14 car bomb killed at least 75 people and injured more than 100 others. That attack was claimed by the Boko Haram Islamist militant group, which has been waging a violent campaign in the past five years to impose Shariah, or Islamic law, in Africa’s biggest economy. 

Gunmen suspected to be members of Boko Haram also seized 230 girls from a secondary school in northeastern Borno state last month, and are still holding about 180 of them hostage.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with about 170 million people and its biggest oil producer, is almost evenly split between a mainly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south.