Songs help memories

    The power of music

    Most people can remember important news stories clearly, whether it was the murder of President Kennedy in the US or 9/11.But now psychologists Martin Conway and Catriona Morrison, from the University of Leeds in the UK, are investigating how music can create “autobiographical memories” of the main events in our lives. The study is online. People have to choose a song by the Beatles and describe the memories that they have when they listen to it.

Reminiscence bump

    Morrison explained that they looked at different age groups and their memories. We often remember more from when we are teenagers and this is called “the reminiscence bump”. This is the time in your life when you form your idea of who you are. For older people who have memories related to the Beatles' music, most of those memories are from when they were teenagers. But younger people also had clear personal memories from their past.

    She loves you

    This study was different from other memory studies, because people remembered events from their past with lots more details. Morrison explained:     “It was like people had travelled back to the past, and they had very clear memories of things that had happened. When they heard a song like She Loves You by the Beatles, they could remember one night in autumn 1963.They remembered what they were wearing, what the weather was like and what their friend said to them. You get a lot more information than if you just say, ‘tell me about a night you remember'. ”

    The study has found that music could be used with people who have problems remembering the past. “You could use music to help improve people's ability to remember,” said Morrison. “In the future, we would like to do more experiments to see how useful music is in helping people to remember the past, and compare it to other things that might also help.”

    All living things on the earth need other living things to live. Nothing lives alone. Most animals must live in a group, and even a plant grows close together with others of the same kind. Sometimes one living thing kills another, one eats and the other is eaten. Each kind of life eats another kind of life in order to live, and together they form a food chain (食物链). Some food chains are simple, while others are not. But all food chains begin with the sun, and all food chains become broken up if one of the links (联系) disappears.

    All life needs sunlight to live on. But only plants can use sunlight directly (直接). Plants are “factories”. They make food from sunlight, water and things in the soil (土壤) and air.

    Plants feed all other living things. Animals can only use the sun's energy (能量) after it has been changed into food by plants. Some animals feed directly on plants, others eat smaller animals. Meat-eating animals are only eating plants indirectly.

    What about human beings? We are members of many food chains. We eat wheat (小麦), rice, vegetables, fruits and so on. We also eat meat and drink milk. But humans often break up the food chains. They kill wild animals. They also make rivers, lakes and seas dirty. When these rivers, lakes and seas are polluted, the fish in them cannot be eaten. If men eat the fish, they will get strange diseases (疾病).

    Each form of life is linked to all others. Breaking the links puts all life in danger.

    DNA is the whole" map" of the human body. It is something that all humans have, and it tells the body what to do. DNA is the reason that we look like our parents, because we get some of their DNA to make our own.

    People have been trying to understand the human body for a long time. In 1860, Mr. Mendel discovered why we look the same as other people in our family. It is because of small things called "genes" (基因)in our body. In 1953, two scientists, Watson and Crick, found out that genes are really messages. They're written in the DNA with a special language.

    In 1961, another two scientists found the first" word" that they could understand in that language. It shows how DNA tells the cell(细胞)to build its parts. So far, scientists have found all the words in the DNA map, but we still don't understand what they all do. By understanding what just one" word" means, we can help to save people from several illnesses. So the more we understand, the more doctors will be able to do.

    Most people hope that this can help to make better medicine to help sick people. Other people worry that when we learn more" word" and find out more information, we will use it in the wrong way. Just to make people more attractive, or stop sick people getting jobs.