Ebbinghaus's retention curve indicates that only 63 percent of the first-time learned information is retained after 20 minutes. Only 38 percent is retained after 1 day, 31 percent after 2 days, and 25 percent after 31 days.

George Miller reported that the amount of information that can be apprehended on one exposure to new material is between five and nine items. If the information is grouped or organized into chunks, the amount of information can be greatly increased.

Osgood found that people fit words into an internal semantic structure that evaluates meaning in three basic dimensions - evaluative (good-bad), potency (strong-weak), and activity (active-passive).

A measure of the way verbal concepts are organized and understood is called lexical markings. Certain words or phrases are basic and "unmarked," such as greater than, tall, and heavy. Other words and phrases are "marked," such as less than, short, and light, and are presumed to be derived from the unmarked form. Children understand the unmarked forms at an earlier age than the marked forms, and adults can remember unmarked forms more easily than the marked forms. Also, an unmarked form can represent the entire dimension. If you ask "How tall is she?" she could be tall or short. But asking, "How short is she?" implies that she's short.

All languages are composed of phonemes, meaningful sound units that can be distinguished in a language (like k, a and t in the word cat), which combine to make up morphemes, which are smallest language units having distinct and separate meanings (like hand and ful in handful), and they are arranged to form phrases, clauses and sentences, which are called syntax.

Monkeys confined in a closed box with two doors learned to open the door that allowed them to look out on an interesting scene. The more interesting the scene, the more rapid was the learning.

Japan has 51 women for every 50 men, the United States has 50.7 women for every 50 men, Nigeria has 50.7 women for every 50 men. East Asia (dominated by China) has 48.9 women for every 50 men. South Asia (dominated by India) has only 48.5 women for every 50 men.

South Korea spends 2.1 percent of GDP on social security benefits, the Philippines spends 0.7 percent, and India just 0.5 percent. That compares with 7.5 percent in the United States, 11.7 percent in Germany, and 18.7 percent in France.

The first superbowl ever was carried live by two major networks, both of which have accidentally deleted the only copy they had.

The first doctoral degree in America was received by G. Stanley Hall from Harvard University in 1878. He also founded the first formal laboratory for the study of psychology in the United States at Johns Hopkins University. The first person in the world to hold the title of professor of psychology was James McKeen Cattell.

In the 1667 Treaty of Breda, Holland traded its colony of Manhattan to England, in exchange for the Indonesian island of Run, then the world's leading source of nutmeg. At the time, the Dutch were considered to have gotten the better end of the deal.

The playing time of a CD is fixed at seventy-four minutes so that it can fit all of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

An absolute threshold is the minimal intensity necessary for a stimulus to be detected. Absolute thresholds change from person to person, but thresholds for the general population are approximately as follows:

Vision - a candle flam can be seen at 30 miles on a dark, clear night.

Hearing - The tick of a watch can be heard under quiet condisitons at 20 feet.

Taste - One teaspoon of sugar can be tasted in two gallons of water.

Smell - One drop of perfume can be smelled when diffused into the entire volume of a six-room apartment.

Touch - The wing of a fly can be felt falling on a cheek from a distance of one centimeter.

An endemic species of plant or animal is one that is native to an island or region and is found nowhere else at all. An exotic species is one that has been introduced from abroad. The reason this results in a disaster is because continental masses are big and support many, many species, each of which are used to competing with each other for survival. So the ones that survive are generally ferocious fighters. Island species, on the other hand, are fewer and don't worry about competition all that much and their evolution and adaptation is much slower. Therefore, when the ferocious fighters are put on the island, they quickly wipe out the native island species.

There is no reason to think that early Homo sapiens engaged in sexual activity knowing offspring would result; the behavior was undertaken for pleasure. Most of what we do is either to get pleasure or to avoid discomfort.

If we are to survive as a species we need to be good at four basic activities: ingestion, procreation, the securing of appropriate habitation, and exploration.

Roger Ulrich has shown that views of natural scenes bring about a reduction in stress for students studying for an exam. A natural setting or even a picture of it, significantly shortens recovery time for surgical patients.

The baiji dolphin, which lives in the Yangtze River in China, is half-blind. Its eyes are high up on its head and can really only see what's above it.

Ostriches don't bite because they have no teeth and they don't don't have forelimbs with claws, so kick their preys to death.

There are three families of responses and behaviors built into the genetic material of many creatures, including humans: those immediately operative from the moment of the creature's appearance as an active individual being, those that occur spontaneously at a later time in life, and those that drive and shape biologically prepared learning.

Samuel F.B. Morse, the inventor of Morse code, had a deaf wife and communicated with her by tapping out Morse code in her hands.

Navajo, a native American Indian language, is a spoken language and it established a precedent for recognizing American Sign Language as a full-fledged language. But there still aren't enough schools that recognize ASL as a foreign language.

The currently accepted phrases to use for deaf people is deaf, not deaf-mute, not deaf-and-dumb and not even hearing challenged, just deaf.

The second-oldest school for the deaf in the United States is New York School for the Deaf, popularly referred to as Fanwood.

Alexander Graham Bell's mother and wife were deaf and he invented the telephone while seeking a device to help hard-of-hearing people hear. He thought that it would be better for future generations if deaf people were prevented from reproducing. Ironically, 90% of deaf people have hearing parents and 90% of all deaf parents have hearing children.

A cochlear-implant is a bionic ear device. A small receiver is implanted in the mastoid bone behind the ear; an array of electrodes - 22 for the 22-channel device - is inserted surgically into the cochlea, the small shaped organ in the inner ear. This operation involves drilling a hole in the skull. After a month of healing, the implantee is fitted with an ear-level microphone and a transmitting coil attached by a cord to a speech processor, a sort of pocket computer. The microphone picks up sounds, relays them to the speech processor, which transmits them to the receiver behind the ear, which sends the signals to the internal device, which stimulates the auditory nerve, which sends the signals to the brain, which interprets them as "sounds."

If you are congenitally deaf, it means you were born deaf, which doesn't necessarily mean you are genetically deaf; it could be due to complications in pregnancy.

If you were watching a deaf performer, you, in the audience, would applaud by waving your hands.

September, 1752 had only 19 days to synchronize the calendars as part of the Gregorian Reformation.