I was at school when it was the praxis to give students "study lists" – conjugations; dates; facts; idioms; poems; proverbs; quotations; spellings; theorems. We got out of school just when our brains were in imminent danger of becoming pedagogic data-banks. Yet this tedious method was a one-stop-shop for keeping us occupied, teaching us general knowledge, and encouraging our brains to create new synapses while honing long-term memory skills. Read next feature >