Full video

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Hello and welcome to Real Easy English.

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In this podcast, we have real conversations

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in easy English to help you learn.

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I'm Georgie.

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And I'm Neil.

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And don't forget, you can now watch a version of this podcast

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on our website at bbclearningenglish.com.

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How are you today?

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I'm pretty good. How about you?

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Yes. I'm good.

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It's the morning, so my brain is fresh and ready for the day.

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Excellent, because we're talking today about our brains.

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We are. We're going to talk about how we keep our minds active.

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So, kind of like exercise for our brains.

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Shall we get started?

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Let's do it.

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So, Neil, do you think you have a good memory?

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Well, it depends.

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I can remember things that happened years ago

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that don't seem very significant at all.

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And then I can struggle to remember what I did at the weekend.

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I have the same problem.

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I guess that's the difference between our long-term memory –

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so, that's things that happened a long time ago.

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And the short term memory –

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so, things that we did this morning,

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I also struggle to remember what I had for breakfast and things like that.

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So, Neil, is there a time recently where you couldn't remember something

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and it was annoying?

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Well, I did a quiz with my daughter, and she's 15 and quite sharp.

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And I knew all of the answers.

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I mean, I have better general knowledge than her, I think.

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But she said all the answers quicker than me.

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I think just the distance between her brain

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and her mouth is shorter than mine.

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Were the answers on the tip of your tongue?

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The answers were on the tip of my tongue,

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but they just didn't get a chance to get out there.

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So, I have a story as well.

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A time when I couldn't remember something.

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My friend was talking about something that...

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about an event where I was and I didn't remember it at all,

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and she had to ask another friend to get evidence,

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to prove to me that it had happened because I didn't believe her.

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And it was so strange because it was true that it happened,

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but I didn't remember it.

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Do you think you have a quick brain?

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I don't actually.

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I'm the kind of person that needs some time to process things –

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what people have said or...

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Yeah, I don't like it when people ask me my opinions of things on the spot.

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I prefer to think about things and form my opinions in my own time.

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So, no. I have a slow brain.

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OK.

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What do you do to keep your mind active?

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Well, I... I like to study languages

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and that's very good for the brain

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because you've got to remember all kinds of things and what order

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they're said in and what happens to the words and that kind of thing.

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And I like reading.

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You have to use your brain to read, to follow a story.

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But I don't do puzzles and crosswords and sudoku

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and all of those things that other people do. Maybe I should.

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Yeah, I... I do jigsaw puzzles, although I haven't done that much recently.

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I also... I think exercise is quite good for your brain.

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Is that true?

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It gets you out of the house, you get some fresh air.

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I feel like that's quite good for your brain.

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What kind of things, Georgie,

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make your brain less effective?

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Well, my brain, as I said at the beginning, works better in the morning.

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In the afternoon, my brain starts not working very well,

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so I tend to do less important tasks in the afternoon.

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I also think that, before I go to sleep,

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if I use my phone too much, too much screen time, I sleep worse.

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And then I wake up feeling a lot less functional in my brain.

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What about you?

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Yeah, I agree, I think sleep is massively important.

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If I haven't slept well,

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then it's very hard to use my brain effectively the next day.

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Yeah, and that's quite common for you, unfortunately, isn't it...?!

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Hey. That's life!

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OK. Let's recap the language we heard during the conversation.

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We talked about our 'memories'.

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Your memory is your ability to remember things.

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Yes. And Georgie mentioned 'short' and 'long-term' memory.

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'Short-term memory' is for things that happened recently.

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And 'long-term memory' is for things that happened a long time ago,

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even when you were a child.

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We also heard 'sharp',

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which is an adjective used to describe someone who thinks quickly.

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We heard 'on the tip of your tongue', which is an expression which means

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that something is there that you want to say,

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but you can't say it quickly enough.

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We also heard 'screen time',

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so this is the amount of time someone spends looking at their screen –

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so, your phone, a tablet, a computer.

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That's it for this episode of Real Easy English.

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Why not try the worksheet on our website to test what you've learned?

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That's bbclearningenglish.com.

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See you then.

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Goodbye!