With these foundational insights into basic mechanisms of memory consolidation and knowledge building we can now begin to apply these insights to the important endeavor of improving learning and memory in the real world. Our lab has tackled this so far in two ways: the first is examining the impact of experimental manipulations on the durability and quality of memory. These include the impact of differential forms of attentional or goal states, emotion, reward and agency. The second approach is most recent focus on studying everyday experiences of participants through daily diary studies where participants report daily events as well as mood and emotions through their smart phones. This has enabled us to study real-world memory for actual experiences of individuals. Our exciting preliminary data show significant benefits of daily novelty exposure on to both memory and mood. We plan to focus on these real-world studies and aim to develop this work to include causal manipulations of novelty to augment memory and mood in different populations.