Salon.com > Memory

Study: People can remember more about Facebook than real books

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 17:44:00 +0000

Researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of California, San Diego, tested how well people could remember text taken from Facebook updates and compared it to sentences picked at random from books. What they found is that participants' memory for Facebook posts was about one and a half times greater than their memory for sentences from books.

Now before you slap your forehead and lament the death of the written word, consider the implications.

The study's findings shed considerable light on the kind of information we are hard-wired to retain, revealing that our brains favor natural, spontaneous writing over more polished content.

To put it into context, think about your Facebook timeline. Sure, there are too many posts about babies, but there is other stuff on there, too. Responses to news stories, thoughts about the world. Usually casual, often gossipy, these posts, researchers say, are easier to remember than more formal, edited content. Basically, the closer to natural speech something is, the better we remember it. (Sorry, Judith Butler! I still love you!)

Joshua Foer: We’ve outsourced our memories

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 12:45:00 +0000

Your theme is memory, but not the sort of memory that automatically embeds itself in our minds, like a first kiss.

The original Latin memory treatises talk about a distinction between natural memory and artificial memory. Natural memory is like the basic cable package. It’s our brain’s biological capacity for recall. Artificial memory is what you are able to do with your natural capacity through training, practice and using mnemonic techniques.

You wrote that memorising is a "primal capacity from which too many of us have become estranged." Please explain.

One of the things that I was surprised by in my research was that although the idea of a disciplined, trained memory feels novel to us today, it was commonplace in ancient history. Once upon a time, people treated their memories with more sanctity. They cultivated their memories. Today we don’t think of furnishing our minds, and few schools emphasise memorisation.

So how did we become estranged from this “primal capacity?”

Forgot your keys? It could be your diet

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 17:51:00 +0000

Yet another reason not to overeat: According to a recent study from the Mayo Clinic, there is a link between memory loss and a high-calorie diet. People over 70 who consumed more than 2,143 calories a day doubled their risk of memory loss and mild cognitive impairment — a stage of decline beyond normal age-related changes when memory, language, and thinking start slipping.

“We observed a dose-response pattern, which simply means the higher the amount of calories consumed each day, the higher the risk of mild cognitive impairment,” explained study author Yonas E. Geda, a neurologist and psychiatrist with Mayo Clinic in Arizona. There is good news, though. People with diets that provide between 600 and 2,143 calories per day showed no memory decline over the 8-year study.