Never Forget A Face(book) – Memory For Online Posts Beats Faces And Books

People’s memory for Facebook posts is strikingly stronger than their memory for human faces or sentences from books, according to a new study.

Try to remember a line from the last book you read. Or, if you’re not a big reader, the face of the last new person you met. Now try to remember your significant other’s last Facebook status update.

According to a new study published in the journal Memory & Cognition, our brains may be more adequately wired to remember status updates and tweets rather than snippets from novels or faces. Subjects in the study were one and a half times more likely to remember posts than sentences from a novel and almost two and a half times more likely than to remember faces.

The findings shed light on how our memories favour natural, spontaneous writing over polished, edited content, and could have wider implications for the worlds of education, communications and advertising.

- Team Shirsa

How long were you able to keep your eyes open?

We've all challenged our friends to staring contests before. Do you remember  your best time? 

This topic  came to my mind when i came across to an article stating,  "a man in Australia's Northern Territory kept his eyes open for over 40 minutes!", no its not a joke. He set this record last year at "So You Think You Can Stare," Australia's first staring competition in the Northern Territory. When asked he quoted (Australian guy ) that "it feels like getting a tattoo on my eyeball."

But how did he do it? And was it dangerous? I mean, what really happens if you intentionally keep your eyes open for that long without blinking? 

I think this guy just has a lot of focus and control. And I doubt he had any lasting damage.
Its universal fact that we all have to blink. It's an involuntary reflex that keeps our corneas from drying out and stops dust and other junk from getting in . Normaly, we blink about 15 times a minute. But if it's windy or smoky, that rate goes way up.

We also blink for psychological reasons. Like if we're attentively reading or listening, our blink rate cuts to less than half. A team of researchers at the University of Waterloo found that even while reading, if our minds wander, we blink significantly more often than when we're focused.

 So how long were you able to keep your eyes open? Try it yourself. I want to know your best time.

Share  your best time on Twitter, Facebook, Now!!

- Team Shirsa