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 Does Your Memory Work?

You might think that your memory is there to help you remember facts, such as birthdays or shopping lists. If so, you would be very wrong. The ability to travel back in time in your mind is, perhaps, your most remarkable ability, and develops over your lifespan.

Horizon takes viewers on an extraordinary journey into the human memory. From the woman who is having her most traumatic memories wiped by a pill, to the man with no memory, this film reveals how these remarkable human stories are transforming our understanding of this unique human ability.

The findings reveal the startling truth that everyone is little more than their own memory.

- Team Shirsa