10/01/2025
Fletchers Fun Facts Friday
1. There is virtually no limit to the amount of information you can remember.
2. A large part of the reason we seem to forget so much may well be that, whilst our long term memory is virtually limitless, our short term, or ‘working’ memory has a much, much smaller capacity. The original research into short term memory says we can only remember 5 to 9 pieces of information there at any given time, though more recent experiments suggest it may even be as low as 4!
These limits on short term memory explain why ‘cramming’ information just before an exam doesn’t work that well, so one clear strategy to remember more of what you learn is to space out your studying so that more information moves from your short term to your long term memory.
3. Learning new things produces physical changes in your brain structure.
4. Being able to access information quickly (i.e. on the Internet) makes you less likely to remember it. Studies suggest there is an interesting flip-side to being able to access information so conveniently: if the brain knows it can just access it again so easily, it’s less likely to bother remembering the information itself!
5. We don’t attempt to store information in our own memory to the same degree that we used to, because we know that the internet knows everything… …One could speculate that this extends to personal memories, as constantly looking at the world through the lens of our smartphone camera may result in us trusting our smartphones to store our memories for us. This way, we pay less attention to life itself and become worse at remembering events from our own lives.
The phenomenon has become known as ‘The Google Effect’, and has become part of an on-going debate as to whether the internet is making us stupid.
6. As time goes on, it can be difficult to know how accurate our memories of an event are – indeed for many of our childhood memories, it can be hard to know for certain whether we’re remembering the firsthand event itself, or are simply recalling a story as told by our parents and from photos or home videos from the time. But this concept has a far scarier implication which has been studied by psychologists. In an experiment, interviewers were able to convince 70% of people they had committed a crime when in reality they had not.
7. Testing yourself on information is better than simply rehearsing or re-reading it.
8. It turns out that partially forgetting something, and then struggling to remember it is a necessary part of the memory formation process. When we try to remember things, we’re exercising our brain and telling it that ‘this piece of information is important, store it somewhere safe and easily accessible!’. This is a key concept behind the ‘spaced repetition’ technique. Spaced repetition is a study technique whereby pieces of information are re-visited at set intervals in order to strengthen the memory of it. The idea is that you re-visit a piece of information when you’ve *almost* forgotten it, thereby bringing it back to the front of your mind.
9. My mom is a prime example on #8. She knew it was Fun Facts Friday coming up, but forgot, then remembered the minute she woke up.
10. Emotionally charged events are better remembered – for longer, and with more accuracy – than neutral events’.
11. Left-handed people tend to have better memories than right-handed people.
12. About 60% of an older adult's memories are when the person was between the ages of 15-25.
13. A human's attention span is about 20 minutes. In the past decade, average attention spans have decreased by 12 minutes due to technology and fast-paced lifestyles.
14. Scientists consider smell to be the strongest and fastest memory inducer. Smell bypasses the thalamus and goes directly to the olfactory bulb, which is connected to the amygdala and hippocampus, the primary memory-making parts of the brain.
