You have probably found yourself in this situation several times. You are sure you have read an entire library. Do you remember spending the entire previous summer glued in front of the screen watching Netflix day after day. However, when someone asks you what books you’ve read, or to name a movie you’ve seen recently, your mind goes blank. In the end, you end up trapped in the mental labyrinth of your memory trying to convince your friends that you have read, and of course that you have seen more than fifty movies in a year. Why it happens? What is the reason for this mental gap?
Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Reviewcommented at the time to Atlantic that “what I always remember is where was i and i remember the book itself. I remember the physical object.” However, Paul ends his sentence with “I remember the edition, I remember the cover, I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember – and it’s terrible – is everything else.”
Not everyone has this problem, of course. There are people who remember every little detail of every movie, series or book they have read. However, for most of us, the experience can feel like “fill a bathtub, soak, and then watch the water go down the drain“, as described in the aforementioned medium. Perhaps there are some drops inside the walls and the bottom of the bathtub, but the rest, the substance, is gone.
The “forgetting curve” is to blame for this phenomenon
According to Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca University in Canada, there is a culprit for this phenomenon. This comes under the name of the “forgetting curve”, and this curve is more pronounced in the first 24 hours after learning something new. Of course, this also affects how we remember the books we’ve just read, and the movies we’ve just seen.
The percentage of forgetting is not stipulated, and it varies over time. However, it is known that it is on the first day that almost all the content learned goes down the drain. Likewise, with the passage of the following days, more and more drops are added to it, leaving the person with only a small fraction of what was initially learned.
Memory is usually intrinsically limited. It is essentially a bottleneck.
Faria Sana, assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca University, Canada
Although memory is believed to have always worked this way, Jared Horvath isn’t so sure. Horvath is a researcher at the University of Melbourne, and believes that “the way people now consume information and entertainment memory type changed that we value.”
A study entitled “Google effects on memory: cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips“, speaks just about this matter. In it, the researchers confirm that people with the most access to information existing on the Internet, “have a lower index when it comes to remembering the information itself”.
You don’t have to remember a quote from a book if you can look it up. When video tapes came along, you could review a movie or TV show quite easily. There is no sense that if a piece of culture is not etched into the brain, it will be lost forever.
Atlantic
Internet works as an externalized memory
Of course, it’s pretty easy to throw all the blame on the Internet and call it a day. And although, indeed, the constant consumption of content and the ease of searching that the web offers us has served to make this “curve of oblivion” steeper; the truth is that even before the internet humans were unable to remember everything they saw, read or heard.
In one of Plato’s works, the philosopher proved to be one of the earliest detractors of this idea of ”externalizing memory.” In the dialogue written by Plato between Socrates and the aristocrat PhaedrusSocrates tells a story about the god Theuth discovering the “function of cards”.
Because it is forgetting what they will produce in the souls of those who learn them, by neglecting memory, since, trusting what is written, they will arrive at memory from the outside, through alien characters, not from within, from themselves and by themselves. .
Phaedrus, Plato
The aforementioned Horvarth comments that, in the play’s dialogue, “Socrates believed that writing would kill memory. And he is right. Writing absolutely killed memory.” However, the researcher adds: “But think of all the amazing things we have thanks to writing. I wouldn’t trade writing for a better memory, ever.”
We absorb more information than we can process
An study carried out by Horvarth and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne yielded startling results on memory. According to the results, people who watched series in a marathon format they forgot the content faster than those who watched the episodes in the weekly format. Also, right after the series ended, marathoners scored it higher in a poll. However, after 140 days, gave lower results than those who consumed the content once a week.
From the results of the study, Horvarth’s team concluded that “if you want to remember the things you’ve seen and read, spread themAlso, memories are often reinforced every time you try to remember themHorvarth comments.
The same thing happens with what we read. When we consume content in a book or on the Internet, information flows. It seems that our brain understands and retains each word that we throw at it per second, but it’s not like that. What we read “doesn’t stick unless we put in effort and focus and engage in certain strategies that will help us remember.”
However, just because you don’t remember something at the time doesn’t mean the memories are lost. Memory works by association, Faria Sana reminds us, and if we have enough stimuli, most likely We’ll get to dust off those memories that we cannot -or want- to remember.
Keep in mind that the books, songs, movies and series that you have consumed are not files that you can upload to your brain. All of them are interwoven with everything else. And although it seems difficult to find the thread that leads to a specific memory when observing the tangle from a distance; they are all still there, each one waiting for you to reach out and unravel the threads to help you remember.