Your Memory Is Like A Camcorder — Here’s How To Turn It On

Forbes:

According to a new study, memory is a lot like a camcorder.

“If you don’t hit the ‘record’ button on the camcorder, it’s not going to ‘remember’ what the lens is pointed at,” says study co-author Brad Wyble, psychology professor at Penn State University.

Sounds simple enough, but in practice there’s a little more to it.

Wyble and co-author Hui Chen, also of Penn State, wanted to find out whether they could “turn on” peoples’ memories to record a specific part of something with multiple parts. So they brought together a group of 100 volunteers and presented them with a series of numbers and letters, and told the volunteers that they’d be tested on remembering the positions of the letters among the numbers. The results of the little test showed almost flawless recall of the letters’ positions.

Read the whole story: Forbes