Facebook Banter More Memorable Than Lines From Recent Books 78
sciencehabit writes "Scientists have found that, when it comes to mental recall, people are far more likely to remember the text of idle chitchat on social media platforms like Facebook than the carefully crafted sentences of books. The team gathered 200 Facebook posts from the accounts of undergraduate research assistants, such as 'Bc sometimes it makes me wonder' and 'The library is a place to study, not to talk on your phone.' They also randomly selected 200 sentences from recently published books, gathered from free text on Amazon.com. Sentences included, 'Underneath the mass of facial hair beamed a large smile,' and 'Even honor had its limits.' Facebook posts were one-and-a-half times as memorable as the book sentences (abstract). The researchers speculate that effortless chatter is better than well-crafted sentences at tapping into our minds' basic language capacities — because human brains evolved to prioritize and remember unfiltered information from social interaction."
Re:I've completely lost interest in Literature (Score:0, Interesting)
PS. To further explain, it's a different between lossy and lossless thinking. Remembering Facebook lines need mostly the subject and can be partially filled by your own thinking/writing while the latter needs exact memorization. I'll tell you what, partially remembering something, at least for me, is a whole lot easier then fully remembering it. You need only to remember enough to reconstruct the sentence.
Same AC as parent of this post.
Context (Score:5, Interesting)
More likely, the Facebook posts were written to be standalone sentences, and were thus more comprehensible than a sentence taken out of context from a large book. Human have been shown to be much better at memorizing things which they understand and can make associations with than things they don't understand.
Re:I've completely lost interest in Literature (Score:4, Interesting)
Same here. In fact, this is what your post looked like to me...
I used to be a voracious reader
I'm also shifting away to YouTube.
I can see all the best bits (in gif form?)
the narcissistic joy draws me in
short attention span? What is it?