Neural Networking: Online Social Content Easier to Recall Than Printed Info

The immediate reaction to this news was, understandably, that social media sites were going to make money from it. After all, if it's easier to remember cliched, trivial and not-infrequently stupid commentary posted on a social site than it is to remember profound wisdom from a book or newspaper, social ought to be able to cash in. Or so the thinking goes.

The problem with that logic is that just because someone finds it easier to remember something does not mean they are going to spend money as a result. The causal connection is between the content and memory, not between content and ka-ching!

That said, the research does suggest that there is something primal here. Speculation centers on whether mankind learned this way as a survival tool: visual impressions being key to identifying risk and opportunity.

So while it may take us a while to figure out who benefits, we may be able to determine more quickly who gets hurt. Text book publishers charging as much as $300 for some weighty but utterly forgettable tome come to mind. But the larger issue may be that as a species we are more acute visually than we are intellectually. Which would not explain Jersey Shore nor why Justin Bieber is surpassing Lady Gaga among Twitter followers. But might account for Manti T'eo's fake girlfriend. JL

Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato reports in Scientific American:

Recollecting trivial and sometimes dull Facebook posts is easier than recalling the same information in a book. It also takes less effort to remember posted patter than someone's face, according to new research. The result could be due to the colloquial and largely spontaneous nature of Facebook posts. Whereas books and newspapers typically are combed over by fact-checkers and carefully rewritten by editors, Facebook posts tend to be free flowing and more closely resemble speech. "It's a new way of thinking about memory," says John Wixted, an experimental psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the research. "Our minds are naturally prepared to encode what is naturally produced."

If memories are the product of evolution, then the ability to remember socially derived conversations may have provided an advantage that helped early humans survive, he adds.

The study involved three different experiments with a sample that largely included undergraduate females and controlled for such factors as the use of emoticons, variations in character size and emotional content. What the research team found didn't make sense—at first.

Laura Mickes, a cognitive psychologist at U.C. San Diego and lead author of the study, says colleagues in her department were amazed by the consistency of the results. "To our surprise the microblogs, the Facebook posts, are much more memorable than one would expect," Mickes says. "People mostly think they're mundane and would be easily forgotten."

Even accounting for associative thinking—such as, "that is something my friend Emily would post"—the social networking site still had a pronounced effect on the extent to which information was remembered by study subjects. Facebook's advantage over books and faces is on the same scale as the advantage that the average person has over the memory-impaired, Mickes wrote in the January 2013 Memory & Cognition. Both Mickes and Wixted agree that additional experiments are needed before these findings can be applied broadly, largely due to the lack of diversity among the study subjects.

Still, the implications are profound. Marketing firms could use Facebook-like advertisements to increase brand recognition. Teachers, too, might incorporate shorter, more colloquial sentences on study guides and in textbooks to raise test scores. The applications could be extensive: "I think there are implications for the way we teach, for how we advertise, how we generally communicate," Mickes says. "There are already professors who are into tech who have incorporated social media into their classrooms."

According to the study, Facebook users in total post more than 30 million times per hour. Whether it’s easier on the brain, that's a lot to remember.