Facebook Chitchat Is Unforgettable
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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 researchers happened upon the findings by accident. Cognitive psychologist Laura Mickes of the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues were originally looking into the effects of emotions on memory, and happened to be using Facebook posts to invoke various feelings. But they found that the status updates seemed memorable all on their own. "It was a bit of a surprise for us," Mickes says. "It wasn't our original question."
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Facebook posts were one-and-a-half times as memorable as the book sentences, the scientists report this week in Memory & Cognition. The team also ran a memory test of human faces, and the Facebook posts turned out to be more than twice as memorable as those.
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http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/01/facebook-chitchat-is-unforgetta.html
