“Eh… What’s Your Name Again?” Is Facebook Completely Ruining Your Memory?

Is social networking taking a negative toll on your memory? It definitely could be, as a worrying new study has revealed that now we’re more likely to remember someone’s status update on Facebook rather than their actual face. Awkward...

Yes, researchers from the University of Warick have discovered that the time we spend poking our friends, having the craic on Twitter and favouriting pictures on Instagram could be having a detrimental effect on our memory.

The researchers decided to test people’s ability to remember quotes from books, faces and the status updates of their friends online. Believe it or not, they discovered that in most cases, people found it two-and-a-half times easier to remember a status update than a famous quote from a book or someone’s face.

“We were really surprised when we saw just how much stronger memory for Facebook posts was compared to other types of stimuli,” said Dr Laura Mickes, the lead author of the study.

“These kinds of gaps in performance are on a scale similar to the differences between amnesiacs and people with health memory,” she added.

Disturbing or what?

Has social networking changed the way our memory works?

So why do we find it easier to remember Facebook updates? Apparently our minds have become much more social media focussed, so it’s easier for us to remember the stand-alone bits of info that make up status updates. Oh and it also helps that they’re usually written in slang or language that is easy to understand.

The plus side is that now researchers know how our capacity for memory is changing, they can use it to help education and the likes.

“Knowing this could help in the design of better educational tools as well as offering useful insights for communications or advertising,” said Dr Mickes.

“Of course we’re not suggesting textbooks written entirely in tweets, nor should editors be rendered useless – but textbook writers or lecturers using PowerPoint could certainly benefit from using more natural speech to get information across,” she added.

What type of memory do you have? Can you always remember people’s faces or can you only remember their Twitter handle?