How is your memory?

How is your memory? Are you still sharp as a tack, with a mutli-gigabyte capacity for recall? That may well be the case but even if it is you probably don’t remember the things that you see every day. Don’t despair though, you are not in the early stages of any sort of decay, you are in fact “normal”. Human beings don’t remember the details of the most common things in their world according to a new study, and that’s not necessarily a problem and there is even a very good reason for it.

If you had to name the most ubiquitous sights in the world surely among them would rank the Apple logo. It might be nestled on your iPhone, your iPad, your Mac notebook, and if not there then you will be seeing it on advertisements wherever you turn. The Apple logo is literally, well let’s say “virtually”, everywhere. So you could reproduce it without a problem, right? That’s what a bunch of people in a new study thought but guess what…they were wrong.

The study involved 85 university undergraduates who were asked to reproduce that Apple logo. All of the subjects thought they could do it but in fact only one was able to reproduce the logo correctly. Even more than this when another group was shown the Apple logo along with five other slightly altered logos less than 50 per cent of the subjects could correctly identify the actual logo and this was true across both Apple and PC users.

So why could people not correctly recall one of the most ubiquitous images of our time which we all would see each day? In actual fact this fits with other research showing for instance that amongst a group of office workers none knew the location of a bright red fire extinguisher in their building despite passing it each day.

People over and over again show in experiments that they do not have a good memory for the details of the things that they see each day. People who work with keyboards daily have trouble describing the details of a standard keyboard and people universally have difficulty describing details of currency. Are we just a group of unobservant sods? Far from it, we are in fact efficient sods. Your brain knows that it doesn’t need to remember all of the details of the things that it sees every day, in fact remembering those details would be using valuable resources that can be far better deployed.

So why not amaze your friends by getting them to try and recall that Apple logo, ensuring that you have memorised it yourself beforehand of course. The human brain just doesn’t waste time remembering mundane details…a principal that politicians rely on all too frequently.