Category: Memory

Do you call family members by the name of your dog? It’s actually pretty common.

Getting family member’s names mixed up is not necessarily a sign of ageing.

In fact having your parents call you by a sibling’s name — or even the family pet — is perfectly normal.

‘Misnaming’ is a very common memory slip which follows certain predictable patterns.

Usually misnaming occurs between people in the same category, such as siblings, the researchers found.

The same is also true among a group of friends, whose names will tend to get mixed up.

Professor David Rubin, one of the study authors, said:

“It’s a cognitive mistake we make, which reveals something about who we consider to be in our group.

It’s not just random.”

Researchers surveyed over 1,700 people to reach their conclusions.

Even the family dog wasn’t immune to getting its name mixed up with other family members.

Ms Samantha Deffler, the study’s first author, explained:

“I’ll preface this by saying I have cats and I love them.

But our study does seem to add to evidence about the special relationship between people and dogs.

Also, dogs will respond to their names much more than cats, so those names are used more often.

Perhaps because of that, the dog’s name seems to become more integrated with people’s conceptions of their families.”

Names which sound more similar were also more likely to be mixed up.

Parents were particularly expert at mixing up the names of their children, even when their names, ages, appearances and even genders were different.

→ If you find names in general hard to remember, this should cheer you up.

The study was published in the journal Memory & Cognition (Deffler et al., 2016).

Mind pops are random words or images that suddenly pop into your head for no reason — like a flashback.

You’re walking down the street, just like any other day, when suddenly a memory pops into your head from years ago.

It’s about a person you haven’t thought of for years.

Just for a moment you’re transported back to a time and place you thought was long-forgotten.

In a flash, though, the memory has vanished as quickly as it appeared.

This experience has been dubbed a ‘mind pop’ and sometimes it is prompted by nothing your conscious mind is aware of.

Weirder mind pops

There is, perhaps, an even weirder type of mind pop.

This is when all you get is a word or an image which seems to have no connection to anything at all.

Like suddenly thinking of the word ‘orange’ or getting the image of a cheese grater.

They seem weirder because they feel unconnected to any past experience, place or person—a thought without any autobiographical context.

Not everyone has these experiences, but many do.

When psychologists have recorded these involuntary memories, they find that, on average, people have about one a day.

They are most likely to occur during routine, habitual activities, like walking down the street, brushing your teeth or getting dressed (Kvavilashvili & Mandler, 2004).

They are also more likely to come when your attention is roaming and diffused.

Mind pops can be traced

Some of these mind pops can even be traced back to their causes.

Here is one psychologist (L.K.) describing some mental detective work:

“…while throwing a used bag in a dust bin the word “Acapulco” popped up and since L.K. had no idea what it was and where she might have come across the word she turned to a member of family for help. To her surprise, it was pointed out to her that Acapulco was mentioned on the TV news some 45 minutes ago.”

This ability to trace a mind pop back to its source wasn’t an isolated case.

When they surveyed people, Kvavilashvili and Mandler found that the words and images that seemed to pop up randomly, didn’t actually come from nowhere.

Sometimes it was an associative mind pop, like being reminded about Christmas and later having the words ‘Jingle Bells’ pop into your head.

Or, it could be a sound-a-like, for example having the image of a sandy beach appear after you see a banana (Bahamas sounds like bananas).

The fact that many mind pops could not be traced back to their source is probably the result of how much of our processing is carried out unconsciously.

The fascinating thing was that many of these mind pops occurred weeks or months after exposure to the original trigger.

This suggests that these words, images and ideas can lie in wait for a considerable period.

Some even think that experiencing mind pops could be associated with creativity as these apparently random associations can help to solve creative problems.

Mind pops are another hint that we are recording more information than we know.

Fortunately, our minds mostly do a good job of suppressing random thoughts and images, as they can be extremely distracting.

So next time you have a mind pop, remember that, however weird, it has probably been triggered by something you’ve seen, heard or thought about recently, even if you can’t remember what.

Of course, why we get these particular ones and not others is still a mystery.

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Effectively, the internet is taking over from human memory.

Using the internet to look up facts makes us more reliant on it in the future, research finds.

The more times people look up facts online, the less they prefer to rely on their own memories for even the simplest questions.

Psychologists have called this ‘cognitive offloading’.

Effectively, the internet is taking over from human memory.

Dr Benjamin Storm, the study’s first author, said:

“Memory is changing.

Our research shows that as we use the Internet to support and extend our memory we become more reliant on it.

Whereas before we might have tried to recall something on our own, now we don’t bother.

As more information becomes available via smartphones and other devices, we become progressively more reliant on it in our daily lives.”

For the study people were asked a series of challenging trivia questions.

One group was allowed to Google it while the other had to rely on their memory.

Later on both groups were given a series of easier questions to answer and both allowed to use Google if they preferred.

The results showed that those who used the internet before were more likely to use it again.

Remarkably, 30 percent of people who used the internet earlier failed to try and answer any of a series of relatively simple questions from memory.

They preferred to Google it.

Those who had relied on their memory before, though, were more likely to use their own memories again.

This could all be more ammunition for those claiming that the internet is making us stupid.

Professor Evan F. Risko, author of a review of the research on cognitive offloading (Risko & Gilbert, 2016), said:

“If you’re allowed to store some to-be-remembered information on a computer, chances are you won’t devote cognitive real estate to remembering it.

As a result, your ability to remember that information without the computer will likely be reduced.

There’s little doubt that these new technologies are affecting what we remember.”

Or, of course, you could argue it’s just the natural way of things: we use whatever tools work.

Have pencil and paper or calculators really made us that much more stupid?

Or did they ultimately allow us to do more?

The study was published in the journal Memory (Storm et al., 2016).