Pop Culture Memory Effect
Mar 26th, 2007 by Trent Adams
I’ve been reading up on memory lately and found an interesting effect that might speak (in a totally non-scientific way) to something that seems to be part of our collective culture. I was listening to research CDs by Diana Deusch (see an earlier post for more background) and a pitch memory experiment caught my attention.
Here’s a quick blurb on “Short Term Memory for Pitch” from her site:
Suppose you play a tone, and this is followed by another tone which is either the same in pitch as the first, or differs by a semitone, most people find it very easy to decide whether the two tones are the same or different. This is true even when the tones are separated by a five second delay.
That’s all very well and good, of course, but when the intervening silence is filled with other tones, the task becomes much more difficult. Nothing strange there, I think we all get that. What gets more interesting, though, is when you fill the space between tones with spoken words (in this case they are spoken numbers). As Deusch says:
Most people find the memory task much easier when spoken numbers rather than tones are played during the interval between the test tones. This contrasts remarkably with the memory loss that occurs when a sequence of tones is played during the interval between the test tones, even though the extra tones can be ignored. So we conclude that the pitch of a tone is held in a specialized memory store, and that interference takes place between pitches inside this store. Other materials - such as spoken numbers - do not enter the store, so they produce much less interference with memory for pitch.
According to the background reading I’ve done in memory, it turns out that short term memory can only juggle a handful of similar items before they are either committed to longer term memory or lost. In fact, George Miller, while at Bell Labs, determined that the number of similar items is about seven, plus/minus two. Research has since shown that the number of “storable items” differs by type and situation (eg. seven for digits, six for letters, and five for words).
What I find interesting is how this might map into popular culture. For example, I’ve always wondered why people tend to remark about recent films being “the best movie ever.” I don’t take those statements literally, but assume them to be infused with exuberant hyperbole to make a point. It’s also relatively well known that in order to capitalize on this effect, movies in contention for Oscars are purposefully released near voting time.
So, if all this is well known, what’s the point of this post? First of all, I think it’s interesting to play with the temporal effect of “liking” something (ie. adding more relative weight to recent interests, degrading them over time). Second, I think it’d be interesting to explore if we’re hardwired to only allow for something like 7 +/- 2 “greatest” movies/songs/etc. in our heads at any given time.
Okay, so this is a little bit off topic, but after thinking about the 7+- 2 idea, I remembered something I was reading about recently. I was reading Chuck Palahniuk’s book “Stranger Than Fiction.” In it, he talks about Narcotization. The idea was that, in a study, subjects were shown photos of gums in three different states of decay. The groups were split into three groups, each shown a different photo. One group was shown a photo of gums that were just a little bit damaged. The second, slightly damaged. The third were shown a photo of absolutely destroyed gums.
After a certain time, the groups were studied to see what (if any) effect the photos had on the participants’ approach to oral health. The first group did nothing differently. The second group showed a bit more emphasis on keeping their gums healthy. The third group…and this is where it gets interesting……..gave up completely. They abandoned oral hygiene.
The idea of narcotization is that, due to stimuli, you feel you have no chance of avoiding a particular fate. There’s no hope left.
I’m wondering if the same applies to information overflow and overabundance on the web. You have some information here, other stuff there, and it’s just a mess of disparate information in multiple locations. Sometimes an application comes out that allows you to aggregate all this different data, but it takes time and effort (though it would, in the end, save time).
So I’m wondering…..do web users suffer from a sort of Information Narcotization? Do we feel that there’s just so much out there that there is really no hope in terms of having a way to bring it all together in a meaningful and useful way? Or are we now at the point where our frustrations are a catalyst for change?