Bored Panda got in touch with Emma N Cahill, PhD, who is a Lecturer in Neuroscience at the University of Bristol, and she was kind enough to share some details on how memory, ideas and human attention spans work. In this day and age, we were curious to learn if people can actually do something to improve their attention spans.
“Yes, we can retain more information for longer if we try to make links across ideas. This is called “Elaboration”, where we make multiple associations between things that you want to memorize. Our attention span depends on a lot of factors, including how we are feeling at the time, the most robust approach is probably to remove distractors rather than trying to increase focus. Put the phone away!”
Of course, memory doesn’t necessarily have a “silver bullet” solution, she shared. “Some types of memory are prone to interference by information that comes shortly afterwards, like how it is difficult to remember a numerical code when a few are presented in a short space of time, that relies on short term memory. Being accurate at remembering is really pretty tricky because memory is a reconstructive process.”
Fortunately, it’s not all doom and gloom, once you start to figure out how your memory actually works. “People can be better at remembering certain types of information because they have practiced techniques in how to encode the information in a richer way by using associations or thinking of memory triggers,” she shared with Bored Panda.
This raises the question, why exactly are we struggling with remembering things and connecting ideas these days? “There are many distractions in everyday life: open tabs on the computer, the bleep of a phone, advertisements, doom scrolling and click bait headlines. These tend to be designed with noises or stimuli that are ‘salient’ and sensational, and so attention grabbing.”
“How prone we are to fall for their temptation is probably a combination of how we are feeling and whether you have learned what you want to ignore. Thankfully we can become desensitized to many of those stimuli, so we are not just doomed to react under their control,” she shared.
