The 6 Weirdest Things That Are Ruining Your Memory

6 Advertising

Between now and Election Day, you're going to see a variation of the ad below from dozens of candidates, several million times. The candidate will talk about how we need to bring back the America of the past, and you'll see images of 1950s-style white picket fences:

... post-war era storefronts:

... and maybe even the Old West:

Those are all from a current ad for Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign, but you've seen variations of it from every politician who has run for office since television was invented. The ads are aimed at older voters, and all hit the same button: "Don't you vividly remember how much better things were before?" It's not just politics, either -- around the holiday season, watch how many ads hammer the "Remember how great Christmas was when you were a kid?" message, like this Acura ad that cuts from happy kids opening presents to an adult buying a new car. The tagline: "The joy is back."

Well, those nostalgic ads work because they can not only make you remember the past, but can totally plant fake memories in your mind. The reason your grandpa remembers the 1950s as nothing but friendly neighbors and soda fountains is because ads and TV shows have been hammering his brain with those images for five straight decades.

Science has proven it; we described once before an experiment in which scientists were able to convince a bunch of people that they had met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland as children, just by describing the event to them. Participants were suddenly able to "remember" all the details, despite the fact that there has never been a Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, not unless Bugs got very lost (he's not a Disney character, for those of you who haven't caught up).

Advertising works the same way. Researchers did another study where they had a group of people watch a series of advertisements that described the experience of eating a popcorn product that the scientists just made up. Half of the participants were then fed this so-called brand of popcorn (which obviously didn't exist and was hopefully called Falsepop). The rest had to make do with cucumber sandwiches or whatever scientists usually serve for lunch.

When grilled about the experience just one week later, those who had seen the most vivid commercials were just as likely to remember actually having eaten the popcorn, whether they actually did or not. Think about that for a moment -- whether or not they actually ate the popcorn was not as important as how convincingly some advertising executive told them they had. And this wasn't months or years later -- it was seven freaking days.

The experiment was testing a theory of memory known as reconsolidation -- in short, the idea that our memories are not fixed and static, but can be altered and updated based on what our brain thinks is helpful new information. If you vaguely remember that your first grade teacher's hair was black and somebody shows you a photo proving it was brown, you will actually update your memories to remember it as brown ... even if the photo is a fake. We didn't just pull that example out of our asses -- a simple Photoshopped image was enough to convince test subjects they had taken a hot air balloon ride as kids, even though they'd never set foot in one.

And while we're focusing on incredibly disturbing things ...

5 Peer Pressure

The above points out what is going to be a running theme in this list: Human memory isn't really an individual thing but more of a dynamic process that gets shared and altered by the people around us. That's useful when the people around us are telling the truth, but not so handy when everyone keeps bullshitting each other.

A group of neuroscientists wanted to test something called the social conformity effect by showing a film to a group of peers and then quizzing them about it afterward. The participants were allowed to see the answers that their friends gave to each question. Or so they thought. These answers were actually written by the researchers and were deliberately wrong. Because if there's one thing that every neuroscientist loves, it's being a douche. What they discovered was that around 70 percent of the participants agreed with the fake answers rather than what they had actually seen.

But then, that doesn't necessarily mean that their memories had changed, it could just mean that they didn't trust their real memories in light of contrary evidence. The researchers realized this, and that's why they quizzed the participants a second time -- but this time, they admitted that the first test was bullshit and those answers weren't reliable. So everyone relaxed and just stopped worrying about looking like a moron in front of their friends, right? Actually, 40 percent of them opted not to change their answers, which means that they weren't just bluffing to save face, but actually remembered the fake details. Their memories had changed to conform to what their friends thought had happened.

Actually, it's kind of titillating to think about the prank applications for this phenomenon. "Hey Steve, remember when you ate that entire bucket of turds? I've got six friends who'll back me up on that. Sign this affidavit saying it happened."

4 Google

As you have probably already noticed in your life, there is a "use it or lose it" element to your brain. For instance, we're guessing that most of you reading this haven't used your high school math skills since your cellphone started coming equipped with a calculator. And by age 22, you've probably forgotten every little bit of algebra you ever learned. Your brain is constantly rewiring itself depending on what you use it -- or don't use it -- for.

That same principal of use-it-or-lose-it applies to information in the 21st century, only now instead of losing your ability to do long division, you're slowly losing the capacity to retain anything in your head. Why? Because of the search engine. Your brain is changing to accommodate the fact that everything you could make the effort to remember is readily available on the Internet inside of three seconds.

In one study, students were loaded up with a buttload of trivia, then told to record what they had learned into a computer. Half of them believed that what they had written would be erased, and half believed it would be saved forever, as computers are apt to magically do. Both groups were told they needed to memorize the facts they were given, regardless of what the computer was doing.

But when the time came to test the students on their recall, those who believed their answers had been erased scored 40 percent better than those who thought theirs had been retained. In other words, test participants' actual ability to remember was impaired by the idea that they could look up the answers, even when given equal instructions to memorize it. The act of storing the facts on a hard drive made their brain subconsciously delete them.

In another experiment, students were asked to remember both a piece of trivia and which folder on a computer the answer was stored in. They discovered that the students could actually remember the location of the answer on the computer better than they could remember the actual answer.

If you think all of this is "The Internet is making us stupid!" scaremongering by old people, keep in mind that this is how memory has always worked. It's just that it used to be with the people around us instead of Google. Ask a married man when his nephew's birthday is, and he'll ask his wife.

That's called the transactive memory effect, and it's the flip side of what we talked about earlier with other people being able to manipulate your memory. It means that in humans, memory is a collective thing -- there's no need to clog up your brain with facts that your friend has already memorized. We cooperate to build our collective memory base. It's just that recently, our brains have started treating the entire Internet as a friend who we can ask if our own memories fail us. A friend who, if he doesn't know the answer, always suggests, "Titties?"

3 Birth Control and Sex

Your sexual activity, it turns out, affects your memory in a number of unexpected ways. And we're not just talking about when you can't remember the name of the person sleeping next to you. That's an altogether separate issue.

Consider the case of one 54-year-old woman who checked into the emergency room, hysterical about a sudden and total loss of memory of the past 24 hours. The only thing that she and her husband could confirm was that the amnesia had struck during a particularly vigorous session of the old Bohemian mattress dance. What she found out was that she'd been hit by transient global amnesia, a condition that can be triggered when someone is lying on top of you grinding and thrusting. Scientists think that it's possibly caused by having the blood pushed the wrong way back into your brain ... uhh ... via porking.

But that's an uncommon case. More worrying is that scientists have just discovered that the birth control pill has strange effects on a woman's memory. To explore this, they showed a group of women (half on the pill and half not) a film and asked them a bunch of questions about it afterward. What they found was that the women who weren't taking the pill generally had a pretty good eye for details. The others, however, tended to fumble along like toddlers in a pool made of Jell-O.

The results backed up something that the researchers suspected about how the pill messes with the female body. It comes down to the differences in the way men and women remember. Women typically retain smaller details, while men recall the bigger picture -- men see the forest, while women see the legs on the aphids on the leaves on the trees.

But birth control pills alter a woman's hormones, specifically by lowering the ones associated with reproduction. It makes her brain more dude-like. So, she starts to remember just the big picture, like a dude. Remember, everything in the brain is connected -- change one chemical, and the effects ripple out into other areas.

But there are other contraception options out there, right? Like that special injection you can get. Oh, except that research has shown that the birth control shot impairs memory in mice and possibly humans. Well, you can always become a nun.

2 Being Single

Aside from the lack of sex, remaining single has a number of other disadvantages, most of which are dwarfed by the no-sex thing, but still rate some kind of mention. Namely, being married or at least in a long-term relationship will help keep your brain's ability to remember from self-destructing under the crippling weight of your own loneliness.

A study conducted in Finland showed that being single for an extended amount of time makes your memory suffer just as much as your genitalia. They studied 1,400 people at age 50, then waited 20 years before studying them again. What they found after graphing up the results was interesting -- those with the most notable descent into forgetfulness and dementia also tended to be the people who were single for most of that time, whether divorced, widowed or just ugly. The sharpest minds belonged to those who stayed married.

You might think that this is because bachelors tend to have such terrible diets and in general live in their own filth, but that didn't seem to be the reason. You get the same results even in cases where singlehood didn't inspire health hazards like eating peanut butter out of the jar with your fingers, a lack of bathing or chronic overmasturbation. The marriage factor still shone through as having a clear impact on one's powers of recall, regardless of what else was going on.

Why? It might have something to do with this research, which seems to show that the frequent conversation shared by married couples helps both parties reinforce their brains and stimulate their memories. By getting a whole bunch of married couples to play a game that heavily involved memory tasks, researchers monitored how the couples helped each other to fill the holes in each other's memories. Why would this help their memories long term, when relying on Google to fill in those holes seems to hurt it? Science hasn't told us, but we're going to guess that the big difference between Google and a spouse is that Google doesn't get mad at you for asking it the same question five times in five days.

1 Being Fat

As unfair as it is to those of us who like to fry our hamburgers in bacon grease, there aren't many advantages to being overweight. With all the well-known health effects (diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, etc.), there's a new one to add to the list: There's a close correlation between how fat you are and how crappy your memory is. Scientists don't know why.

The tests are pretty cut-and-dry -- according to research conducted by the Women's Health Initiative, for every extra point on your body mass index, you lose one accompanying point on whatever scale they use to measure your memory power. (The Retentionator?) And this is after the researchers ruled out secondary explanations like having diabetes or high blood pressure. An obese person who is otherwise as healthy as Wolverine still suffers from this memory degradation effect.

One possible explanation links obesity with a lack of exercise, and thus with a lethargic and understimulated brain. Some tests on mice have discovered that, at least in rodents, an active exercise regimen stimulated the growth of brain tissue along with muscle tissue, so that as they got stronger they also got smarter, which makes us thankful that they were testing mice and not bears.

So that's it, right? Your hours of sitting sedentary in front of the computer is making your brain shrivel and soften along with your abs? Well, maybe not. Because some even weirder research has shown that people will experience the same improvement in memory if they just go ahead and get their stomach stapled. No exercise necessary -- just get the surgery and wait for the results.

So there you go, you have another good reason to lose weight! And to get a sex partner. And to stop using the Internet.

Thanks to Kristi Harrison for the research. S Peter Davis writes for Three Minute Philosophy and also has a Tumblr.

For more not-so-apparent side effects to watch out for, check out 6 Medication Side Effects Straight Out of a Horror Movie and 6 Bizarre Side Effects of Foods You Eat Every Day.

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