| Title | How Long Can an Event Hold Humanity's Attention? There's an Equation for That. | |
| Date | Saturday December 15 2018, @07:40PM | |
| Author | takyon | |
| Topic | ||
| from the TFS-is-too-long dept. | ||
It's not often you open a mathematical research paper and find a Pablo Neruda poem. But a new study in the journal Nature Human Behavior begins just like that: "Es tan corto el amor, y tan largo el olvido." Translation? "Love is so short, forgetting is so long."
The paper, titled "The universal decay of collective memory and attention," is an ambitious attempt to turn the slow slippage of cultural memory—the way a hit song lingers, or doesn't—into a quantitative method for measuring the way our attention to various cultural products declines. It seeks, in other words, to turn the most abstract cognitive phenomenon into a cold, hard equation.
[...] The process of decline was similar among all of the artifacts the researchers studied, but the amount of time it took for each to fade varied by domain. Biographies lasted the longest, circulating in the collective memory for 20 to 30 years. Music disappeared the fastest, lasting just 5.6 years on average.
[...] The work could fuel research into our species' tendency to forget large spans of history, with landmark events tucked away into our cultural memory, sans context of the surrounding years and minus the perspective of characters we don't care for. Perhaps understanding how quickly these historical moments fade—morphing from the truth we lived to the condensed narrative we save for posterity—could keep us from constantly repeating ourselves.
How long can an event hold humanity's attention?
Sorry for the long link to the paper. The shorter link gives access to the abstract.
[Paper - Abstract] The universal decay of collective memory and attention
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