The more I try to remember, the easier it is to… what was I saying?

‘We found paying more attention to a piece of information weakened working memory’

FORGETTING the name of someone you have just met, despite desperately trying to commit it to memory, is an embarrassing social faux pas.

The lapse reflects a genuine inability to retain the information in spite of our best efforts.

Now a study by Chinese researchers has found that trying hard to lodge something in one’s short-term memory makes it less likely to be retained.

The short-lived memory cache has a tiny capacity, scientists believe. As a result, safely storing something is tricky because the brain is selective.

“We found paying more attention to a piece of information weakened working memory rather than strengthened it,” Zhejiang University researchers wrote in the journal Science Advances.

They conducted six experiments to see what factors affected how information was saved to a memory bank.

Participants viewed a coloured shape, for example, a yellow triangle. But they were asked only to remember the colour, not the shape itself. This was later reversed, with the shape the essential detail.

Later, they were shown a variety of coloured shapes, such as blue circles, green hexagons and red squares to distract them and strain their memory.

Afterwards, they were shown shapes and asked if it was the same colour or shape as the ones they had been tasked with memorising earlier.

Researchers found that when people were asked to recall a shape, they performed better at remembering its colour, an irrelevant detail, and vice versa.

“Our findings indicate that attention does not always enhance memory,” the scientists concluded.