Human Bottleneck

Bottleneck Blog

Memorising Novel 4 letter "Words" - Discussion

How many did you get?

Typically we remember no more than one or two of them when we try this for the the first time.

We are most likely to remember those words that appear completely or partially familiar, such as:

 "five", or perhaps "jsad" or "tyex",

or perhaps we remembered the first one and clung on to that alone.

or perhaps you are familiar with some of these words in another language

If you repeat the test you will score higher as you become more and more familiar with the text and it is less and less novel.

Your average learning rate (in bits/second) is unlikely to ever be sufficiently high to remember novel words at this rate.

The World Record for remembering numbers, binary digits, playing cards etc., is less than 10 Bits per second!

                                                                           © Richard Epworth 2009  Updated 2010-May-27 UK Time