P. 25
Meaning Matters; Details Don’t
Why should we remember faces, but not the names that go with them? Part of the answer is that when it comes to memory, meaning is king.
28 Names, it turns out….don’t mean much, and as a consequence we tend to forget or confuse them.
34
Yet, as overloaded as we are with things to remember, we often persist in picking hiding places we are doomed to forget. In one survey, more than four hundred adults were asked whether they had recently found an object that they had lost or misplaced. Of those who had recalled such a recent episode, 38 percent reported finding the item in a place that was not “logical.” Why would such a high percentage of lost items be found in illogical places? Researchers concluded that people mistakenly believe that the more unusual a hiding place is, the more memorable it will be. But the opposite turns out to be true: unusualness doesn’t make a hiding place more memorable—it makes it more forgettable.
The Bible and meaningful books 