Societies forget, and this physicist wants to know why.
By Eleanor Cummins December 14, 2018
Collective memory may be stored in libraries, archives, and museums. But it still decays.
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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.â€
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.
https://www.popsci.com/how-collective-memories-decay
