How long can an event hold humanity's attention? There's an equation for that

[Sanguine]

Societies forget, and this physicist wants to know why.
By Eleanor Cummins December 14, 2018
Library books collective memory

Collective memory may be stored in libraries, archives, and museums. But it still decays.

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 first step was finding a viable proxy for memory. Lead study author Cristian Candia, an experimental physicist turned social complexity researcher, chose attention. In the 21st century, our eyeballs are so efficiently monitored, our online behaviors so carefully measured, all Candia had to do was turn Wikipedia searches or YouTube views into actionable data....

https://www.popsci.com/how-collective-memories-decay