There's a growing tendency for advertisers to hype up modern movies with hyperkinetic trailers that end with a blitz of imagery from the film. Seconds after the clip ends, the onslaught of explosions, punches and screeching tyres are probably crystal clear but minutes later, and your recollection of the images starts to fade. By the time you leave the cinema, you can probably only remember a few sparse details, if that.
These experiences jibe with psychological research, which suggests that the photographic clarity that accompanies initial memories tends to fade as they are transferred into long-term storage. The older our memories are, the fewer details they contain. But a new study challenges this view of long-term memory as a set of fuzzy depictions, by showing that it can actually store a massive number of different objects at an unexpectedly high level of detail.
The size of our long-term memory hasn't ...
