Of the millions of words that are filed away in our memory banks at any given time, some are just more memorable than others.
That’s the conclusion of researchers at the NIH National Institute of Health who observed common words like “pig,” “tank,” and “door,” were much more likely to be recalled than words like “cat,” “street,” and “stair” in a study of epilepsy patients.
In the study, patients were show pairs of words from a list of common nouns.
The patients were shown one of the words again after and asked to recall the “related” one.
Researchers were surprised to find that across the board patients were far more likely to recall some words than others, regardless of the way they were paired.
And the top five most-recalled words were seven times more likely to be recalled than the bottom five.
Researchers found similar results in an online version of the test with 2,623 healthy volunteers.
“We saw that some things — in this case, words — may be inherently easier for our brains to recall than others,” said Dr. Zaghloul who led the trial.
“These results also provide the strongest evidence to date that what we discovered about how the brain controls memory in this set of patients may also be true for people outside of the study.”
One to think about next time you’re struggling for a word in Scrabble!
