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Science Quickly

Our Brains Really Remember Some Pop Music

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2019

⏱️ 4 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Although millennials' memory of recent pop tunes drops quickly, their ability to identify top hits from the 1960s through 1990s remains moderately high. Christopher Intagliata reports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

0:11.0

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

0:19.6

To learn more about Yachtolt, visitacult.co.com.j.j.

0:23.9

That's y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P.

0:28.4

When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

0:33.7

This is Scientific American's 60-second science.

0:37.2

I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

0:39.0

How many U.S. presidents can you name?

0:41.9

For most people, researchers have found...

0:43.9

The first couple are remembered like Washington, Adams,

0:47.3

and the last couple of Bush, people like that.

0:50.1

But then nothing in between.

0:51.2

New York University's Pascal Wallish studies what's called neural data science,

0:55.9

dealing with the huge amounts of data that come with studying neuronal activity.

0:59.7

And he says our recall of presidents is governed by two factors,

1:02.9

what's known as the primacy effect, who came first, and the recency effect.

1:07.2

That's who's been around lately.

1:09.0

He and his colleagues wanted to see if the same type of cultural memory pattern would hold true for pop music. So the question was,

1:14.7

is there like a cultural horizon or event horizon at what point, like, you know, a nod or

1:19.5

something drops to zero? So his team asked more than 600 volunteers, most of them millennials,

1:24.4

to listen to snippets of Billboard number one hits from 1940 to 2015,

...

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