Neuroscience and Critical Thinking: Understand the Hidden Pathways of Your Thought Patterns- Improve Your Memory, Make Rational Decisions, Tune Down Emotional ... Expectations (The critical thinker Book 3)

by Albert Rutherford

In 2007, Richard Wiseman conducted an experiment called "Total Recall" to test exactly that—how much humans have the ability to remember. He did this by showing two volunteers (both female) 10000 images in two days, then testing them to see how many of the images they could remember. This type of experiment was not new; Lionel Standing first conducted this memory test in the early 1970s in Canada, where he found that his subjects could remember 70% of the images—or 7000 of the things they'd seen for only seconds at a time over just a couple of days! The problem with this study was that it was hard to replicate. Wiseman was the first to try. Wiseman found that the subjects were, on average, better able to remember images if there were fewer of them, but he still found an amazing remembrance rate—on average, 98 percent for 612 images and 65 percent for 10,000 images.