A curious research conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA) has discovered that we may not take one factor into account when we forget about names : music.
In fact, what the experiment showed is that while young people were not affected at all, participants of a certain age associated 10% fewer names with photographs of faces when playing songs by Eric Clapton, Jefferson Airplane and Rush or the sound of rain .
"Both groups recognized that music was distracting them , but the younger ones did not lose their ability to retentive as a result," explained psychologist Sarah Reaves, who participated in the study.
The researchers linked the study results to the so-called "cocktail effect" – the ability to isolate ourselves from the music and noise around us at a party to focus on a single conversation. In other words, as we get older, the more it costs us to abstract from the noise of the environment and the more associative memory fails us. Silence helps.
