Spending a lot of time on social media has been getting a lot of stick for all of the terrible things it says about our personalities and what might be doing to our brains. So, it’s quite nice to be able to say that there could be something rather positive coming from spending so much of your life on Instagram.
Researchers at Cornell University found that posting personal experiences on social media makes it a lot easier to remember them, reports Elite Daily . And no, not just because they’re digitally saved at your fingertips to gaze at whenever you get a pang of nostalgia – posting online actually makes it easier to recall events from memory.
The study said: ‘The process of writing about one’s experiences in the public sphere, often sustained by subsequent social feedback, may allow people to reflect on the experiences and their personal relevance.’
The researchers asked 66 students to keep a diary for a week, and to describe things that happened every day noting down whether or not they had posted it on social media. They also had to give each event a rating out of five for ‘personal importance’ and ‘emotional intensity’.
They were then given two surprise quizzes – one at the end of that week, and one another week later - to see how many of the events they’d written about they could actually remember. It turned out that the ones that were posted online gave a really good indicator of how likely it was that they’d be remembered at the end of each week, even the events that students rated pretty low on those personal and emotional scales.
So basically what we learn is that regardless of what we actively post online, good or bad, we’re still probably much more likely to remember it.
Qi Wang, lead author of the study said: ‘If people want to remember personal experiences, the best way is to put them online’.
‘Social media – blogs, Facebook, Twitter and others alike – provide an important outlet for us to recall memories, in the public space, and share with other people’ Wang added.
Well, there you have it. I guess the bad news is that there’s some logic to those annoyingly repetitive ‘my baby just burped in the most adorable way’ new mums insist clogging your Facebook news feed with. But the good news is that maybe social media isn’t turning our brains entirely into mush. If you’re the sort of person who can’t remember what you had for lunch yesterday, at least now you have a reason to Instagram it.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.