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How Good Is Your Short-Term Memory? Why The Anonymous' First Challenge Is Deceptively Hard
Your short-term memory might be more limited than you realize. But some players on The Anonymous fared better than others.
USA Network’s The Anonymous is a game of contradictions. Contestants play part of the time in the real world, working face-to-face to add more money to a $100,000 prize pool. Performance during these in-person challenges also gives players a chance to win immunity from elimination, so there’s value in working together while also being the best individual player. From there, they play the rest of the time as anonymous avatars in a digital chat room where there’s an incentive to be ruthless. It’s the perfect environment for two-faced betrayals and calculated lies.
In the pilot episode, players collaborate on a memory game that involves memorizing and repeating a sequence of symbols. There’s no way to lose the challenge, but there is a way to win ... and it involves stretching your short-term memory further than everyone else.
The Anonymous' Short-Term Memory Game
Early in The Anonymous' premiere episode, everyone chooses a digital icon to represent them in the chat room. Instead of names and faces, the players are identified by simple drawings of objects: a football, a slice of pizza, etc. So it's fitting that in the first Challenge, players were asked to memorize random sequences made up of their avatars.
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One at a time, players memorized their given sequence and recreated it by pressing the appropriately labeled buttons. For each correctly recreated sequence, the prize pool increased by $250 per symbol. However, each sequence was one character longer than the previous; the first person only had to remember one symbol, the second person had to remember two, and so on. That meant each new sequence was more valuable than the one before, but also more difficult to complete.
The person who successfully recreated the longest sequence earned immunity from elimination. So, there’s an incentive to go later and have a longer sequence, both to earn more money for the group and to earn safety. The way to win was to strategically choose your position in line, giving yourself a sequence that’s short enough to remember and long enough that later players won’t make it.
The real trick is knowing the ordinary limits of human short-term memory ... So ...
What We Know About Short-Term Memory
In 1953, Henry Molaison (generally identified in the medical literature as “H.M.”) underwent a now-famous brain surgery to treat chronic seizures. The operation improved his epilepsy but eliminated his ability to form new long-term memories.
From then on, H.M. could hold a conversation and had no apparent intellectual or personality disorders, but he couldn’t remember anything that happened to him more than 30 seconds prior. Everything older than the last 30 seconds and newer than the date of his operation was lost into the neurological ether. Researchers described his mind as a hotel where information could gather in the lobby but could never check into a room.
Doctors studied H.M. postoperatively until he died in 2008, attempting to better understand his condition specifically, and the brain more generally.
In experiments, H.M. was asked to compare two shapes and say whether they were the same or different. It’s a relatively simple task for most folks, and in control trials, neurotypical adults correctly identify shape pairs 11 out of 12 times, on average, with a 60-second gap between shapes. When H.M. performed the task, his performance varied dramatically depending on the duration between the shapes being presented. If the duration was 30 seconds or less, H.M. did about as well as everyone else, but when the duration was longer, his accuracy fell to about 50%, the same as if he were guessing.
RELATED: Is It Possible to Spot a Liar? The Science Behind USA's The Anonymous
By studying H.M. and other patients like him, scientists have learned more about how the brain captures and stores memories. Every experience we have ends up, at least temporarily, in our memory banks. Whenever your brain processes sensory information, it's stored to act upon. Most of the information your brain processes is only needed for a moment, so the brain has to be precious about what it holds onto.
First, information goes into sensory memory, which is fleeting but powerful. (It’s the reason you can remember the feeling of a touch for a few seconds after it has ended, for example.) If you need information longer than that, the sense goes into short-term memory, which has a slightly higher (but still small) capacity to retain information.
How Long Does Short-Term Memory Last?
In general, short-term memory can hold about seven items or bits of information for about 15 to 30 seconds.
All things being equal, the sweet spot for The Anonymous contestants during this challenge would have been seven items or fewer. Longer than that and they'd have to employ some memory tricks. You can extend your short-term memory significantly by repeating the sequence to yourself. That’s what you’re doing every time you drive to the grocery store mumbling “bread, milk, chocolate … bread, milk, chocolate.”
You can also sneak more than seven items into your memory banks by “chunking” information into groups. If you’ve ever memorized a 10-digit phone number by breaking the digits into three groups, that’s chunking. By combining the 10 individual digits into three groups of digits, you’re reducing the mental load for holding that information. If you repeat information enough, it will eventually move into long-term memory, where it is stored and can be recalled even years later. It’s the reason you might need a friend to repeat their phone number a few times before you get it, but you can remember your best friend’s phone number from third grade.
New episodes of The Anonymous premiere on Monday nights at 11 p.m. ET/PT on USA Network.
