KNOW YOUR TYPE
Consign brain fade to your junk folder with a simple change to your laptop settings
N “ever memorise anything you can look up,” said Albert Einstein, who, despite his genius, was notoriously forgetful. Novelist Stephen King, on the other hand, was haunted by “the persistence of memory” – “art”, to him, involved the ability to “remember everything”. In this respect, most of us are more like Einstein: memory is less a matter of crafting the perfect horror story than mentally checking off all the ingredients we need at Tesco for our Sunday meal prep. Yet the consequences of forgetting can range from Misery to Desperation: an unsatisfying potato-free frittata, say, or the Mondaymeeting panic when you’re asked about that report you promised… but somehow neglected to start.
Thankfully, researchers at Melbourne’s RMIT University have devised a new tool to prevent brain fade from consigning your health and career aspirations to the Pet Sematary. In a recent study, 400 students were tasked with memorising a passage of text, presented in two typefaces: Arial and Sans Forgetica. The letters of the latter – newly designed by the RMIT team – awkwardly slant seven degrees to the left and are full of gaps that deliberately slow comprehension. This “desirable difficulty” was discovered to trigger the act of remembering, leading to a 7-percentage-point increase in test scores.
The Australian study supports the findings of a 2010 paper from Princeton and Indiana universities, in which students were given a memory test on a passage of fiction, displayed in either the easy-to-read Arial or Comic Sans – a typeface notorious among designers for its cumbersome, scrawled style. The psychologists discovered that “disfluency, the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognitive operations”, enhanced results, with the Comic Sans group scoring an impressive 13 points higher.
So, don’t make it easy on yourself when you type up your next important list: ignore the derision of the design fascists and choose the most spinechillingly inelegant font you can endure. It’s the simplest way to keep your prospects Shining.