Tuesday, April 30, 2013


Hypermnesia…?
 
What is hypermnesia? And how does it work?

Hypermnesia is the opposite of Amneisa which is forgetting things, losses of the memory ability. Hypermnesia is a medical term for people who don't forget things, who abnormally have a strong memory.

Talking about Hypermensia from the medical angle will result in opening a lot of currently irrelevant subjects.
Instead I will relate it to social media and let you know how we all face this every day.

Did you ever wake up in the morning singing a song you heard yesterday in an ad that you barely remember?
Don’t you find yourself singing the melody of a certain program that you heard on the radio when you don't even recognize the last time you listened to it?

Well it does happen to a lot of us and sometimes we get agitated because we simply can't stop singing the song which isn’t always necessarily favorable to us, yet it sticks regardless.


So hypermnesia, in short, is the ability to filter and select things we don't want to percept.

For example: getting interrupted by breaks while watching a movie... forces us sometimes to look for distractions, get chips ,anything to drink or even check our facebook. Our brain is actually filtering the ads. It is avoiding watching them. 

Another example is while you are walking in the mall and then all of a sudden a lady appears and she starts talking to you about a certain product that you are not actually interested in … normally you listen to the first 2 min of what she's saying then you start to ignore the rest, as you are not interested and what most of us do is say "sorry am not interested" and we move on.

What marketers usually disregard is that customers do have hypermnesia, and at the same time their brain avoids certain things while selecting others. A marketer’s wish is to diminish the possibility of avoidance towards his product.
However I’ve mentioned before, the two examples of the lady at the mall and the commercial breaks (along with similar types of ads), cause major disturbance to us (customers, audience), and a disturbance of the mood leads to an automatic brain-filtering process.

We as customers need some privacy and we enjoy the freedom of choice, a marketer should respect that.

In conclusion, I will sum this up with an example… in Times Square there are lots of billboards everywhere for many different products. No one watches them all; you simply select the ones you want to see!