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.