Whether you remember a face or a word has nothing to do with how interesting it is—it just depends on how 'loud' the electrical signal was in your brain at the time.
April 13, 2026
Original Paper
Representational magnitude as a geometric signature of image and word memorability
bioRxiv · 2025.09.01.673067
The Takeaway
This suggests a universal law for memory: things stick in our heads simply because they leave a physically larger 'footprint' in our brain's geometry. It is the intensity of the activation, not the meaning or category of the object, that determines what we recall.
From the abstract
What makes some stimuli more memorable than others? Recent work has shown that image memorability is predicted by the magnitude of population responses in both monkey inferotemporal cortex and convolutional neural networks, suggesting that stimuli that more strongly activate distributed feature representations are more likely to be remembered. However, it remains unclear whether this effect is specific to the visual domain or reflects a more general property of distributed representations. Here,