A new study adds an unexpected method to the list of ways to spur memories about our past: body position. That’s right: just holding your body in the right position means you’ll have faster, more accurate access to certain memories. If you stand as if holding a golf club, you’re quicker to remember an event that happened while you were golfing than if you position your body in a non-golfing pose. […]

Dijkstra’s team believes that the effect may be due to the way memories are stored in the brain: one theory of memory suggests that memories are composed of linked sensory fragments — odors, sights, sounds, and even body positions. Simply activating one or more of those fragments makes the entire memory more likely to be retrieved. In any case, if you’re trying to recall a particular incident in your life, putting your body in the right position might help you remember it faster and more accurately. The key appears to be your body position when the memory occurred.

[via Cognitive Daily — one of my new blog loves]

This is a really fascinating topic, and the first time I’ve seen it studied methodically.

What is the long term impact of our growing involvement in virtual life and digital communication?

If you see all movies in the same general context (on your iPod or computer screen), rather than surrounding them with a trip to a theatre, candy, theatre seats…

If your reading material consists of Word and eBook files, without the sizes, fonts and thickness of books…

If your letters are all emails or instant messages, without stamps, handwriting or envelopes…

If your conversations are all via SMS, with no body language or tonal cues beyond emoticons…

…and if all that happens within a very limited number of positions and locations (on the sofa, on a train, in the kitchen, at the desk), then what impact does that have on your personal internal journal of your life?

Is that why we need our cell phones to journal our [digital] lives, with automatic uploads of pictures to Flickr, video to YouTube, status to Facebook, and stream of consciousness to Twitter? Is it because we might experience life as a giant blur of digital events that in retrospect are difficult to tease apart from one another… or even difficult to call up as memories?

What does it take to make a digital experience memorable in the way a fully physical experience is? I doubt that color or even sound are enough. New trends in haptic and scent generation might help… but I suspect that the real trick is to tie the digital experience to the surrounding environment (or at least to a discrete digital environment) — tying the mobile ad to the location, to the store, to the time of day, to the people in the room, for example.

A whole new meaning for Location Based Services.