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Scientists design new font to help you stop forgetting important notes

If reading and re-reading text was still not enough for you to remember it during exams, researchers have devised a new font to help make the process bit more reliable.

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If reading and re-reading text was still not enough for you to remember it during exams, researchers have devised a new font to help make the process bit more reliable.

Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) have developed a new font which tricks the human brain into using deeper cognitive processing to remember the text written in it. As Cnet reports, the font, ironically called Sans Forgetica, is a sans serif style typeface which slants to the left, an usual design principle in typography, and has holes in it.

The unusual features are exactly what make the font use cognitive psychology and make one better remember the text written in it. The psychological learning principle is known as 'desirable difficulty' making the obstruction (holes) work towards better memory retention. 

Recently, scientists have also identified the brain region behind choice overload, which makes it difficult make a decision when faced with too many options. Choice overload can sometimes have serious consequences, said Colin Camerer, a professor at California Institute of Technology in the US. For the study, volunteers were presented with pictures of scenic landscapes that they could have printed on a piece of merchandise such as a coffee mug.

Each participant was offered a variety of sets of images, containing six, 12, or 24 pictures. They were asked to make their decisions while a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine recorded activity in their brains. As a control, the volunteers were asked to browse the images again, but this time their image selection was made randomly by a computer.

The fMRI scans showed brain activity in two regions while the participants were making their choices: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), where the potential costs and benefits of decisions are weighed, and the striatum, a part of the brain responsible for determining value. Researchers also saw that activity in these two regions was highest in subjects who had 12 options to pick from, and lowest in those with either six or 24 items to choose from.

With inputs from ANI

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