In the popular series “Ted Lasso,” the show’s titular character once said, “You know what the happiest animal on Earth is? It’s a goldfish. It has a 10-second memory. Be a goldfish.” As funny and pseudo-inspirational as this may be, there’s a problem with this logic: goldfish don’t actually have a 10-second memory
Over the years, there have been studies attempting to uncover the memory time of a goldfish. Different studies, conducted in varying ways, gave results that never answered the question in a definitive way. While the precise memory of a goldfish hasn’t been 100% confirmed, a recent study has given a better understanding of what a goldfish’s memory is really like.
But how do you test the memory of a goldfish? You can’t exactly hold up flashcards or give it numbers to memorize and repeat back. Instead, the researchers created visual markers in fish’s tanks that helped denote distance. Using food as a reward, they were able to essentially “train” the fish to go a certain distance – or at least stop at a certain point. Because even when the starting point was varied, the fish were able to stop at the correct visual markers.
If fish only had a 10-second memory, they wouldn’t be able to remember spatial information – distances, directions, etc. – and therefore would not be able to be trained to act a certain way and complete tasks. This study helps prove that fish can remember distance factors, and therefore have the memory capacity to, well… remember stuff.
Does that mean your goldfish remembers what you wore this morning when you fed it? Unlikely. But, knowing how they navigate and the fact that they can be trained like other animals (to an extent) shows that goldfish have a memory capacity contrary to that of popular myth. More research is needed to know exactly what a fish’s memory span actually is, but that kind of data is abstract and hard to collect. So, for now, we have to stick with what we know: goldfish might have brains about the size of their eyeballs, but they still have the potential to remember more than just the past 10 seconds.