Instead of focusing on just what we remember from a story, new research from ‘Physical Review Letters’ looks at how we remember any story…using math!
Scientists created a model that represents stories as trees: each small part of a story is a “leaf,” and bigger ideas are the “branches” connecting them. Our memory works by summarizing these trees, and how much we can recall is limited by how much we can hold in our working memory.
What they found:
- The longer the story, the more we remember, but not in a straight line.
- As stories get longer, people start summarizing more of it in each sentence.
- Eventually, no matter how long the story is, people tend to recall parts in a consistent, universal pattern.
In short: our brains naturally compress stories into bigger chunks, and we all tend to do it in surprisingly similar ways.
Citation: W. Zhong et al., (2025). “Random tree model of meaningful memory,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 237402.