Introducing Sans Forgetica, the font designed to improve your memory

A new font can help house information deeper into your brain, according to the researchers, but it's not magic, it's the science of effort.

Researchers in Psychology and Design at RMIT University in Melbourne have created a font called Sans Forgetica, designed to improve the retention of information from readers. It's based on a theory called "desirable difficulty," which suggests that people remember things better when their brains have to overcome minor hurdles when processing information. Without Forgetica is elegant and slanted in the back, with intermittent gaps in each letter, which serve as a "simple puzzle" to the reader, according to Stephen Banham, designer and lecturer of RMIT who helped create the font .

"It should be hard to read but not too difficult," Banham said. "By requiring this extra act, the memory is more likely to be triggered."

In designing Sans Forgetica, Banham said he had to override his instinct, stemming from 25 years of typography studies. Clarity, ease of processing and familiarity are generally guiding principles in the field. The backward tilt of Sans Forgetica would be foreign to most readers, as the backward tilt type is generally only used by mapmakers to indicate rivers. The openings in the letters make the brain reflect to identify the shapes.

The team tested the effectiveness of this policy, along with other intentionally complicated policies, on 400 experienced laboratory and online students. She found that "Without Forgetica did not sufficiently respect the principles of design without becoming too illegible and that it no longer allowed to preserve the memory," according to a press release published on the website of the university.

In some ways, Sans Forgetica is a continuation of the work of Daniel Oppenheimer, professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon, who presented a similar idea about the "desirable difficulty" called "disfluence" during his work at Princeton University in 2011. The terms are different the principle is the same: minor mental gymnastics helps readers to remember things better.

[Nobel Prize in medicine goes to cancer immunotherapy researchers]

The Oppenheimer team relied on contrast and size to overcome mental obstacles rather than a foreign police. In one experiment, the team asked 28 college students to read about two makeup creatures, the Pangerish and the Norgletti. The color information was printed in gray, in 12 characters Comic Sans or Bodoni. The norgletti profile was printed in 16-point black Arial font.

The team distracted the students 15 minutes after reading about the animals and then interviewed them; the students remembered 87% of the strange facts, whose information had been more difficult to read, and 73% of Norgletti's facts.

Oppenheimer and his team have expanded their research for one semester at a high school in Chesterfield, Ohio. They changed the fonts on educational materials – racks, PowerPoint slides and spreadsheets – into several classes and topics into unusual texts, such as Comic Sans in italics, Monotype Corsiva and Hattenshweiler. After several weeks of teaching, the researchers found that in all subjects, with the exception of chemistry, students who had read the "defective" papers were getting much better results.

"This research shows that behavioral interventions can be an important part of school reform," Oppenheimer said in an interview with Harvard Business Review.

Without Forgetica is the first font created for detention, said RMIT researchers. But Janneke Blijlevens, another project researcher, pointed out that the font must be used sparingly to remain effective. If the reader's brain becomes too comfortable, it will invade Sans Forgetica as easily as if it were Arial or Times New Roman, some of the most popular fonts in the world.

"We think it's better to focus on key sections, such as a definition, in the texts rather than converting entire texts or books," Blijlevens told the Washington Post. .

Do you want to test for yourself? Without Forgetica is available as a Google Chrome extension on a RMIT website.