Question: Do goldfish really have a 6 second memory?

Alex Reid answered on 12 Nov 2018: last edited 12 Nov 2018 12:03 pm

Hi CrunchyCurry, this is a really cool question for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it is interesting, but secondly I really like the fact you have heard something and you have decided to check for yourself if it is true or not. The goldfish six second memory thing is not true and is an example of something called an ‘urban myth’. These are commonly held beliefs that are not true (see here for more examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions). There are loads about psychology, such as the one that we only use 10% of our brain, that are simply not correct. I would always encourage you to question things you hear because urban myths are everywhere! 🙂

The reason this myth exists is probably because someone originally made a joke about goldfish being in a goldfish bowl and not getting bored, so they go round every six seconds and always see something new! Although life in a goldfish bowl is probably fairly uneventful apart from the odd feeding, goldfish are descended from wild goldfish (a lot of whom are actually brown), and they have a varied diet of things such as insects, little water creatures and various types of plant matter. With a diverse diet comes a need to have a memory of where to find things in order to access this array of tasty snacks, and this will need to be longer than 6 seconds to be of any use! In particular goldfish will be good at pairing a stimulus (food or some other reward) with some context on how to access this. This is a type of learning called conditioning and humans (and pretty much all animals) also have it. It relies on memory through the reinforcement of tasty treats and other things you need to survive. Using conditioning you can actually train goldfish to play football (kind of) as you can see in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15Xi-IUKj7A