The Little Plastic Castle: Goldfish and Memory

“They say goldfish have no memory

I guess their lives are much like mine.

And the little plastic castle

Is a surprise every time.

And it’s hard to say if they’re happy,

But they don’t seem much to mind.”

~Little Plastic Castle, Ani Difranco

I was listening to this song this evening, it’s one of my all-time favorites. The album came out in 1998, I remember going to the store and buying it on the release date when I was 13. I guess, even outside of the context of the song, I believed the common saying that ‘goldfish have no memory’ or ‘goldfish have a 3-second memory.’

But if you’re reading this, you are reading ‘Uncommon Knowledge: Sometimes the things you know just ain’t so.’ So you know I’m about to say that Ani, as well as many of you out there, are wrong.

One of my favorite shows for both entertainment and content value is Mythbusters. Airing Feb. 22 2004 on the Discovery Channel, Adam and Jamie tackled this myth head-on through a lab test. They bought goldfish. Each man used a different method to train them to go through a basic maze (both used a food reward). It worked. But Adam and Jamie weren’t the only ones to put the myth to the test.

ABC Net Australia reported in 2009 a similar experiment done by 15-year-old Rory Stokes. His hypothesis was simple: that animals couldn’t really evolve without having a memory, because animals depend on it for survival. His first trial was to acclimate the fish to being fed near a red Lego. He removed the Lego for a week, and noticed upon replacing it that the fish remembered that it meant food. The article also sites research Culum Brown from Sydney’s Macquaire University, who has also done a study of his own. Brown tried to teach fish how to escape a net. The net had a small, but feasible, escape route and the fish were able to learn to escape within five trials.

The Telegraph UK wrote about goldfish memory in 2006. The article reports that according to a study done out of the Queen’s University of Belfast found that goldfish could remember pain for at least a day. The study showed that ‘pain avoidance in fish does not seem to be a reflex response, rather one that is learned, remembered and is change according to different circumstances,” the article states.

A quick Google search reveals a myriad of science fair project websites that suggest testing a goldfish’s memory as a project, as well as numerous reports refuting the popular saying. So perhaps songwriters should do a little research when it comes to their metaphors, and try the truth on for size.

　

　

Sources:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0768499/

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/19/2166204.htm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1509199/Painful-memories-for-goldfish.html