Have you ever gotten half-way into a story only to realize that you’ve told this exact tale before, to precisely the person you’re boring with it now? (In fact, you may have already told it to them several times?) According to research published in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science, losing track of whom you’ve regaled with what stories may have to do with the way our brains process different types of memory. According to researchers Nigel Gopie and Colin M. MacLeod, source memory, or your ability to keep track of which person told you a story, may function more smoothly than destination memory, or your capacity to catalog your own information output, in part because of the direction in which that information is traveling. “Previous research demonstrated that encoding of the external environment is disrupted when actions are performed by oneself rather than by someone else,” the researchers point out.
