10 Well Known Facts You Thought Were True (That Actually Aren't)

3. Fish Have Incredibly Short Memories

Everyone knows that fish have a memory spanning mere seconds. That€™s why goldfish in a bowl don€™t get bored, remember? Every new lap of their environment opens up a brand new world of excitement to them, simply because they can€™t remember the last. It€™s a fact so well known that Disney turned it into a cartoon character voiced by Ellen DeGeneres: Dory, in Finding Nemo, is a literal incarnation of the idea of the fish with memory problems. In fact, that€™s not necessarily the case at all. Researchers at have proven that fish can be trained to operate feeding mechanisms, even recalling the time of day that they could get fed. The mechanism worked for one hour a day, and the fish remembered. Even better than that: fish have been trained to associate specific sounds played through a loudspeaker with feeding time. Every time a particular noise was played, the fish would gather to be fed. After weeks of this, the fish were released back into the sea €“ but five months later, the researchers played the noise once more, and the fish returned to be fed yet again. Scientists are convinced of it: fish are capable of the same learning and thought processes as rats or mice undergoing similar behavioural experimentation.