Tuesday 23 August 2011

Tuesday 23rd August 2011

I was accused of having a memory like a Goldfish the other day.
This was obviously a reference to my sometime poor memory, but it got me thinking.

Why do people think that Goldfish have a memory span of ten seconds? Is it just a presumption as the majority of them swim around in a small bowl, and if they had longer memories then they would go mad? Or has some sort of scientific survey been carried out?
I'm thinking it is the former, as trying to carry out a scientific survey with a bunch of Goldfish would be crazy.

Unless, of course, the survey was carried out by a fish.

Let's face it, a human wouldn't be able to do a survey, as I doubt many humans can speak Fish. And, I would imagine, even fewer can speak the Gold dialect.
So a Goldfish carrying out the survey would be the obvious solution.

But this would, in itself, be slightly problematic.
For a start, how would the Goldfish doing the survey get around to all the other Goldfish that it wanted to question?
One way, I suppose, would be to hang around Fun Fairs. You always get a bunch of Goldfish hanging around them. And they could enrol other fish, the ones that get won, to continue the survey on their behalf, if the homes that they go to already have a fish in residence.

In this day and age with all kinds of communication available, they could send back the results by many different ways.

The biggest problem, however, would be that the Goldfish asking the questions would quite possibly forget what he was supposed to be asking.
And then he may forget why he was asking them.
If he didn't forget what or why and managed to make a note of all the necessary answers then he would almost certainly forget where he was supposed to send the results (unless he sent them really really quickly) but then he would probably forget who to send them to.

If he was smart, which we all know he won't be otherwise he wouldn't be a fish, then he would have remembered to write down the email address of the person he had to send the results to, that's if he could remember their name. But then he would have to remember where he put it whilst he carried out the survey.

But, and it's a big but, if he remembered what questions he had to ask, and he remembered why he was asking them, and he remembered where he had to send the answers, and he remembered who he had to send them to, would it be any good?

Cause I bet the Goldfish who commissioned the survey would have forgotten all about it and gone to the Fun Fair for a ride on the dodgems or something.

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