14 DAY TRIAL // You know how sometimes your brain plays tricks on you and you can't remember what day it is? Not just the date, the actual day of the week?
Well, rest assured, there is no reason to worry that your memory might be failing you. It happens to all of us and it has nothing to do with your cognitive abilities.
It's your work schedule that's to blame
In a study in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers at the University of Lincoln and their colleagues at the Universities of York and Hertfordshire propose that the reason people sometimes can't recall what day of the week is is because of their work schedule.
In a trial, the scientists had a group of volunteers, all working adults, name words they strongly associated with the different days of the week.
It was discovered that, whereas Monday and Friday had plenty of mental representations linked to them - i.e. boredom, tiredness and the like for Monday, and freedom and other positive representations for Friday, - the other days of the week had weaker identities.
Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays correlated with especially few mental representations, meaning that they were very much the same for the volunteers.
It was such days linked to a low number of mental representations that the researchers found were most likely to be confused with each other. To put it bluntly, it looks like Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are so alike our brain doesn't register them individually.
Rather, they're more like just one fairly dull day repeating itself a total of 3 times, which is why we have to make an extra effort to remember them by name.
“The seven day weekly cycle is repeated for all of us from birth, and we believe this results in each day of the week acquiring its own character,” said study lead researcher David Ellis.
"Indeed, more than a third of participants reported that the current day felt like a different day, and most of those feelings were on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, reflecting the midweek dip in associations attached to different days,” he added.
Well then, what's there to do?
As noted, confusing a day of the week with another isn't that big a deal and, usually, does not reflect a person's cognitive abilities. Admittedly, it can be a sign of an underlying neurological disorder, but then it would be accompanied by other symptoms.
All the same, specialists say that those looking to get rid of such memory hiccups can try to overcome the problem by educating themselves to associate more mental representations with the days of week, even those that don't seem to have anything special about them.
