We’re all used to skimming past the boring parts of a reading assignment or a web article. But when researchers from RMIT University printed information in a weird, hard-to-read font, they found that people were more likely to remember what they read.
There’s a sweet spot, their experiments suggest: If the font is too chaotic, it becomes too hard to read. So they settled on small tweaks: Gaps in the lines of the letters, and a slight backwards tilt (the opposite direction as the slant in the more familiar italic type).
The resulting font is called Sans Forgetica, and you can download it here. The researchers also created a Chrome extension that will render any web page in Sans Forgetica, the better to study with.
But don’t use it everywhere: They suspect that if we get too used to reading in Sans Forgetica, its memory-boosting effect will fade.
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