Achi news desk-
There is nothing better towards the end of a holiday than a good mood around tourist shops. Bottle of water in hand, sunglasses firmly on her head and a little ‘oooh’ now and then at the gifts around the shop.
Of course, with this obligatory mooch comes the obligatory magnets to take home with you and your loved ones. Will you go for a nice flat magnet with the name of the city on it or will you go bold and get a small 3D rendering of a famous building? Either way, these cheap treats come home with you.
However, more than serving as fridge furniture and holding your important letters on the fridge door, these could be helping you remember your holidays, according to research from the University of Liverpool.
How fridge magnets help memories
In the hope of learning more about people’s relationship with holiday magnets, lead researcher John Byrom and his colleagues conducted in-depth interviews, often actually in the participant’s kitchens with 19 people who owned at least 20 fridge magnets of trips away.
The research found that these particular keepsakes help preserve memories and trigger emotional responses with some participants saying they thought magnets were more important than photographs as memory aids.
“If you go anywhere, obviously in a day you could take 50 to 100 pictures … but now I don’t tend to take a picture of anything … I’ll end up with a fridge magnet ,” said one participant.
People discussed the importance of the magnets with the researchers, with one participant admitting that she kept a magnet from Spain not because she had a good time but actually to remind her of how terrible things were at that time in her life.
Byrom said: “When people talked about what their magnets meant to them, it was very easy for them to be able to produce these memories and reactions to very specific events or people, including quite poignant examples of holidays that they have had with people. who have died or children who have grown up and moved away.”
It makes sense when you think about it. How often do you really return to your holiday photos?
Byrom said: “If you think about how often you go into a fridge, it’s very different to those cheese knives you might buy, and then gather dust in a drawer, or a picture that gradually becoming wallpaper.”
The next time I visit someone’s home, the first thing I ask for is their fridge magnets.
