Greater Than 3 Seconds: the fish cognition blog.

There is a surprisingly prevalent myth that goldfish have a 3-second memory. Sometimes it’s bettas instead of goldfish; sometimes 5 seconds instead of 3. No-one seems to know where it came from. Simply stating that this is false, as fish owners and researchers have been doing for decades, doesn’t seem to have any effect on the popularity of the myth. I've had it repeated to me by my friends, academic colleagues, and family. Early in my graduate career, my grandmother – using false premises but irrefutable logic – claimed that in all her years of cooking fish she had never observed them to have brains, and you can’t have a memory without a brain. QED.

After years of this abuse (of both the fish and me), I’ve decided to create this blog: a compendium and discussion of the fantastic cognitive abilities of fish and their behaviors, updated – ideally – every time I come across some cool new research. I’ll try to write it so that it appeals to everyone (whose love of fish is assumed) and hopefully is also interesting.

p.s. If you want more of this sort of stuff, check out Stephan Reebs’s “How fish behave” site.

About me.

My name is Noam Miller. I am an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. I've spent my career bouncing between psychology and ecology but always studying animal cognition and behavior. Starting with my PhD I've been mostly working with zebrafish, studying their collective cognition, meaning how they make decisions in groups. This has more relevance to how human groups make decisions than you might think. I'm also more generally interested in fish cognition, which is why I started this blog. If you need to know more about me than that, go visit my lab website.