How Long a Goldfish Actually Remembers | Smartest Year Ever (Dec 27, 2025)

For decades, goldfish memory has been treated as a joke. A throwaway line. A cultural shortcut for forgetfulness. But modern animal cognition research paints a very different picture.

In this episode of Smartest Year Ever, Gordy digs into the real science behind goldfish learning, memory retention, and behavior, pulling from decades of behavioral psychology, neuroscience, and comparative cognition studies. Goldfish have been studied for nearly a century not because they are simple, but because they are reliably trainable, capable of learning patterns, cues, sequences, and environments in controlled experiments.

This episode explores how researchers test long-term memory in fish, why goldfish are still used as model organisms in learning experiments, and how one persistent myth managed to outlive the actual data. Along the way, Gordy reflects on what studying hundreds of facts over a year does to your own memory—and why confusing quiet behavior with low intelligence has been one of science’s longest-running mistakes.

If you think you already know the answer, you probably don’t.

No Days Off. New Fact Daily.

Sources:

Abramson, C. I., et al. (2017). Learning in goldfish (Carassius auratus): A review of classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and maze learning. Behavioral Processes, 141, 307–318.


Behrend, E. R., & Bitterman, M. E. (1954). Avoidance conditioning in the goldfish. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 47(5), 389–393.


Rodríguez, F., et al. (2002). Long-term retention of spatial memory in goldfish. Animal Cognition, 5(3), 193–199.


López, J. C., et al. (1998). Spatial learning in goldfish: Place learning and cue learning in an overhead maze. Animal Learning & Behavior, 26(3), 266–272.


Bitterman, M. E. (1965). Phyletic differences in learning. American Psychologist, 20(6), 396–410.


Sarel, A., et al. (2022). An interspecies portable fish-operated vehicle. Behavioural Brain Research, 434, 114028.

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Music thanks to Zapsplat.