BUSINESS LIFE:I am aware that I ought not to be pushing this electronic form of crack cocaine to readers. If you download this thing, you can say goodbye to work for the rest of the day

FOR TWO days last week I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to read or talk to people. I certainly didn’t want to work. All I wanted to do was stare at little squiggles on a screen and guess which logos they represented.

It all started when one of my sons shoved his iPhone under my nose and pointed at two excessively curly letters in a blue circle. “What’s that?” he demanded. “General Electric,” I replied in a flash.

This was all it took. From that minute I was a slave to Logos Quiz, a game that for the past couple of weeks has been the most downloaded free app for the iPhone.

It starts off gently with images everyone knows – Starbucks, Facebook, and so on – but then gets harder, tantalising you with tiny parts of logos that you know you know, but can’t quite place. There is the rush of joy on realising that a thin white line with a red surround is part of CNN. A further jolt of pleasure comes with seeing that the two black Ss that have been eluding you are Hugo Boss.

If you get stuck you can ask for a clue, or ask on Twitter. I used to wonder what a microblogging site was for; now I know. It is to disturb as many people as possible and ask them if they can identify the red swan with the circle around it.

I am aware that I ought not to be pushing this electronic form of crack cocaine to readers. If you download this thing, you can say goodbye to work for the rest of the day. But still I urge you to do so. This is no Paper Toss or Super Rat: The Cheese Addiction. It is essential for everyone who is even slightly interested in memory. Or in branding.

The first thing you come to realise is how these logos are tattooed on your brain. There was a study done a few years ago showing that toddlers recognise the McDonald’s arches before they know their own names. Another more recent study showed that seeing the golden arches triggers neurological changes that increase our reading speed. It’s not called fast food for nothing.

I used to think this was just a McDonald’s effect, so was never terribly worried. I despised the soppy columnists who wrote articles about the pernicious brainwashing power of brands. But now I’m not so sure.

Take a blue oblong, with the corners cut off, and set it at an angle. I looked at this for half a second before I found myself yelling “Blockbuster!” at my iPad.

How did that happen? I’ve never rented a Blockbuster video in my life or knowingly walked past a store or seen any advertising. What was the image doing, lurking there so easy to find when other things – the name of a neighbour or the plot of a novel I read recently – have vanished?

Our stock of logos is so ingrained that they have become part of who we are. So much so that we are taken aback when people close to us don’t have the same stock. My younger son was floored by the chunky red K on the yellow background as he’d never heard of Kodak. I was scandalised. Later, when I failed to identify the X-Box logo, he was equally shocked. We stared at each other in horror: some mutual reappraising was clearly called for.

What makes logos stick has little to do with familiarity. Think about stamps and coins, things we see every day. I’ve just checked to see that, on a stamp, the Queen’s head points one way, and on a coin the other. But I bet you couldn’t have told me that. That’s because HM isn’t spending billions ramming the image down our throats.

The game also makes me understand why it matters so much to get the design of the logo right. The good news is that this has little to do with money. The new BT logo – a globe – cost about £5 million, but is something I could not identify at all. The Wikipedia logo – another globe – is instantly recognisable and cost almost nothing.

There is a second thing that is quite cheering. Nearly all the banks’ logos are utterly forgettable. I can just about do the UK ones but beyond that I’m blank. The stars of BNP Paribas leave me cold, as does the logo of ABN Amro. I must have seen the twee crossed keys of UBS a million times, but my brain refused to supply the name. I may have worked on a financial newspaper for almost half my life, but the banks have failed to establish any emotional hold on me at all.

I must now get back to the game, but I urge you to download it now. And when you get to Level 7, if you could kindly identify whose logo the crossed swords under the palm tree are, I’d be most grateful.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

(Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012)