memory tricks

[cellio]

This morning during services Rabbi Berkun asked me if I could lead services tomorrow night. I said "let me check; I'll tell you at breakfast". I later realized that he probably now thinks I carry a PDA around.

No, it's nothing like that. Maybe one of these days, but thus far I am not PDA-enabled. What I had to do was visualize the calendar on the kitchen wall and check whether anything was written in for tomorrow night. (Like, were we having anyone over for dinner?) And I didn't want to interrupt davening long enough to do that on the spot.

This, in turn, reminded me that most people's brains don't work that way.

I don't have photographic memory per se; I can't visualize the front page of yesterday's paper and read the headlines off or anything like that. But I have a very visual memory, which includes things like remembering that the thing I'm searching for is in this book, about three-quarters of the way through, on a right-hand page halfway down, even though I can't remember the name of the chapter it's in. And I remember my calendar visually, though I can't "read" what's written on it.

Ironically, I completely suck at the names-and-faces thing.

Comments

Join the crowd!

[jerusha.livejournal.com]

(hmm... if two's company, and three's a crowd, we need to find someone else whose memory works like that. Actually, based on a comment in one of her columns, I suspect cadhla's may work like that).

I remember trying to remember material from textbooks during exams, and being able to remember "it's about 2/3 of the way through the book, on a left-facing page, with a diagram at the top of the page...", and not *quite* being able to read the text. Frustrating, that.

I also find/lose things in a different way than most. I can usually "see" (in memory, in my mind's eye, not any sort of clairvoyance) where I left something. The problems are a) if someone else moves something, my image doesn't update, and b) if I clean house, and move too many things at once, I have a "buffer over-run" and misplace items because the image in the register is one iteration older than the current location.

Although it is fun to watch people's faces at work when I look at the (closed, locked) supply cabinet and say something like "The cyan toner you need is in the left-hand cabinet, bottom shelf, right hand side, front".

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

my memory works very similarly, but more targeted. Mine is definitely not as cool as a photographic memory, but for something I've studied at length, like class notes, or a textbook... Let's say I'm taking an exam... I dig through my memory and I can picture the page of my notes that the answer is on, and I can picture the shape of the text (That is, the shape of the paragraphs and indentations and such). I gradually focus in until I can read the text. This doesn't work for everything.

But if it were a calendar, I'd only be able to remember if there was something in the space, not what it read. Though when it comes to schedules, I keep things in my head reasonably well.

My point to this long, rambly, incomprehensible message, is that I understand how you work!

[goljerp]

Cool...

Sometimes I remember whether something's on the left-hand side of a page or not, but I can't do the calendar trick. Of course, I don't have the greatest memory either.

My names-and-faces memory was great up to and including high school. Then the space for the names/faces database got filled up. I got through college by purging entries from high school, and some compression, but the process has continued to worsen over the years. The problem, of course, is that the purges are not under my conscious control-- in fact, the decision to forget somebody will probably make me remember them, unless I decide that I'm forgetting them to remember them. (I remember Daphna's name, for example, because I said when I met her that I'd probably forget her name. I occasionally call her son Paul "Peter", but now I remember his name by imagining her saying it in her south african accent.)