short term conversations, after talking to my mother of 60 minutes on the phone my wife will ask what we talked about and I honestly don’t remember.
names, sucks that I can tell you how I know a person, activities they did, where they live, things they’ve said, conversations we’ve had, but I can’t remember their first names.
My good memory:
maps and directions, all it takes is one trip around a big city and stopping somewhere once to permanently knowing how to get there whenver I want in the future.
I would suggest that Suburban Plankton would do well to record a conversation that you have, and then, later check your recollection of the “verbatim conversation” to see if it is, in fact, so. If it is, then he(?) might as well forfeit all future arguments. If some little things are subtley distorted, which I suspect, then there is hope. If you’re way the hell off then the proper recourse is a victory dance.
I’m pretty good in this regard when it comes to driving, taking public transit, or walking in city streets. But if it involves freeway driving with multiple changes from one interstate to another, I’m hopeless when I’m not familiar with the interchanges. I never remember for sure what lane I need to be in before I get to the interchange. Just recently I had to go from West L.A. to Fullerton, and actually opted to drive to the downtown L.A. and take the train from there rather than drive all the way. That way I wouldn’t have to deal with the 10-to-5 interchange and then the 5-to-91. Of course, my ultimate destination was easy to reach from the Fullerton train station, and if that hadn’t been so I would have just driven the whole way. But as it was, I happily avoided having to do so.
I can remember stupid data: in college, I wasn’t allowed to play Trivial, but would get called in to referee when the answer given sounded right but didn’t match the card. My youngest brother won his dorm’s Trivial championship twice, got second once, so it’s a family thing.
I can remember logical sequences. If I have the starting point and remember the logic, I can reconstruct a sequence of events, or solve one of those problems where you basically just follow a procedure (equation solving, for example).
I have serious problems with lots of mathematical demonstrations: either I can’t find the logic (ok, how am I supposed to know that that is the next step, out of all possible steps? “you just learn it”? Sorry, doesn’t work! Math’s supposed to be logical, I want to know what the logic is) or I don’t see the need for the demo in the first place. Had serious problems learning Bolzano’s Theorem for Calculus 1 in college because, well… to me the theorem itself wasn’t just obvious but stupid and didn’t need any kind of demonstration (if I remember correclty, it says that you can’t go from (x1,y1) to (x2,y2), where x1 and x2 have opposite signs, without crossing the X axis).
I suck at names but can remember faces I’ve seen once or twice and place them with perfect accuracy. There was a guy once in summer camp who insisted we’d met before, I said “no we haven’t, but we sometimes take subway 3 at the same time”, he said he never took line 3… several months later, in subway 3: “hi Paco! gee, look where we are”
Honey, if your mom is any way like mine, it’s a survival mechanism. I programmed my mouth eons ago to be able to insert “aha”, “hm-hmmm”, “oh my”, “oh that’s horrible” and “that’s nice” in the proper places and with varying inflections, while my brain is busy thinking about something more interesting than her last 2-hour conversation with her friend (conversation which, of course, Mom takes 3 hours to recount). I use it with Mom and her parents all the time.
I’m good at trivia, useless facts, stuff I learned in 6th grade, all that stuff. I’ve worked at the same place for 15+ years, and I’ve got a nice rep as being a great source of institutional memory – the stuff that isn’t exactly in the files. I’m a little proud of the times I get phone calls from the higher ups with some funky little question.
I’m also a good contributer to memory tennis (as I think of it) – when you go back and forth to figure something out. If I don’t remember something right away, if a friend can recall one little detail, it will trigger me to remember something else, and with each piece of info starts to snowball until we’ve got a pretty complete package.
I’m awful at remembering faces, and matching the right name to the right face. I can’t remember what people look like until I’ve seen them a lot. I saw some discovery program of an Oliver Sacks type of thing, where they showed people with various bizarre brain injuries, and they had a woman who couldn’t remember faces. Apparently the human brain is hardwired to recognize faces. Now, this woman couldn’t remember the faces of her husband and other loved ones, and I’m not that bad, but otherwise – that’s pretty much what I have going on. Sometimes I do have a hard time recognizing who people are in photographs, even if I know them well.
I’m bad at weeding out incorrect memories, which I worry about because I don’t want a mistake to seem like deliberate dishonesty. If I’m remembering something, and one wrong detail gets in there somehow, I don’t notice right away and sort of incorporate it into the big picture. Something like this happened recently, my brother and I were talking about a family vacation to Florida, and we “misplaced” an incident from another vacation and didn’t realize it until much later. That always freaks me out – when we were talking about it, it seemed perfectly correct that it happened on the Florida vacation.
I have always had problems putting names together with faces. It takes me weeks to learn people’s names.
However, books stick in my memory. I can read a book and be able to tell you the plot and most of the action from then onward, and the more I read the book, the more detailed I get.
But unless I write down the grocery list, I will always forget something or three and have to go back to the store. And my childhood memories are blurring.
Interesting thread, js.
I have a terrible memory for where I put things. I am the only person I know who can lose something at my desk while sitting there. I also have trouble remembering names, although I don’t tend to forget faces. I don’t have a good memory for music.
The thing I’m good at remembering is words, especially words in rows, in particular written words. My verbal memory’s not that good, but I can quote parts of hundreds of things I’ve read, either verbatim or slightly paraphrased. I remember books, and I pick up poetry, especially rhyming poetry, very easily. I am the household dictionary. If it’s not really specialised, chances are I can define it.
Conversely, I can’t learn another language. Well, I could, but I spent six years taking French and only started to get it near the end. If I don’t understand it, and it doesn’t come in logical sentences, I can’t remember it. Individual term memory in other languages doesn’t happen. So
Envelope hymn book almond lava lamp tissue
wouldn’t ever get remembered, but
…My life is light, waiting for the death wind
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.
My memory is crazy good. For some reason I can remeber almost everthing about events that have happend in my life and lord help you if you cross me, I never forget that stuff! (insert angry glare face)
