The Persistence of Memory
Jan. 7th, 2012 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jon_chaissonFunny thing, memory--it definitely messes with your head.
I've been reading Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, and I have to say it's quite the eye-opener. Caveat: it's not a self-help book at all; it's more of a way to explain why we tend to remember the weirdest things, forget seemingly important things, and that our memory may not be as much of a sieve as we believe. It's SCIENCE!
Okay, maybe not completely...but it put a few things into perspective for me, especially considering that over the past few months I've been thinking about why I've been forgetting some things lately (nothing important or worrisome--just things such as what we were planning to do a few weeks from now, something Emm said to me a few days previous, or exactly what week in April I was taking for vacation, things like that). I know I'm not losing my mind or having a mental breakdown or that anything might be physically wrong--on the contrary, I had to explain a detailed procedure to a coworker the other day and was able to do it with very little backtracking.
There's also the fact that I've been delving into the past quite a lot lately for my Walk in Silence project, which has been a mixture of listening to a lot of 80s college rock (in chronological order--I love MediaMonkey's ability to sort it down to month/day level), reading some of my old writings and poetry (I also have a habit of dating my longhand writing sessions, so I know when they were written), a hell of a lot of reading for research, and putting it all together chronologically on a spreadsheet.
This second thing--the writing project--is what's been fascinating me over the last few months. I knew I could remember a handful of events and songs if given the right stimulus--in this case, the combination of the music and writing, as well as looking at the chronology--and it worked in spades. I of course can't remember full conversations or exactly who might have been present at the time, but in this case that isn't completely important. The important thing was that I remembered my mental and emotional state at the time, and what I was listening to.
The reason I bring this up is because Moonwalking brings up the fact that mnemonics tend to be how many people can remember all sorts of things. I subconsciously learned how they worked, interestingly enough, back in the 80s when listening to music. I realized that in listening to certain songs, I'd be reminded of certain specific memories. Most people do this, and use it as a tool of remembrance of sorts, but when I understood how this worked, that's when I started obsessing over music even more--I'd make all kinds of mixtapes for myself, and even a lot of my Flying Bohemian songs were mnemonic in their own way.
One of my many plans for 2012 is to get myself grounded again, and one the ways I'm doing that is returning to some of my older thought processes. Over the course of last year I'd started to notice how much I'd miss the logic connection (that is, "putting two and two together"), or when I'd catch myself not paying attention, or even losing my train of thought. Like I said, I knew it wasn't a physical problem--it was a mental and emotional one. It was partly due to disconnecting from the stress and frustration of life, partly due to a long-standing habit of 'not getting involved' to different levels...a bunch of things. I realized it was time to change all that. Foer's book merely validated what I'd been thinking over the last few months.
This is going to be a long personal project, and one that will definitely take longer than just a year--this will take years, really. Undoing bad habits, relearning thought processes, all while learning new ones. But it's something I'm willing to try out, because I'm mentally and emotionally prepared to do it this time.
I've been reading Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, and I have to say it's quite the eye-opener. Caveat: it's not a self-help book at all; it's more of a way to explain why we tend to remember the weirdest things, forget seemingly important things, and that our memory may not be as much of a sieve as we believe. It's SCIENCE!
Okay, maybe not completely...but it put a few things into perspective for me, especially considering that over the past few months I've been thinking about why I've been forgetting some things lately (nothing important or worrisome--just things such as what we were planning to do a few weeks from now, something Emm said to me a few days previous, or exactly what week in April I was taking for vacation, things like that). I know I'm not losing my mind or having a mental breakdown or that anything might be physically wrong--on the contrary, I had to explain a detailed procedure to a coworker the other day and was able to do it with very little backtracking.
There's also the fact that I've been delving into the past quite a lot lately for my Walk in Silence project, which has been a mixture of listening to a lot of 80s college rock (in chronological order--I love MediaMonkey's ability to sort it down to month/day level), reading some of my old writings and poetry (I also have a habit of dating my longhand writing sessions, so I know when they were written), a hell of a lot of reading for research, and putting it all together chronologically on a spreadsheet.
This second thing--the writing project--is what's been fascinating me over the last few months. I knew I could remember a handful of events and songs if given the right stimulus--in this case, the combination of the music and writing, as well as looking at the chronology--and it worked in spades. I of course can't remember full conversations or exactly who might have been present at the time, but in this case that isn't completely important. The important thing was that I remembered my mental and emotional state at the time, and what I was listening to.
The reason I bring this up is because Moonwalking brings up the fact that mnemonics tend to be how many people can remember all sorts of things. I subconsciously learned how they worked, interestingly enough, back in the 80s when listening to music. I realized that in listening to certain songs, I'd be reminded of certain specific memories. Most people do this, and use it as a tool of remembrance of sorts, but when I understood how this worked, that's when I started obsessing over music even more--I'd make all kinds of mixtapes for myself, and even a lot of my Flying Bohemian songs were mnemonic in their own way.
One of my many plans for 2012 is to get myself grounded again, and one the ways I'm doing that is returning to some of my older thought processes. Over the course of last year I'd started to notice how much I'd miss the logic connection (that is, "putting two and two together"), or when I'd catch myself not paying attention, or even losing my train of thought. Like I said, I knew it wasn't a physical problem--it was a mental and emotional one. It was partly due to disconnecting from the stress and frustration of life, partly due to a long-standing habit of 'not getting involved' to different levels...a bunch of things. I realized it was time to change all that. Foer's book merely validated what I'd been thinking over the last few months.
This is going to be a long personal project, and one that will definitely take longer than just a year--this will take years, really. Undoing bad habits, relearning thought processes, all while learning new ones. But it's something I'm willing to try out, because I'm mentally and emotionally prepared to do it this time.
