Retraining one's head
Oct. 22nd, 2010 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camrogersFor a while now I've been a bit concerned about my recall. I've always been utterly, utterly crap with names. Part of it's low-grade social anxiety, and part of it - I think - is the fact that I seem to have spent my entire life training up visual recall to the exclusion of almost anything else. On one memorable occasion, when doing a round of introductions, I actually forgot my own name. It had been a bad day, admittedly, I think I was tired, and I was under the gun to remember the names of everyone who was there and by the time it got to finally introducing myself my cortex basically just shrugged and said 'I got nuthin'.'
The side-effect of this is an excellent visual memory for detail. Last night I heard a piece of voice work and I knew I knew who was delivering it. The high way he grated the consonants, narrow and focused and diaphragmatic, threw a picture of his lips and teeth into my head... but the rest was fogged out. I kept replaying a few words, the words where he hit those consonants, urging the picture to blossom out, give me a nose, or a cheekbone, enough for my visual memory to grab it and flower out the rest (In the end it did, and it turned out to be the actor who played Tighe on Battlestar.)
But now it's gotten to the point where I have trouble remembering things I've actually studied. Like this morning I tried remembering the name of the Druze warlord who ran a lot of terrible operations during the Druze/Maronite conflict in Lebanon during the mid-1800s. I kept trying to call up the shape of the name visually. I knew it was triple-barrelled, but because I didn't have a face, or a memory of his cheek-stubble, or the cant of an eyebrow, or the way his fingers rested on a pommel, I had nothing. It's been twelve months since I had to look at the name. If it had been three months, or six, then the visual memory of the shape of the name would have been enough. In the end the name did just come to me, once I let go of trying (it was Said Bey Jumblatt.) The same way, I guess, if you forget a PIN it's best to just blank out and let it rise to the surface of your mind of its own accord.
My problem is that I need to retrain my head to store and recall things non-visually so that the details I need rise effortlessly when they're needed. I watch a programme like Q.I. for example and am envious as hell of the recall of many of the guests there (whose names I now can't recall even though I've seen six sodding seasons), or of many of the writers and broadcasters and public speakers whom I admire. They do it effortlessly. I know that were I in the same position now there would be flow-killing delays as my memory withholds the goods. It's hard to sound credible when any given name is replaced with 'that guy who did that thing.'
So now I'm making an effort to somehow assign different 'markers' to things I want to recall. The way you smell something before eating it, for example, is orthonasal. The way you smell it as you eat it is retronasal. Even in typing that I blanked out on orthonasal. I knew the prefix was related somehow to skin... or anthropology? Epinasal? Anthronasal...? But that was the marker my mind came up with: it's somehow related to some sort of human quasi-medical thingy. Swell.
I think my thinking is disordered. Or the filing system at least. My brain needs a defrag. There's research that suggests regular meditation jacks up visual acuity as well as mental, so I think I'll start there. Anyone got any advice? I can't be the only one who's had to deal with something like this.
The side-effect of this is an excellent visual memory for detail. Last night I heard a piece of voice work and I knew I knew who was delivering it. The high way he grated the consonants, narrow and focused and diaphragmatic, threw a picture of his lips and teeth into my head... but the rest was fogged out. I kept replaying a few words, the words where he hit those consonants, urging the picture to blossom out, give me a nose, or a cheekbone, enough for my visual memory to grab it and flower out the rest (In the end it did, and it turned out to be the actor who played Tighe on Battlestar.)
But now it's gotten to the point where I have trouble remembering things I've actually studied. Like this morning I tried remembering the name of the Druze warlord who ran a lot of terrible operations during the Druze/Maronite conflict in Lebanon during the mid-1800s. I kept trying to call up the shape of the name visually. I knew it was triple-barrelled, but because I didn't have a face, or a memory of his cheek-stubble, or the cant of an eyebrow, or the way his fingers rested on a pommel, I had nothing. It's been twelve months since I had to look at the name. If it had been three months, or six, then the visual memory of the shape of the name would have been enough. In the end the name did just come to me, once I let go of trying (it was Said Bey Jumblatt.) The same way, I guess, if you forget a PIN it's best to just blank out and let it rise to the surface of your mind of its own accord.
My problem is that I need to retrain my head to store and recall things non-visually so that the details I need rise effortlessly when they're needed. I watch a programme like Q.I. for example and am envious as hell of the recall of many of the guests there (whose names I now can't recall even though I've seen six sodding seasons), or of many of the writers and broadcasters and public speakers whom I admire. They do it effortlessly. I know that were I in the same position now there would be flow-killing delays as my memory withholds the goods. It's hard to sound credible when any given name is replaced with 'that guy who did that thing.'
So now I'm making an effort to somehow assign different 'markers' to things I want to recall. The way you smell something before eating it, for example, is orthonasal. The way you smell it as you eat it is retronasal. Even in typing that I blanked out on orthonasal. I knew the prefix was related somehow to skin... or anthropology? Epinasal? Anthronasal...? But that was the marker my mind came up with: it's somehow related to some sort of human quasi-medical thingy. Swell.
I think my thinking is disordered. Or the filing system at least. My brain needs a defrag. There's research that suggests regular meditation jacks up visual acuity as well as mental, so I think I'll start there. Anyone got any advice? I can't be the only one who's had to deal with something like this.
