What Did You Do? - Part One

I have been thinking about memory a great deal, including the limitations and inaccuracies. The simplest aspects I came across early. I gradually absorbed the reality that I remembered things much better than other people.  All kinds of things: school quiz items, stray facts in books, backs of cereal boxes, events that had happened, people I had not seen in years.Yet at no time did I think I was at some magical or unearthly level.  I would read about those children who could remember long strings of digits or watch those performers on TV who could glance at a half-dozen one-dollar bills for a second each and then add them all up and be as amazed as anyone, or even more. I also saw that while it was very often associated with high intelligence, there were exceptions in both directions - other smart kids who had things fade from memory quickly, or kids who were not notably academic who remembered past events at my level or better.

Games and puzzles provided dramatic illustrations. We had games in fifth grade that the teacher discontinued because I always won and it was no fun for everyone else. Other games, and legitimately cognitive/academic ones, I was only mildly good at, and that mostly from compensating for lack of the needed skill bringing in others. A few were just opaque to me. 12? -2i? x to the 4th? Bolivia?

It took a long time for me to notice that it was often the types of information. Some had an ability to remember many types of things, others mostly remembered events or people. There were kids at camp who remembered what counselors and campers had been in every cabin four years ago, and who had won awards that year. There were girls who learned and knew song lyrics - and they were always spot on for the tunes as well. I noticed things that seemed different about my own memory first, then tried to spot others and develop theories about it. I could do mental arithmetic almost automatically if it was auditory, and could recognise people by their movement from yards away, even years later. But I would sometimes freeze up with numbers on a page if someone else had written them or would stare straight into the face of a person I knew well and be unsure who they were even though I was sure I knew them.

In retrospect, becoming a research psychologist studying memory is one of the several professions I missed going for. When people are spinning theories, it is an advantage to know that some explanations cannot be universal because you yourself, or one of your relatives or closest friends is an exception, and also that some unlikely things are possible, because you have examples ready to hand.

A whole new world up for me when I started working on psych units. I found patients who remembered remote events in startling detail (usually manic at the time), and others who reported events so incorrectly, so quickly that the automatic assumption was that they had to be lying. I later encountered a few who would restructure memories within minutes. To not recall what has just been said to you is a bit of a surprise, but we all do it via inattention. But to remember it, but change or even reverse its meaning was amazing to me.  Frankly, it still is.  I intellectually know that such things occur, and I have seen it, but it still seems just impossible. It is most frequent when the emotional content overwhelms the intellectual so completely that it overrules it. "I wasn't really suicidal this morning, I just said that because I wanted attention." No, you actually tried to hang yourself and might have succeeded if you hadn't been on (clandestine, for exactly that reason) 15-minute checks. But now your boyfriend is here by surprise and you want to have unsupervised visits. And they are absolutely serious and honest. They uncertainly acknowledge that there are still marks on their neck, but that is somehow...unimportant...and we should believe them that they are safe.  How can we not take their word for it?

Hmm. I haven't even gotten going yet and this is already 5.5 paragraphs long.  I had better go back and enter "Part One" in the title and let people get started on the issue in general before coming back to finish this.