Total Recall: The Woman Who Can't Forget | Hacker News Reader

Total Recall: The Woman Who Can't Forget

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I was a kind of quirky kid when I was younger... I sort of memorized the Hobbit without really intending to, along with every other book I ever read. Being something of a quirky kid it took me until about middle school before realizing a) this sort of thing is not normal and b) sometimes its better to keep it under your cap. (I can't do it word-for-word anymore, although I still have fairly good retention. I just stopped doing it and it stopped happening. Happy/sad about that, mostly happy. Being "scary" makes for an uncomfortable middle school experience, and being unable to forget the uncomfortable bits sucks royally. Trust me -- been there, done that.)

One of my friends from high school, also diagnosed as being LD, still remembers my drivers license number. He saw it when I showed him my photo after passing the exam, more than a decade ago. Oddly enough, I have never had a particularly good memory for numbers, even back in my freakish days. (It also took me until about age 10 to figure out the difference between left and right. My little brother, who was exasperated at that and thought I was playing, mentioned that left is always the same side as the mole I have on my left wrist. I still check my wrist to this day, out of semi-conscious habit.)

Ahh, the human brain -- it is pretty freaking weird.

left is always the same side as the mole I have on my left wrist. I still check my wrist to this day, out of semi-conscious habit.

In a similar fashion, I learnt left and right because I 'write with my right hand'. I still run through this in my head to this day.

The way I learned: my left hand makes an "L" when the thumb and forefinger are perpendicular.

About left and right, I have a friend, a black-belt karate student, and he can't figure out either. He says he developed a method, and asked his teacher to do it instead of saying "punch with the right", "punch with the left".

The "method" is just saying "punch with the hand that you write", "punch with the hand that you don't write".

I had a hard time believing, until a couple days later, he was driving and I said "turn to the left!" (many times) and he missed the road. Then we developed our own method, which was "turn to the side of the radio", and "turn to the side opposite of the radio".

Freaky. But fun :p

To this day I'll hold up my hands and make an L shape with my pointer finger and thumb. The one that looks like a proper L (and not a mirrored L) is left.

East and West gives me a hard time too, so I have to think about where California is or where Florida is.

I had trouble with left and right for a long time. Then, one day on an elementary school ski trip, another kid indicated he wanted to go right at the top of a hill. I somewhat embarrassedly admitted I wasn't sure which way that was.

Response: "Look, this way (point) is right, this way (point) is left." Never had trouble with left/right again.

I was like this for east and west when given north for the longest time. I would always ask my little brother which way east or west was.

Never Eat Soggy Waffles. Point in the four directions clockwise. It took many years of saying this alloud before I had it anywhere near down. I still ocasionally have issues. I also had problems with left/right and the months of the year.

Well the other problem was with clockwise... Couldn't do that either.

I had a very hard time learning east and west as a kid until I started playing Lands of Lore...

So I guess it was probably a question of motivation....

I still have the same left-right confusion. For me, the odd part is that I have no trouble with port and starboard.So my wife gives me driving directions in nautical speak.

I figure if I care about it enough, I can probably fix it one day.

I figured out port and starboard with a little device from sailing school that has never left my head:

red->left->port green->right->starboard.

note that on a sail boat, lines are traditionally colored depending on what side of the boat they are on.

A long time ago (before Internet gambling), I remember reading in Reader's Digest about a professional card player with a photographic memory who got caught in a tragic casino fire. In the article, it said that since the fire, he'd been unable to enter any casino because his photographic memory brought back the scenes of the fire vividly into the present.

I also remember the hypnotist at my college orientation who hypnotized a bunch of our class. He had a couple revert to kindergarten memories, telling him who sat where in the classroom, who their friends were. In the most memorable sequence, however, he asked a guy in childhood mode the question 'did you ever make a special sound'. The guy/kid was shy and said 'yes but I'm not sure I want to do it.' Eventually, the hypnotist coaxed and encouraged the guy/kid enough ... and the guy/kid did the most spot-on, uncanny, loud Chewbaca roar. He got the nickname Chewy around campus after that.

That's a pretty awesome story -- I've always wondered whether it was our memories or our ability to recall them that faded! Does anyone know of good reading on the subject?

I soon find that except for her own personal history and certain categories like television and airplane crashes, Price's memory isn't much better than anyone else's. She struggled in school, is no good at history before 1965, and seems genuinely miffed that she was once asked when the Magna Carta was signed ("Do I look like I'm 500 years old?").

That was the most interesting part to me out of the entire article. It raises the question of whether she consciously makes a decision to remember facts that she's interested in (herself, disasters) and exclude others or whether she just never spent any mental energy remembering these 'outside' events.

I had this unusual ability to memorize entire chapters of Biology and History. And unusually I could do it only with these two subjects, as for me they were the most difficult to understand and relate to. Let me just give you an example. The tests papers would question things like: a) give any two symptoms of malaria (2 marks) b) list all symptoms of malaria (7 marks)

And I hated to lose marks and overall class rank because of this one stupid Biology, and let's say I covered malaria but this time they chose to ask about treatment for cholera.I reasoned to myself, they could ask anything. So I might memorize all symptoms/treatments of malaria AND cholera. During one such exam preparations (must've been grade 7/8) by the end of it I had an epiphany that I'd just memorized the entire chapter. I even parroted it back to my mom making her happy that here I was ready to take on the diseases of this world. The notable point is that only after that realisation, I became very good at memorizing entire chapters. I remember by 9th grade I could almost memorize the 4-5 chapters of Biology. Surprisingly it happened mostly with Biology, a subject I hated the most, Chemistry equations which our teachers never explained because even they didn't know what the fuck was going on in there with those molecules(S8+8O2=8SO2?), dates in History and exact word-for-word quotes in languages -- all things that needed memorization. I could never remember say for example the 4-digit number plate of the cars which just passed by at 60kmph even after I had summed up its digits and they came out less than 30, and done so for all the 15 cars that passed by within 30 seconds or so (try this game, its fun and it'll improve your number skills).

And quite unsurprisingly, after my schooling, when this ability was no more required, I slowly started losing it. I always wondered if I could get that 'magic' back so to speak. Is there a name for this condition - the ability to channel immense memory powers when needed?

btw, if you guys are wondering this was an Indian school system. I also had other freakish abilities, but for now I'd leave it at that.

Previously on Ms. Price:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373529

And necessarily:

"Funes, The Memorious" by Jorge Luis Borges

http://io.uwinnipeg.ca/~morton/bigidea/funes.txt

I see you don't forget URLs.

The Internet never forgets. Where we once had oral retellings of epic sagas, we now have synthesis of radical new ideas. Humans are extraordinarily adaptable machines. We've now built a ubiquitous information retrieval system and it will only get better.

If you could trade memory for creativity, would you?

I hardly ever think back.. I'm always thinking about what I am going to do or what I want to achieve.

My memory scarcely goes back further then a week. It tends to make my live a bit empty, I don't remember doing anything.

I have the strangest memory. I can remember facts, theorems, and all sorts of things that are easy to reason about, but my experiential memory is crap. I find my friends talking about things we did together and I can't participate because I don't remember very well.

However, I'm beginning to suspect it's because I spend too much time thinking to myself and not enough time paying attention to the outside world. Does anyone else have a similar experience?

I've got a pretty similar memory. Can't remember events. To remedy this I try to keep a log of event(call it a diary if you will) so that I remember some important things I don't want to forget.

Have you noticed your experiential memory improving as you keep the log? I once kept a dream diary, and I started remembering my dreams really really well.

Yes, and I feel the more I get into programming and reading the worse my social memory gets. I used to not read much in my lower teens but was more social. I would remember everything in conversation, exactly what happened, the clothes the person was wearing, just about everything to the point that it would make people angry that I would remember things that they wish I didn't. Now that I spend a majority of my time in front of the computer that ability seems to be fading. I think the brain restructures itself to handle memory that is related to the expected daily experiences, which would explain why the loner has a hard time comprehending or acting "normally" in social situations in their youth.

It is interesting to note that having a very good memory used to be a tremendous advantage. I mean before ubiquitous books (never mind the web).

There is a lament by an ancient philosopher (Platon?) about the advent of writing destroying memory.

Yes, him. Generally rendered as "Plato" in English.

It is, of course, only because of writing that anyone now has even heard of Plato, never mind having available the substantial fraction of his work that we have.

In the `Small Book about a Large Memory,' Aleksandr Luria described the case of `S.' a man with an even more astounding capability of recall. The Russian version of the monograph is even available online: http://www.psy.msu.ru/science/public/luria/small.html

The untapped, unexplored universe that are our brains and our genes astound me every time I read a story like this! Nothing is more fascinating to me. Except for the process of human/animal evolution.

I don't forget either -- I just never really remembered in the first place.

Women never forget. It is unfathomable.

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