Memory

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I often say that I have a bad memory. It's a reasonable approximation, but it's not exactly true. I'm very good at certain types of recall, under certain circumstances, it's just that access is very complicated.

I was always very good at school, and tested very well. If I put my mind in "studying" mindset (and I have the focus at the time to do so), I can fairly easily read a chapter once and then take any normal test on it and do well. I can memorize lines or definitions fairly easily, as long as I have the right cues to bring them up. Once I'm looking at my slides for teaching, I have all sorts of detailed facts about the material at my disposal.

For day-to-day things, I basically have two different types of memory. One is the equivalent of a few ragged, handwritten notes that provide pointers that I'm left to puzzle over. The other is extremely detailed, and I think of it as the equivalent to a saved game. When I access this, I have all sorts of information about that particular point. Sometimes it's an entire conversation, sometimes it's a detailed sensory snapshot.

However, these are organized in a complicated set of non-searchable, unlabeled, nested folders in my brain. Accessing them by choice is nearly impossible. Instead, I can look around the folder I'm in and see if there's anything useful, open the folders inside that folder to check them, or maybe back out a level and see what's in the folders nearby. If that doesn't help, then I just won't have access to that thing until I discover that I've moved into that folder. 

I do have some concepts of how to move around and access folders, and sometimes I can leave a label on an individual folder, but I still can't see that label until I happen into the folder that contains it. External cues are very helpful and I leave many of these in my electronic brain or with my friends and partners. 

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