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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Are you referring to Method of Loci? I’ve experimented with it a bit. For a while I would do daily mental walk-throughs of the apartment I grew up in and I practiced visualizing symbols for the 10 digits. After a few months I was able to successfully remember some pretty long numbers. Ironically, I don’t remember how long they were. It wasn’t that useful though. It took me a really long time to “store” numbers; longer than it would to just write it down. I didn’t have a system for storing anything besides digits. Worst of all, the “memory space” was limited to the size of my old apartment. I was able to increase the space by adding detail to rooms but it was never enough to be practical for anything besides trivia. Strangely the repeated “walk-throughs” ended up bringing back memories of smells and textures that I hadn’t thought about in decades

    I think I’m much better at remembering and imaging things that can be easily articulated. I recognize my wife with no problem but I can’t really summon a good mental image of her. We have a photo of the night we met. I can visualize details of the clothing and jewelry she was wearing but when I “look” at the image in my mind I can’t really see her face. It’s hard to describe. Almost like there’s an image with a tag that says “link to wife’s face here” without actually loading it. When I really concentrate on it I can wither get a really blurry image of her face, a really zoomed in image, or a sort of “line art” version of her face. I don’t have real prosopagnosia. I can recognize faces, it just takes many more exposures than it does for most people.



  • This (and the human brain in general) is fascinating to me. I’ve always been on the opposite end of aphantasia, although I’ve never been officially diagnosed with hyperphantasia. I don’t understand it at all it just seems natural.

    When there’s a question about physical objects I close my eyes and just check. It’s not that my memory is particularly good but I can “synthesize” shapes. I might tell myself a story like, "Start with a point. Expand it into a line segment. Now pull that line parallel to itself to create a rectangle. You can spin that plane around a bit and then grab a point in the middle and pull it up into a pyramid. And so on. I basically watch a color-coded animation when I say something like that.

    With music it can be a bit distracting. I’ll go through phases where I get some piece of music stuck in my head and when I do it’s incredibly detailed. I can pick out individual instruments in an orchestra and hear reverb. It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I’ve never heard before. I can play that enough times to “drive out” the other one but not enough to “light up” the new one and I’m fine.

    As a kid it was obvious that this was not something everyone did and I thought I was special. It turns out that beyond being an interesting curiosity I haven’t found any actual use for it. Too bad. I still find these differences really interesting.

    As an aside, I’m also one of those people that’s terrible at remembering names and faces. I often completely forget someone’s name and face within minutes of meeting them. I’ve started using Anki to help with it. I make flashcards of all the people I’m supposed to know and run through them every night. It’s a hack that works well enough that (some) people think I’m one of those people that never forgets a face.