Repetition and Memory

My memory skills vary for different kinds of information. Facts, like dates and names, are difficult for me to recall and consequently my general knowledge is very poor. I love quizzes but I always do badly at them, or rather the results don’t really reflect my intelligence. People think if you are good at quizzes you must be clever, what it means is you have a good memory for facts.

What I am good at remembering are concepts and theories. This is very useful to me at the moment. Writing a blog like this where I am analysing my behaviour would be very difficult if I didn’t have a good memory for the theories I’ve read and also a good memory of my different behaviours. In this way I am able to apply theory to my behaviour and find the reasons to explain why I do the things I do.

Having a poor memory for facts and a good memory for ideas seems to be contradictory at first. When I am engaged in daily activities, it is usually details I am good at and generalisation I am poor at. So why when these enter my memory is it the other way round?

Something you should know is that memory is a scare commodity for me. I put as little in it as I can. Basically because I don’t trust my memory, I know it lets me down. Sometimes I think this is because so much of my memory is used up doing tasks that other people use their thinking processes to do. An NT person will know the rules governing social interaction and use this to guide them, whereas I use past experiences and my memory of other events to guide me. NT people learnt the rules of grammar to be able to speak, whereas I memorised phrases as a child.

I don‘t like people giving me information during conversations because I‘m so forgetful, and I never seem to have a pen and paper when I need it. Emails and texts are good because then I always have something to refer back to. If I know there is somewhere I can go to find the information later then I won’t bother even trying to remember. For example, if I know it is a film someone wants to see then I shall go onto the cinema’s website later to find the details, or jog my memory. If it is a reference for an essay, I shall just try to remember which book it was in.

To remember things I need to have them repeated several times, which can become very frustrating for the person you are speaking to you if you keep asking them to repeat stuff. A fact is a very small thought, forgetting a fact is a bit like losing some change down the sofa, you don’t notice it’s gone. A concept or an idea though, now that’s a big thought and big things are more difficult to loose. Big things seem pass into my memory with much greater ease, there is no need to keep repeating them.

I never thought of thoughts as having a size before, but I suppose they must have. I suppose it’s because we don’t tend to think of thoughts as having an actual physical presence. Any mystic or psychic however will tell you that they do. In which case they must also have a mass or a charge, but I think I need to do some research.