Every so often, I have this conversation:
Them: So you know how the other day we talked about whether we should leave for our trip on that sunday or monday?
Me: …doesn’t sound familiar…
Them: And you said it depended on what work you had left to do that weekend…
Me: Hm… where were we when we had the conversation?
Them: Um… we had just arrived at my house and I had started making food-
Me: Ooooh yeah yeah okay. And I was sitting on the black stool facing the clock. Okay cool, I remember the conversation now, please continue.
…What the heck is up with this? Does it happen to anyone else? Apparently, my brain decides to index conversations to be efficiently looked up by quite precisely where I was in physical space when the conversation occurred. I have no conscious experience of this indexing happening. It’s also pretty strange that it happens for locations that I use on a regular or even daily basis; it’s not like I could just start listing all the conversations I’ve had while sitting on that kitchen stool.
I do believe that I’m quite above-average aware of what’s happening in my visual field. I always notice when people come in and out of a room, I tend to see new objects or decor right away, and I somehow spot every insect. I’m often the first to spot a leak or mold. I almost never run into stuff or knock things over. So maybe it’s just increased attention to my surroundings?
Here’s a similar pattern I’ve noticed.
I’m in a phase of my life where I read a lot of books, and especially textbooks. My field of study is interdisciplinary, and I am frequently looking up something that I’ve read before. When I do, I will frequently have the sense of roughly where it was, physically, in the book. This includes:
how far into the book,
whether it’s on the left or right page,
how far down the page,
roughly where within a paragraph it is,
and a vague sense of what the rest of the page looks like.
To be clear, I’m not claiming that I have any kind of “photographic” memory. I have no idea what almost all of these books say. I don’t have any degree of verbatim retention. But when I remember that there was a particular interesting part and want to go look for it, my brain brings up these visuo-spatial associations. These associations feel blurry but confident, like some kind of hash function. Textbooks are heavily formatted, so there will be lots of white space, diagrams, section headers et cetera to anchor off. When I try to recall the “location” of events in flat prose fiction books, nothing comes up.
This is, I think, one reason why I have struggled to switch over to digital forms of books. I’ve tried it a lot, but they always fade out of use. There are many other reasons (if they’re not on my shelf I tend to forget it exists, I find physical books far easier to skim) but the fact that I can’t physically index my knowledge to it is noticeable. It’s just some big infinite scroll that looks and feels indistinguishable from all the other big infinite scrolls.
I’d love to hear how others relate to either of these experiences!
When I was 13-16 I did a paper round, and cycled round the same sequence of houses every morning. I didn’t listen to anything; I just thought about stuff. And it was a daily occurrence that I would arrive outside some house and remember whatever arbitrary thing I was thinking about when I was outside that house the previous day. I don’t think it had to be anything important. I have only rarely experienced this since then.
This is exactly how my memory works as well.
I had a related experience while exploring whether I had aphantasia ( inability to visualize ) or not. I had at that time always considered my visualization abilities above average. I enjoyed tinkering and making things, drawing, and sculpting both with physical and digital media. But when I started exploring my ability to visualize colour I found it very difficult. I realized I couldn’t even visualize different shades of grey well, but I was looking at vivid internal models of the world! What the heck was going on?
Drum roll to build suspense and let you consider speculating and investigating your own experience before reading on...
So, what I discovered was that what I thought was me generating imagined visual data was actually me generating imagined tactile, kinesthetic and proprioceptive data. I now realize it is multimodal, there is weak perception of vision which I have worked on strengthening and there is also auditory or linguistic packets, like, the word “joint 1” may be attached to a kinesthetic imagining of a joint such that placing my focus on it causes me to be aware of the idea of “joint 1″ and vice versa.
Since I was (and still am) apparently ADHD and obsessed with fiddling with things to investigate their physical properties, it seems that this is actually the modality I feel most comfortable thinking in. It’s a little bit like I have many invisible or ghost hands to touch the surface and inside mechanisms of whatever I’m imagining, but like how when holding a pen or some tool, my awareness goes to the point I’m concerned with, eg, the tip of the pen, I can make use of any existing or imagined tool in place of my hands for working with my plane of imagination. Not that I would need to use a tool to modify anything, I can just think them different, just that the idea of imagined hands isn’t quite right, it’s more like “hands or any other tool I can imagine”.
There is also some kind of awareness of the entire plane that I don’t quite understand. It’s like an awareness of what it would be like to pick up or physically interact with an object but without the idea of the physical interaction… just the properties it would have if I was interacting with it.
@Alex_Altair, since you seem to be indexing memories in spacial locations, I wonder if you have any of this kind of spacial imagination happening? I’m also curious if other people experience this?
As for the question of indexing memory, I definitely do the same thing with books make frequent use of method of loci, usually with geometric shapes rather than memories of real locations. As for indexes of conversation, I more often have problems where I only index conversations by their content without indexing who I was talking with, when, where, or basically anything other than the ideas I experienced during the conversation. It can lead to embarrassing situations where I have long conversations with people and then fail to recognize them. I’m usually not that bad with it, but that is more my experience. If I index spacial location of a conversation I usually also index other details.