The power of human memory
Today when popping into the kitchen between work-related calls I caught the last thirty seconds of a radio broadcast of the episode "Rolling in it" from the series "The Men from the Ministry" which was first broadcast in 1971.
And almost instantly recognised the story as one that a classmate at school had described to me the following day having heard it at the time.
I checked on the BBC website and the memory was entirely accurate. It's a very funny episode which describes government idiocy of a kind which, alas, is very much still with us. You can access the episode at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jnvj for the next 29 days.
My classmate may have been listening to a repeat two or three years later rather than the original broadcast, but we are still talking about a conversation more than forty years ago. And somehow my brain was able to access the memory of that remembered conversation, put it together with a short clip on the radio which would have made little sense in isolation, deduce the identity of the series, which I had never heard directly before, and understand why the situation in that last thirty seconds was funny.
Which it would not have been without the information recalled from a casual conversation when I was a child more than forty years before.
I'm not claiming any special memory skills, I think most people have sometimes done things like that.
Human memory can be fallible. But it can also come up with that kind of incredible feat of data retrieval.
When you stop and think, isn't human memory, and the ability which the human brain can sometimes demonstrate, a truly extraordinary thing?
And almost instantly recognised the story as one that a classmate at school had described to me the following day having heard it at the time.
I checked on the BBC website and the memory was entirely accurate. It's a very funny episode which describes government idiocy of a kind which, alas, is very much still with us. You can access the episode at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jnvj for the next 29 days.
My classmate may have been listening to a repeat two or three years later rather than the original broadcast, but we are still talking about a conversation more than forty years ago. And somehow my brain was able to access the memory of that remembered conversation, put it together with a short clip on the radio which would have made little sense in isolation, deduce the identity of the series, which I had never heard directly before, and understand why the situation in that last thirty seconds was funny.
Which it would not have been without the information recalled from a casual conversation when I was a child more than forty years before.
I'm not claiming any special memory skills, I think most people have sometimes done things like that.
Human memory can be fallible. But it can also come up with that kind of incredible feat of data retrieval.
When you stop and think, isn't human memory, and the ability which the human brain can sometimes demonstrate, a truly extraordinary thing?
Comments
Thats the thing with memory, its very good you just need to learn to use it. People remember pictures and rhymes and tunes rather than streams of data so you can add the data to a rhyme or in some other way connect the data to a rhyme
date in a rhyme would be:
"a metre measures 3 foot three its bigger than a yard you see"
"2 and a quarter pounds of ham, weighs around a kilogram"
Connections would be, well can you remember the Voltage of a car battery? - I bet you can.
Proves your point, I think,
I like those mnemonics.
Probably the most used is the one for the months:
Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one,
Save February, with twenty-eight days clear,
And twenty-nine each leap year.
Just think of an American asking for 5 tomatoes.
five - tom - ate - ohs
five - two - eight - o
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