Given the craziness of moving to New York, which is going to end up being a two month process, this post is going to be more throw-away than usual because I just don’t have much else to talk about right now. In essence, this post is just some musings about how my brain works, specifically when it comes to retaining memory and how inconsistent it is. And to help explain it, I will use the example of how I navigate while driving or walking. The main reason being that people I know have often marveled at how good I am at it, yet I can be extremely forgetful about other things.
When I was young, I used to be fascinated by maps. I would get a map or an atlas out and just spend a long time looking over it and enjoying all the details. I especially enjoyed looking at the street maps of the areas I was currently in, I liked to know exactly where I was in the universe.
Eventually this lead to some inevitable questions. How do buildings get their numbers? How do streets get numbered or named? How do interstates get their numbers? What’s the difference between streets, avenues, drives, boulevards, roads, etc.? Luckily, I asked these questions during a time where looking up directions online didn’t exist so my parents actually knew the answers, and I managed to remember them despite not really needing to know them for years.
What I was doing there was learning some fundamentals about street navigation that I keep to this day, and I can use them to make bigger observations about the area I’m in. Computer programming is similar and probably why I’m good at that too. You learn some fundamentals about how most languages work and you use that knowledge to understand the details that make each language different. So while some people may get to a place and flounder about trying to find the right building, I know that, if I know what the address number is, I can find it pretty easily because numbers follow two basic rules: numbers always increment away from the origin (as street numbers also do), and numbers are always split where evens are on one side of the street and odds are on the other. Granted I don’t know if these rules are true everywhere in the US, but it has been in all the places I’ve been thus far.
I think it’s largely because of the way I studied maps that I always get directions using streets rather than landmarks like many other people prefer. I remember in high school when I first started driving, my friends would try to give me directions to their places using landmarks and it was a real struggle. But if I looked up where their house was earlier, I could remember a minimal number of streets I needed to turn on, and it would be a breeze. I still do this today if the route is easy enough, I don’t need to worry about using turn-by-turn navigation, I just remember the turns. This is one of the things that impresses other people the most, that I can look at a route for a minute or two and just know it. I try to carry this into other areas of my life as well, finding the easiest path that I’m more likely to remember, even if it may not be the most efficient or quickest.
So I use some basic rules to figure out how to do things without knowing the full details and I use reference points to memorize minimal paths that I need in the short term. When it comes to long term memorization, it always comes down to doing versus seeing. If I drive to a place for the first time, I can usually get there again a second time if it’s within a few months without looking it up again. If I go somewhere between 3-5 times, I will likely remember how to get there for the rest of my life. Everyone has the ability to remember things like this, if something is a routine, eventually you build a habit and you just know how to do it. But I seem to build this habit much faster than most. It’s one of the things that makes me so good at adapting. If I’m forced into using something new, I am good at remembering how it works within a few uses.
This comes with many advantages. It makes me very effective at certain tasks, including my job. I work a lot quicker than others because I can remember where things are, I don’t have to do searches all the time, and I can find problems easier. I feel that it also makes me a good teacher because when I know something and I’m conveying the knowledge to someone else, I can arrange it and frame it in my mind without needing to look up references or jump all over the place as things come to mind. On the other hand, sometimes I do get into situations where I think I know how to do something, or it’s been so long that I have forgotten how, and I never have any notes on how to do it, so I often need to relearn things that have slipped from scratch.
Having this ability also means that I have terrible memory when it comes to facts and trivia. When I just read something, I forget pretty much all of it an hour later. Same with things I hear or watch. It takes much more investment in something for it to stick with me, unless it’s something like a game where I’m directly involved in it. This definitely has more disadvantages since I constantly forget things, including things that I should be remembering to do. So for things like that, I have to put them on a to-do list or I never get around to it.
Anyway, this one is pretty short and sweet, I could give more examples but I think I got the general idea across. I also have a lot to do so no need to spend more time on this than necessary.