This is not the post I’m still trying to make for the blog carnival. I can’t seem to write that post. Instead I wrote this one.
I have a relative where a conversation with him can go like this:
Him: Did you know they found that some kinds of cat litter are radioactive?
Me: Actually they didn’t. There was one cat who’d ingested something radioactive, excreted it into the litter box, and the litter was taken to the dump and found radioactive. But it wasn’t the cat litter, it was the cat poop.
Him: Really?
Me: Yeah, check Snopes.
Him: Oh okay. Wow, I never knew that.
Which makes sense as far as it goes. The problem is, a week from then, this conversation can take place:
Him: Did you know they found that some kinds of cat litter are radioactive?
Me: Actually they didn’t. There was one cat who’d ingested something radioactive, excreted it into the litter box, and the litter was taken to the dump and found radioactive. But it wasn’t the cat litter, it was the cat poop.
Him: Really?
Me: Yeah, check Snopes.
Him: Oh okay. Wow, I never knew that.
And a week after that:
Him: Did you know they found that some kinds of cat litter are radioactive?
Me: Actually they didn’t. There was one cat who’d ingested something radioactive, excreted it into the litter box, and the litter was taken to the dump and found radioactive. But it wasn’t the cat litter, it was the cat poop.
Him: Really?
Me: Yeah, check Snopes.
Him: Oh okay. Wow, I never knew that.
Me: Actually this is the third time we’ve had this conversation.
Him: Really?
Me: Yeah.
Him: Are you sure?
Me: Yeah.
etc.
He doesn’t remember the previous conversations, and is likely to keep repeating the mistaken version of the urban legend (not that particular one, it’s just an example) for years. And honestly won’t remember it (or at least doesn’t appear to).
I used to think I didn’t do things like that, and be really puzzled by why he did that. I still don’t know why he in particular does that, but I’ve noticed something odd about myself in this regard.
I’ll discover something that I could swear I’ve never noticed before. Not necessarily something as trivial as an urban legend, either. It’s often something that knowing it makes a big difference in my life overall. It’s often the sort of thing that I can tell is a life-changing discovery, and an important one, and an amazing one. And so I write something about it, still really excited about discovering it for the first time, and/or writing about it for the first time (sometimes it’s something where I have known it for awhile but never been able to write about it).
And then I’ll be looking through the archives of my hard drive, and I’ll find references from two years prior to learning the exact same thing. And then two years prior to that. And then two years prior to that. And so forth.
I want to note something about this: I am not talking about things that are a “hard lesson to learn” in an ethical sense, where despite knowing that something is wrong and a bad idea and so forth, you do it again and again and again and have to keep “re-discovering” that it’s a bad idea. I am talking about the sort of things that most people seem to learn easily, incorporate easily into their background of knowledge that they already have, and then build upon. The sort of knowledge that is along the lines of “letters represent parts of words,” not the sort of knowledge that is along the lines of “I really ought to yell at people less often.” Certainly not the sort of knowledge that most people find easy to forget.
I’ve been talking to someone else who has a weird memory this way, and we’re figuring it’s a retrieval thing, not a storage thing. I am pretty sure that if something triggers the retrieval of certain knowledge, then the knowledge would suddenly appear somewhere. And I know from experience that when you trigger the recall of knowledge, my recall is very good, better than most people’s possibly. But without any trigger, it doesn’t stick in any state where it can be retrieved easily, and deliberate recall is difficult if not impossible and likely to yield fuzzy or distorted results when it yields any at all.
Jim Sinclair wrote in 1989:
I taught myself to read at three, and I had to learn it again at ten, and yet again at seventeen, and at twenty-one, and at twenty-six. The words that it took me twelve years to find have been lost again, and regained, and lost, and still have not come all the way back to where I can be reasonably confident they’ll be there when I need them. It wasn’t enough to figure out just once how to keep track of my eyes and ears and hands and feet all at the same time; I’ve lost track of them and had to find them over and over again.
I don’t know if xe is talking about the same thing or not, but xe might well be. I have learned to be cautious about saying that I have discovered something for the first time. Because at the time when I am discovering that thing, it certainly feels like the first time, and I can’t remember having ever discovered it before. But then I can’t remember very much at any given point in time. Right now I can’t remember much that is outside the room I am in and the subject matter and knowledge that I am immediately dealing with and using, nor can I easily direct my memory outside of those bounds. I could discover something again for the first time right now that I’ve actually discovered twenty times before, and my subjective experience of discovering it would be exactly like those previous twenty times. I’m not blocking out the knowledge of the previous twenty times, I just can’t remember it right then.
I suspect that whatever the mechanism is that is behind this, also explains why I have been unable to retain (in any functional sense) a lot of knowledge and skills that for most people are learned and retained forever, and also why I seem to do some things seemingly out of nowhere that are unprecedented by my usual apparent abilities in any given area. Rather than retaining conscious and deliberate access to certain knowledge, I seem to retain the tools to find that knowledge again.
In that respect I am like a person with no innate sense of direction, who can find something with extensive use of maps, compasses, GPS receivers, etc. (Which would actually be a fairly bizarre experience to me because my sense of direction, while not as infallible as it used to be — and it used to be completely infallible including for places I’d only been to once — is still better than 99% of people I’ve met.) The only difference being that, in that analogy, the person would, if somehow the knowledge of a location was triggered instead of deliberate, be able to walk to that location with no problem at all and no clue how they knew how to do it. But then if they tried to go there on purpose, they would need to use the map and compass, and they might forget that the place existed at all and keep stumbling across it and “discovering it for the first time” even if they’d been there a hundred times before. But then they might keep going back there whenever something triggered their ability to do so, and they might “discover” the location of the place after they’d been going there for a long time without noticing it.
I also have a suspicion (although it’s only that, a suspicion) that an “area of interest,” be that interest simple or complex, sensory or intellectual, represents not necessarily just an area of interest, but a window of easy flow of information and focus of all sorts of abilities that can’t possibly focus on more than that area. For instance, finding words is difficult in any area, but finding words outside of a few specific areas can be impossible. What those areas are depends on the moment. CNN sent me a long list of pre-interview questions. All of the questions are hard. But some of them I answered like the following:
–What do you think about the war in Iraq?
I don’t like it. I have never written about it before, so I don’t have language built up to describe all the particular reasons I don’t like it, but they do exist. (This is one thing that isn’t always obvious if you get me talking about something I’ve already talked about before, is that there are entire areas that I have plenty of knowledge around and never figured out words for.)
But I think it’s not just about not having talked about it much before. It is also that it does not coincide closely enough with my areas of interest to be able to come up with words for it. I am interested in the war in Iraq, and I hear a lot about it, have opinions about it, and can see patterns and stuff that relate to it. But neither that nor the vast majority of my knowledge or interest is within one of those windows. People who know me well know me as having a lot more breadth of knowledge and interest than people who know me only by my writing. At the same time, people who know me only by my writing in areas that I am good at, would probably be shocked at the things I know and care about that I am totally incapable of communicating most of the time. (How many people know that I cried yesterday when I found out someone shot one of the seven remaining female Amur leopards?)
This is why, while there is a difference between someone who can write at length but only about their area of interest and someone who cannot write at all, the difference is not necessarily anywhere near as vast as some people believe it to be, and it is a mistake to assume that a person’s communication skills about one topic reflect an ability to communicate about anything else (or even a consistent ability to communicate about that topic).
I think the fact that I’m more about the tools to figure things out than the things that are already figured out (at least when it comes to what my strengths are), also means I see things that other people, having already “figured things out,” don’t notice. Sure, I might have to figure something out a hundred times over that most people figure out once and are done with for life. But that means I’m unlikely to figure something out, decide I have it all figured out, and never again see it from a new angle or as if for the first time. If I have to do it over and over again from scratch, I’m more likely to notice the flaws in what people think they know but never have to figure out, or in what they figured out so long ago that they’ve forgotten there’s anything to figure out about it, or anything more basic than what they already “know”.
It also means that by most people’s standards I must look (over time) some combination of haphazard, confusing, paradoxical, contradictory, regressive, backwards, unreliable, and totally outside their definitions of how people are supposed to operate (and therefore not really operating in exactly the way I do operate, but doing something else that is easier for them to wrap their heads around even if they’re completely wrong). But I don’t think I am by nature any of those things, I think I just look that way because of a configuration that’s as normal for me as other people’s configuration is to them. I think I’ve also been confused by myself, because the world tends to explain humanity in terms that don’t include people who operate this way, and it does so even to people who do operate this way, who are as likely to absorb the at-best-incomplete definitions of “how people work” as anyone else.