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Persistence of Memory

When it comes to memory, I am with Dali. A few melted pocketwatches and a protoplasmic sack of crap.

I am somewhat neurodivergent, so your mileage may vary.

As a kid I had a near total recall. I memorized and recited chunks of 'the Odyssey'. I read my mother's math textbooks (she was a math teacher), and skated through math with very little work. I even got into a specialized NYC math/science high school with a perfect math score, in spite of almost non-existent English.

And then something happened. Maybe it was hormones, maybe something else. Maybe it was figuring out how to reason. Maybe it was my experiments with drugs. Maybe it was realizing that I can't remember everything, and it's more important to remember how to find the answers rather than blindly memorize everything. Or am I just rationalizing my failing memory?

After my teen years, my memory has been crappy. I kind of gave up on it, after a few spectacular failures.

As a coder I've been working alone for several decades now. I've learned to comment as if for another person. When I read my code from a few years back, my reaction is often "who wrote this?". Sometimes, "how did he know all this and why can't I understand or remember any of this?"... And often "what a moron!".

A while back I returned to a project that was on hold. I fixed a bug, and added a clever comment, with a pun I was proud of at the moment. I looked a few lines up, and there it was, an older comment with a nearly identical pun.

I would be genuinly worried about dementia of some sort, but I've been pretty consistent about being unable to remember certain things since my 20s. Of course, these days you don't have to remember anything because there is Google.

There is a working theory that we don't actually experience anything directly, but only through memory. We do things on autopilot, and create a memory. A chunk of our brain responsible for constructing a plausible semblance of a 'personality' creates a lie that ties memories together. We are just big fat liars. I believe that.

Another working theory suggests that memories are altered every time they are accessed. We remember not the original event, but telling the story of that event, a little different every time. I believe that too.

I live with a person with dementia. She creates her own reality. Things that don't fit are dismissed with a 'don't be ridiculous...'. She was quite good at it; now she is in her 90's and a lot of what she says does not make any sense, and she can no longer fool us. How long has she been doing it? I've known her for 30 years, and she's been doing it for at least that long.

It is truly scary how little brain capacity you need to get by, especially if someone is caring for you. If you are not broke, you can get away with 'eccentric' with no memory and a reasoning power of an 8-year-old.

I don't trust my brain. Maybe that's why I write a reasonably complicated piece of software every few years -- it's hard to fake that...

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