Look what I found in my brain...

[firecat]

I've been listening to CoverVille podcasts all day; mostly it's been background music. But when I started listening to the Alice Cooper episode something weird happened.

I didn't think all that much of Alice Cooper when his band was active in the 70s and I was majorly obsessed with rock music. And I don't think I've heard most of these songs even once in the past 25-30 years. But as soon as I began playing them, they all came back into my consciousness in perfect condition, and I enjoyed all of them quite a lot more than I used to.

Music mostly gets stored in my memory in a sequential access manner, like a cassette tape. As soon as I heard each song, I recognized it, and when the cover version was different from the original, I remembered what the original sounded like. I would have expected my memories of music that old to be fuzzy and distorted like a cassette tape stuffed at the back of a closet for years. But the storage seems really detailed and accurate.

Music is a pretty reliable way for me to feel and express emotions and I guess that's part of the reason the storage is high quality, because people supposedly store memories better when there's strong emotion involved. But what's especially weird in this case is that I didn't consciously like most of these songs back then. I guess on some level I did like them or at least reacted to them emotionally.

What's it like for you when you re-encounter music from your past?

Comments

[firecat]

So to oversimplify -- the difference between what you experience and ADD is that people with ADD have more difficulty tuning out external environment, whereas you have more difficulty tuning out memory (or you would have, if you weren't good at managing it with meditation and other tools).

The experience with music that I described in this post suggests to me that in some areas I have a lot of memory stored but I don't usually have access to it except when it's exposed by an external stimulus.

Brains are weird...

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Mm. Yes and no. What I suspect is that I don't tune out environmental stimuli very much* - probably less so than many ADD folks - but mostly that I have very good coping strategies around it. That it shows up so much as a memory issue is, I suspect, just a combination of a fairly unfiltered memory stream and a fairly retentive memory - there is simply more past than present, and if I let it, the past is pretty much as immediate as the present.

When I think about something I thought I knew, I can remember the what magazine it was in, and where I read it, and what the room looked like, and the angle of the light (and extrapolate from that about when this happened - which is really why I'd been remembering in the first place), and what my mother had been saying to me while I read the article.

* I guess I'm not addressing this part as much because it's harder to explain. If there was a conversation in the room, and I was reading and focusing on something else, I might not have been paying attention, but I heard it, and it's accessible to me, if I turn my attention to it. (Though if I don't turn my attention to it within a few hours it doesn't really get indexed at all.) But that's really an oversimplification. A lot of it is more about noticing a lot of things at the same time...

...and it's time to teach Chen, so I'm doing that now ;-)