movies where someone hears an important message only once and retains all the details….
girl if that were me, we’d be fucked. I have to reread emails like 4 times.
if it were me having to repeat my dead father’s instructions on destroying the death star:
I was in a college psych class, and the teacher was doing some kind of exercise about memory, patterns, and retention. He began with, “for instance, if I asked you what number the first letter of your name is in the alphabet, you wouldn’t be able to tell me right aw–” “Ten,” I said. “What?” “J. J is ten,” I said again. He stared at me. “I happened to learn it while looking at the alphabet when I was five or six, and it just stayed in my brain,” I told him. Then we did an exercise on retention. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “and then I’m going to send you out of the room for five minutes, and when you come back, you have to repeat as much of the story back to me as possible.” He told me a long and meandering story with no plot or structure, just a random series of events, place names, actions, etc. Then he sent me out of the room. I looked at the wall for a while. He called me back in five minutes later, stood me up in front of the class, and asked me to repeat “just as much of the story as you remember.” Apparently while I’d been gone he’d been telling the class about how eyewitness accounts aren’t reliable because people don’t remember things well after a certain period of time. So I told his story back to him– not verbatim, but certain phrases were exact– and watched the consternation in his face as I accidentally blew up his (valid! and extensively studied!) lesson about how bad people’s retention is. “It’s like a song,” I tried to explain to him, and the class. “Or a poem. Every part of the story has a little tag to remember it. I looked at the chalkboard while you were saying this part. My leg itched while you were saying that part. A chair squeaked during the next part. Then I just have to come back and go over all the sensations that I had while you were” “Sit down,” he said. I sat. Turns out I’m Autisms Georg adn should not have been counted
ADHD version: A friend asked, on a field trip, why I knew the scientific name for Caltha palustris, “Well, we did that [one week long] field ID course [three years previously] and we saw it in one of the bogs”.
This, I was informed, is very much not a normal reason to remember the scientific name of a plant for the rest of your life.
It took me five whole years to learn when my partner’s birthday is.
I can remember specific details about games I played over two decades ago that I have not played since.
I once forgot it was my birthday. On my birthday. And when my sister (Who lived several hours away) jumped out of hiding and yelled happy birthday, I looked around to see who she was talking to.
I hated having to take a second language in school, and more so I hated the options the school had available; German, Latin, French, and Spanish. (I would later find American Sign Language clicked well) I took Spanish because my older sister did and that meant I’d have help if I needed it. I cheated on most of my tests though as if I needed to remember phrases I would just Draw on the paper something. Often unrelated. I couldn’t read the phrase but I knew the answer associated with it and with key words matched the drawing, and because I doodled all over everything in school including assignments it wasn’t suspicious that I had drawings and doodles in range of my sight.
I don’t remember my left and right naturally, as any time I need it I immediately remember my third grade teacher smacking the chalk board with each hand; “LEFT! RIGHT!” and the sound of the smack because the chalk was in one of his hands so one hand made a ‘tick’ on impact while the other didn’t
I only remember which hand is my left and which is my right because we watched an educational show in first grade and I distinctly remember the man speaking in an accent as he said “which hand makes the letter ‘L’?”
Naturally, sometimes I forget which way the letter L is supposed to be facing.
This is despite the fact that my last name begins with the letter L.
This is despite the
fact that my last name begins
with the letter L.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.