Man! Brains mess up what you’re trying to think about sometimes
I’ve been thinking a lot about how my memory works. From what I can tell, it works by clustering pieces of data together, based on my emotional response to each piece.
I was watching Starship Troopers yesterday, and one of the pilots in the movie was played by Amy Smart.
After searching my mind trying to place her, I recognized her face as being involved with something unnecessarily violent or sexual. It took me a while, but I realized she played the girlfriend in Crank.
As far as I can tell, my memory works like a network with nodes representing pieces of data. The weights of the edges seem to be related to some sort of emotional significance.
I wonder how this sort of memory compares to rote memorization. For example, how do I remember the sixth multiplication table? I remember memorizing it in elementary school, but I don’t harness that memory when trying to multiply six by seven.
