Jan 1, 2003
On Visual Memory
At one point, a few years ago, my friends used to poke gentle fun at me for always drawing maps using the objects on the table:
“So imagine that this salt cellar is me, and that ashtray is the corner of the road…hand on, can you pass that fork? Ok, that fork is the zebra crossing, and the mug, I mean the bus was going along here like this…”
My listening friends would start to chip in usefully:
“What’s this pepper pot?” “How about my lasagne?” “Can this glass be a bus stop?” and so on. Smart arses.
But I can’t help it: I’m a very visual person. I tend to wave my hands around a lot when talking, and frequently end up sketching things on napkins, bus-tickets, notebooks, whatever comes to hand, to explain myself better. I remember things visually and spatially and in relationship to each other, and I explain them better that way, too.
I have a visual memory. When I was studying for my finals in uni, I realised that the best way for me to remember key things like dates, quotes, definitions and key translations was to remember them visually. I would draw up elaborate A3 sheets in coloured pen, with words and paragraphs and numbers written in different colours, or underlined, or at a weird angle, or next to a doodle of a tree. Sometimes I would get other people to write things for me – my flatmate, boyfriend, neighbour. My landlord even wrote something once when he came around to collect the rent: in brown pen on the top right hand corner of a sheet – Banisteriopsis, the latin name of the most widely-used hallucinogen in the Amazon. I still remember it now. I remember because after writing the sheets, I would tape them over my windows, and then sit at my desk and stare at them. I would memorise the relationships of the objects, the way they were written, and then later, in the exam, I would be able to re-draw them in my mind.
That’s the way my mind works – I learnt that early on, and I figured out how to work around it: if I write your phone number on a bit of paper, I probably won’t remember it. If you write it down, I probably will. But I’m completely porked when it comes to type – now I use a PDA, I don’t tend to remember phone numbers any more. But I had to get a scribble pad for the device, in order to help me think. I think visually, with a pen in my hand.
I surprised Tom earlier. I was trying to explain how something worked, and he wasn’t getting it, despite my hands drawing elaborate shapes in the air, and so I suddenly whipped out a whiteboard from under the bed, and drew him a quick flow diagram.
“I cannot believe you own a whiteboard, Meg,” he said “and you keep it under your bed.*”
No wonder I’m single. Sigh.
* At which point, I must point out, Tom launched into a long postulation about exactly why I might keep a whiteboard under my bed. He conjectured that it was for precise diagramatic and businesslike explanation and review of sexual expectation and performance, including (in his own words), the projected orgasm requirement curve, and, most amusingly, graphs of expected performance figures: “If we look at the chart we can see that I am not required to perform any oral services until June, although there is reciprocal servicing required from late April.” Thank you, Tom. That’s not why I keep a whiteboard under the bed, boringly enough. Sorry to disappoint.
