Stay, memory...

WARNING: A lot of freewheeling here, with no discernible point, perhaps...I'm doing this to see where my fingers take me...

Part of my interest in memory and memory techniques lies with the phenomenon of forgetting. In this context, "forgetting" means one of two things: First, the deliberate "unremembering" of something you've remembered (as opposed to "not having ever remembered it in the first place"). Second, the involuntary "disappearance" of something you've made an effort to remember, and did not want to forget.

With regard to the first meaning:

It may be said that the forte of the human mind is its ability to forget things that are not significant. Sometimes, this ability is a handicap ("Where were you on the night of January 16th?" "Uhh....I don't know."), but for the most part, since there is no need to remember information such as what you ate for dinner on July 2, 1996, such information can be conveniently forgotten.

The existence of individuals with unusual powers of recall underscores the importance of being able to forget. The late George Koltanowski, a chess master who penned a column for the San Francisco Chronicle for many years and who excelled at playing several games of chess with different people at the same time without physically having the boards in front of his eyes, had an eidetic memory (also known as a "photographic memory"). During a lecture appearance in Jacksonville, Florida in the mid 80s at a local chess club, he noted that this skill had helped him in many ways in his chess career, but also hurt him in daily life, in that the images in his memory would not go away, which interfered with a number of activities, such as driving a car.

There is also the work that was done by a Russian, A. R. Luria, in the early part of the 20th century with a subject, identified as "S," who was synaesthetic (that is, physical stimulation of one sense caused him to experience multiple sensations, e.g., "seeing" sounds; "hearing" colors). S, it seemed, could not forget things, even after long intervals of time. Luria studied this subject for many years and among the points made in his book Mind of a Mnemonist was this: S had problems forgetting the material, not remembering it.

In both of these cases, the items to be forgotten are eminently forgettable: positions on a chess board in the case of Koltanowski, and various bits of trivia - including nonsense phrases - in the case of S.

With regard to the second meaning:

There appear to be some things that - pathological circumstances aside - we will never forget. These include our names, the names of numbers and letters, and other items. There are other items that we took the time to memorize at one point in our lives, but which begin to "fade" after a while, particularly through disuse.

I remember painfully my return from a vacation to Spain and Portugal in 1998, when my daughter met me and Galina at the airport. She gave me a big hug and then slapped a paper into my palm (subpoena-style) and informed me that I'd been assigned a telecon for the following morning (the paper was my work authorization for the telecon). Well, not having spoken any Russian for two weeks, I attended the telecon the following morning and...well...tanked. It was as if my Russian had developed a thick coating of rust.

In similar vein, Rolf Wetzell, the author of a book titled Chess Master at Any Age propounds the idea that there is a constant "leakage" of information from memory that can not be stopped, but only overcome by working at putting more in than leaks out. I forget whether the author based his hypothesis on the work of others, or whether his was a home-spun kind of theory, but on the surface, at least, it makes a kind of sense.

It all boils down to: if you don't use it, you lose it.

But S couldn't lose it, even if he didn't use it.

But then, S was a master of creating (literally) unforgettable images.

The key, then, to remembering what you want to remember, is to become good at creating unforgettable images.

Duh.

But would such a skill have prevented - could it have prevented - the Incident of the Rust-Encrusted Russian?

Or was that incident an anomaly? I spent the better part of January completely away from NASA-related issues and Russian terminology, and yet yesterday's console stint assured me that my language skill is pretty rust-free.

Or had the build-up of my language skill in December - intense work every day for 29 days of the month - been so huge (following Wetzell's argument), that any degradation of skill would only become apparent under more extreme conditions?

I don't know, which is a heck of a note on which to end a post. Ah, well...

Cheers...