Comment by codezero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codezero | Hacker News Reader

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I've been thinking about that a lot lately (mostly in terms of my own memory) and a fun random thing I've been thinking of is that it's really impossible (at least to me) to visualize something with any meaningful fidelity. I can describe a scene, but that's just my description, it's so blurry.

When I hear a song I like, I can pretty much repeat it note for note when I whistle, and it conveys really the same feeling and meaning, but it's also a bit blurry on account of the details getting fuzzier like lyrics, specific instruments etc... but it feels a lot more authentic to the original memory/experience than anything I can ever visualize.

What I'm saying, is that I wonder if there's something special about how spoken/vocal memory sticks vs other kinds of memory.

I noticed that there is something there about vocal compared to visual. Some years ago while messing around memorizing/reciting pi, I always thought I imagined the numbers visually and recited from there. I'm bilingual and a friend asked if I can do it in my mother tongue. It was weird, I was surprised I was struggling. I definitely recite(in my head) in English, then I visualize the numbers than I translate.

It was surprising because when I was even younger I thought I had a photographic memory, I noticed it got weak over time and with memorizing some of pi I thought I was bringing it back. And here I find it was mainly vocal. With the points brought up here for oral tradition, it makes sense that vocal memory has stayed strong.

I wonder if it’s mostly about the cardinality of the options.

Songs are made up of only a few discrete notes, but strung together, but visual memory doesn’t really have a good analog. Pixels? That’s not how we think. Maybe there is a way to remember a visual scene, the closest I can think of is the memory palace technique, and it’s just damn hard to hone, but it really is effective.

I think the trickiest thing is error correction. In a song, a missed note is a riff, and likely close to the real note, in memory palace, there’s a risk it’s just way off and even that being way off fucks up the next step in recall, with no way to repair it.

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