I am amazed at how he recalls events, issues, incidents etc. with such detail decades after they happened. I can’t seem to remember things well that happened 6 months ago.
Does anyone have a system they use to help with such rich recollection?
Does anyone have a system they use to help with such rich recollection?
But I have some weaknesses with it, like temporal trouble. It's hard to natively remember dates and sequences of events. I can strongly remember what the pieced together moments were like, but it's difficult to recall "Did that happen before X or Y?"
With things like that I need to remember, I visualize a timeline or a graph in my head or draw it out and take a mental snapshot of that. I've also found that's why I'm a "visual" person when it comes to things like project management.
I've imagined a lot of memory management for others must be like that: You find your innate abilities of mental organization, and use it to map the world outside to the world inside. I imagine it looks very different for everyone.
Years later tried to write out, maybe didn't hold together https://serprex.github.io/w/Ad%20nauseum%20ad%20nauseum
And if you wrote a blog, these would be the events you would write about. You obviously won't write a blog post about events you don't remember.
It is selection bias, it is not indicative of the ability of Raymond Chen to remember all little details.
There are a few events in my life that merit the story being told to people; friends at the pub, during conversations with colleagues at lunch, etc, because they're amusing or unbelievable or whatever.
After a while, you may not remember the event so much, but you do remember the story.
I decided I was going to sneak onto the floor anyway.
So I positioned myself to be ready for the lights to drop as the opener, Rasputina, finished up and I hopped over the bar and tried to disappear into the crowd on the floor below.
It didn't work. I was instantly spotlighted by a man with a flashlight. Someone else grabbed my shoulder and corrected me by indicating rather forcefully that my intended destination was not the mosh pit, but was instead the entrance gate at the back of the arena.
They didn't kick me out, but once we got back to that quieter area I was informed that since I didn't have a ticket to be in the pit, then I was definitely not going to be in the pit. I was further made aware that I would not be trying this kind of thing again.
So I sauntered back to the assigned seat that I started from and watched the show from there, where some usher became increasingly livid at the despondent teenagers who were smoking cigarettes at a rock show in the 1990s (but who was apparently powerless to do anything about it).
The show was good. I'd seen it before, and I would also see it again.
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That was almost 30 years ago. Certainly, some aspects have been lost to time.
Was it Harrisburg? Maybe it was Pittsburgh. It probably wasn't Wheeling -- that show was differently-memorable because I had Gideon's bible in my pocket and people were getting arrested for throwing snowballs at the Christians who were holding a vigil across the street, with candles, as they prayed for our souls. It might have been Wheeling anyway.
And the usher? I definitely remember issues between smokers and an usher. But maybe that guy was at a show somewhere in Ohio instead.
Did I make my move during Rasputina, or maybe it was some other opener? Was Rasputina even at that show? (Maybe it was unrelated to the opening act?)
I do know that I hopped over a barrier and immediately got sent to the back, and that's the important part of the story that I wanted to convey. The rest is just context.
And the trick is to just fill in enough believable details about that context that the story works. (It's even easier if you believe those details yourself.)