My Memory

I wanted to talk about how we remember things. A lot of people have studied how memory works, there've been some discoveries about long-term versus short-term memory, and how it's an exponential curve; if you study something again before you've forgotten too much of it, it's more entrenched in your memory, it will last somewhat longer now; you'll need to re-study it at a longer interval to retain it, then a longer interval still; and so forth, if you want to retain it forever. A man developed a piece of software called SuperMemo, which understands this principle. You put information into it which you want to learn, and it knows to remind you at those proper intervals, to keep it fresh in your mind. The problem is, with all the information we want to keep track of in our lives, you'd have to keep studying constantly; never missing any study-sessions, because that would throw off your study-timing.

There's another factor to memory that I've never heard anybody discuss, and that's Joy.

When you are reading something with a deep sense of joy, you automatically retain it longer. With a high-enough level of joy, seeing something once can help you retain it forever.

I was reminded about this today when I found a web site listing all the Eamon adventures from the old Apple II days, around 1979-1980. I had so much fun learning to program back then, playing all the games I could get my hands on, and the greatest adventure game at the time was the Eamon series. My friends and I would play for hours, trying to explore and conquer the various adventures. And there were many - I'm sure I had at least a dozen different ones. The Eamon series was what I would consider the first open source project, long before the term "open source" ever existed - anyone who wanted could look at the code, and build their own adventures.

When I stumbled over this web site listing the Eamon adventures, their list had about 300 titles on it - way more than I remember. Reading those names, it hit me - the name of the Eamon adventure I created! "Birds Paradise" I called it. I searched the list, but my adventure wasn't there. I google-searched for "eamon birds paradise", but no luck - no results. Even though I gave out copies of my Eamon adventure to a couple of my friends, evidently it didn't make it far enough to be listed on these sites. And I got rid of all my old Apple II diskettes a long time ago.

But then I realized - I hadn't thought about Eamon adventures or anything related to them for at least the past 15 years. So how did I instantly remember the phrase "Bird's Paradise"? How could I have, without "refreshing" that memory every few years or so? My brain's exposure to that phrase was many-daily-occurrences when I was young, then a 15-20 year span of never thinking about it once. That breaks the "exponential pattern" that psychologists have been talking about recently.

Upon reading all those adventure names, every single name I recognized brought back a huge swell of joy in my heart, and a couple of them made me laugh. Those were such happy times in my life, I was in middle school and later highschool, with lots of free time to play with computers, practice typing, saving my valuable files onto floppy diskettes, talking to my friends about the things I learned, the games I played, etc.

So I realize now - a super-high level of joy can implant memories so strongly, they don't need to be refreshed to be retained. The joy I felt reading those adventure names brought the phrase "Bird's Paradise" back into my mind in a single second.

I'm sure there are many factors to memory, and we're learning more about it all the time.
Just remember - joy is a powerful factor in memory. I hope somebody studies this some day.