(1118) Perfect recall or photographic memory

I was surveying a handful of blogs as to the number of readers: it is interesting to find that play dough (1070) and The Red Seed Game (1075) are quite popular.

Here is the follow-up blog. I paid a visit to the lovely, artistic young lady up north and found that although she has less memory hooks than most people, her visual memory is one of the best I came across over the years.

This is the vital game which revealed that valuable piece of information. I took a pack of cards (poker cards, the kind we come down the airplane with after a long flight with children) and arranged them face down in rows and columns on a long table. Then I corralled as many old and young to play my game. It is called Memory Game. Each person opens two cards, whichever they wish, if the cards happen to match, then they acquired them and is given another turn. If not, it is then the next person's turn. Over the years, I have played this game thousands of times and became quite good at it. As I was the game master, I was not paying much attention to winning, I spent the time observing and recording each person's performance. It turned out that my target, the object of my visit, was the best player with her mum following closely behind. After a second game, I began to suspect that she may have a photographic memory that she did not refine over the years.

I am a one-track mind person. After my return, I was still unconsciously playing with the thought of how a person with such unusually powerful ability of recall could not hang onto pieces of information. It occurred to me then that memories come in the form of words, pictures, ideas, diagrams, music,... The answer seemed to be at the tip of my tongue and yet I could not touch it, let alone utter it. Then during worship in church one Sunday morning, the answer flashed like a light bulb: but of course she need no longer develop memory hooks, all she needs to do is to paint in her memory easel whatever she wants to remember: be it words, symbols, diagrams or pictures or a combination of any thing, snap a visual photo and file it away --"wallah!" she would be one of the world's best memory experts in practise.

After being challenged to pray and make a visit to a city 400 miles or so away, I am relieved to have no need of going there anymore. I was very fearful that I will be found wanting and was being treated as a consultant when in actual fact I know so little. I have had no formal training whatsoever. No degree, diploma and not even a certificate in the field in question. All I have is my own experience in over coming certain short-comings years ago, probably a smattering of very specific knowledge garnered with great difficulty and perseverance in a few cases I came across over the past decades. Enough to tell stories but not enough to consult.

Thereafter I had better turn to publishing e-books and not tell too much of my past activities in the bio data. I am most thankful that I survived this experience and there is a solution given to me, on my own I would probably be still puzzling over the seemingly contradictory pieces of facts.