First Blog

  It’s natural to think a note on memory is about improving one’s memory, say tips or advice. All agree that having a poor memory is undesirable. But today we consider the opposite. This note is about those men and women gifted with excellent memory, or even beyond excellent. Courtrooms are transfixed by memory-gifted attorneys citing case after case in support of their clients. Students are mesmerized by faculty that communicate like walking encyclopedias of information with complete ease. World leaders invite memory-rich consultants to give historical aspects to current problems. Yet, the at-home housewife can demolish her husband in a dispute over the point of contention by recalling in minute detail what happened last time or recalling past sins and errors. The boss who remembers every mistake of every employee has an uncomfortable staff. As well, adults who vividly remember only childhood punishments may have problems with authority. So, is perfect memory a blessing? Consider.

Imagine your mind has a built in search engine, not unlike Bing or Google. Wouldn't that be great? You just set it to work and presto, up comes a number of hits on whatever you search. Guess what, it does! The number of hits is small in most cases, large in others, but significantly null in all too many, especially for searches distant in time. Like all search engines, your engine has limitations of capacity. This implies you have lots of information, carefully filed away in your brain, but essentially inaccessible. It has become unsearchable and unremembered. Google, et .al., can merely add more servers to increase capacity. You cannot. The question we pose here is: how can we find this "lost" information. The method we propose is called relational recall . Sounds mysterious?  It really isn't.  But, this is something the digital search engines cannot do. As such, they are limited to text searches. They cannot feel what you feel much less know what you feel or desir