I'm curious how this relates to neurodivergent/ADHD/autistic learning where someone has weak rote-memorization skills and mainly remembers things as a fractal of associations.
For me, I can't remember that I have an appointment tomorrow, but if you ask me how computers work, I'll start with explaining electron orbitals and band gaps, doping, masking, VLSI, assembly language, C, functional programming and where AI is heading from first principles.
Unfortunately instead of being some kind of superpower, it's mainly been debilitating for me, because I've spent my career writing CRUD apps in an endless series of failed startups. Because most people don't think this way, and instead see only the use-case before them as a stepping stone to another goal, usually financial. It would be easier for me to design spaceships than manage my bills, but I seem to be relegated to doing chores for the rest of my life and dying penniless.
Hi - I had similar experiences to you, but an old boss pulled me aside explained everything. For context, I was not doing great at work, I was missing deadlines, would get accounts confused, etc. While I was getting chewed out, he rattled off all the relevant numbers/structures/people for all the things I was missing. He told me he knew I didn’t care about my job because I couldn’t remember the details of my job. If I cared about it, I would know the details. Yet, when it came to the things I actually cared about (computers, video games, movies), I could list off of every minute detail. The framework of “you only remember the things you care about” helped me understand why I was dropping the ball in life and ultimately led to a happier life. I stopped doing some things I clearly didn’t care for and started doing more of the stuff I remembered more easily. The real kicker was that I also able to change the things I cared about. Work got much better a few weeks after that chat. I also got very good at remembering names because I started caring about others more deeply.
I hope you see parts of yourself in my story. You’re clearly a talented and smart individual - it’s never too late to turn things around.
I'm glad this worked for you, but I don't think that you understand OP's central argument about the penalties imposed by the substantial ergonomic mismatch between ADHD "smart" and the conventional species, and may not have as strong a sense of what being on the inside of this condition feels like.
ADHD wiring essentially forces every task to be derived from a set of fundamental axioms about why the task must e done, why it must work the way it does, with an almost proof-like causal chain working all the way back to first principles, in order to simply remeber it in a stable way. Being interested in a subject can benefit you only in so far as it will provide you with motivation to build out a vast knowledge graph scaffold around the set of tasks that need to be done, in order to not feel like you are kicking a dead whale up the beach every time you have to start doing one of them.
But if you are presented with a subject where there is no time to do this, or the type of subject where it is actually not possible and only the muscle memory of rote memorization will power you through it, it doesn't matter how much it subjectively appeals to or interests you. You are going to be at the back of the pack despite your best efforts.
Attempts to give you help will only frustrate your (very likely memorization-gifted) tutors and mentors: they don't understand what's going on, so you merely look stupid, unmotivated or both. However, if you had enough runaway, they would find that not only you would catch up to wherever everyone else was (in one third of the time it took you,) but after another third share of prep time you would move from the bottom decile to the top, with gains still compounding. But this occasion almost never presents itself, because you're typically flushed out of the cycle long before you build enough inertia in the domain to show what you're capable of.
One can go almost sick with envy over the way neurotypically smart people are almkst unaware of how easily and quickly they retain multiple arbitrary lists of "how" steps in processes, even when these are largely self-contained and unconnected to any other chain of reasoning, and just get shit done without having to know how the entire superstructure is put together.
You'll be almost comically bad at (and find little pleasure in) all board games (except the most popular ones you've had years of exposure to), if you have not had time to master them ADHD style - even if you genuinely enjoy board games in principle. Whereas peers in your same nerd adjacent circle seem to reach competence or even mastery of any example in this genre of bureaucracy-as-a-sport within a few plays. Performing on stage, if there are more than a handful of lines to memorize, is utterly out of the question. Even if you love acting or theater, it's just not for you.
My own testament to this paradox is not from board games, but incredibly demoralizong experience trying to learn the piano (as an adult no less), something I had more than ample interest in and motivation to learn, but which in the initial stages presented almost insurmountable obstacles when it came to simply memorizing the basics of sight reading, scales, and the learner's songbook. skills that I watched 7 and 8 year olds, teens and even fellow adult learners, acquire in weeks but took me well over a year to reach parity. Since my job and self-image werent riding on being at the top of the class, I was able to keep with it accordimg to my own pace. And although I probably still wouldn't get hired even for a gig in the local shopping mall, my ability to improvise and stylize outside the set pieces I had received my basic training on inexorably began to surpass most of that cohort who had lapped me several times over back when we were just doing the rote basics.
This describes much of my own experience, but I didn't know it might be attributable to ADHD.
Is this something you figured out through introspection of your own experience or is there something you read that showed you it was ADHD that was the root cause? Are you formally diagnosed?
Were you able to find treatment and solutions? Is there anything I might ask a medical professional to help me figure things out?
No, I didn't recognize it at all, thus I didn't have to ask a medical professional anything since my presentation was evidently obvious. The only advice I can give, or what is close to advice as I can get, is to recount how I moved from ignorance to action in my own situation, and to emphasize the importance of getting in front of a professional psychiatric diagnostician as soon as you can. They will know what to ask you. no need to guide them to any particular conclusion, nor would I recommend trying this.
Due to coincidence I happened to have a professor in college who was the same person my parents had been referred to (on my behalf) for behavioral examination and intervention following a sudden precipitous drop in school performance between ages 8 and 9.
This person had given me a battery of performance tests yielding unambiguous data indicating that the deficiency in academic performance (and comorbid peer group socialization problems) resulted from an excess of raw ability. Emphasis on 'raw.'
In those days (80's) this was quite counterintuitive, and perhaps still is. Separate classes for gifted students did not yet exist in our district - "gifted" was still a novety also. Skipping a grade (the conventional solution) was likely to aggravate the problem instead of addressing it. So my circumstances prompted the creation of a trial program mainly so that I could attend it, though I resented being singled out and separated from the few friends I had. to my great relief half a dozen or so other students quickly joined once the program became a reality.
Once we both acknowledged that we had encountered one another many years before, my professor asked whether I had interest in testing again, because they saw that well over a decade of growth had done little to improve the fundamental challenges I faced, though I had become much better at masking them from others as well as from myself.
In the intervening time, the diagnostic profile of ADD had become formalized and increasingly visible outside medical circles, though still mainly centered on early childhood dev stages. They recommended that I look in to getting a formal diagnosis, because although they believed they saw pretty obvious signs I fit this profile, this did not amount to a professional diagnosis.
I, being a teenager still, reflexively rebuffed the entire notion that I might need psychiatric evaluation, or could be meaningfully affected (much less improved) by medication - something I associated with "weakness."
This would turn out to be a catastrophic misjudgement, and although I did eventually get a formal diagnosis and a protocol, delaying for more than a decade was the most regrettable self-inflicted setback of my life, one that unquestionably cost many millions over the next 20 years.
What makes you say that autistic people have weak rote but strong associative memory?
One common feature of high functioning autistics is an obsession with the memorization of minutiae (on some topic of intense interest) without at all understanding context.
For example, a former classics professor I knew told us about a relative of his who memorized the entire Persian king list for dozens of dynasties long. He couldn't tell you much actual Persian history at all, but the professor unabashedly admitted that almost no one of his colleagues outside of the actual specialists in Persian history could recite that list even with a gun to their heads, despite being capable of lecturing on Persian history due to their education.
Good question. I might be more like 80/20 ADHD/autistic and have mostly learned about the (monotropism?) symptoms from @nd_psych on TikTok. I spend an inordinate amount of time simulating other people's minds trying to understand how they arrive at conclusions that don't make sense to me, in pathological demand avoidance (PDA), and in autistic burnout due to masking. I don't seem to have the stereotypical pedantic/critiquing/savant or memorization skills seen in portrayals like Rain Man or The Accountant.
My lived reality is just a crushing, unending, series of external asks that have all but obliterated my sense of self and autonomy. From the moment I wake up until I go to bed, I'm just running, performatively matching the constraints required of me to tread water. I used to be very self-driven, but after so many decades of this, I don't have a strong sense of being able to take care of myself. I would have been homeless at many times in my life had it not been for the generosity of friends and family.
Where this matters for me is that I've lost too many years to stuff like politics. I've learned recently that left and right just live in different realities. No amount of mental simulation will allow me to fully understand another person's context. Because they're not even thinking about the same problems I am, they're prioritizing other things.
For example, I was raised under a largely feminist/humanist framework and identify as progressive, so empathy dominates my decision making. But imagine you're in a hostage situation, who do you want to rescue you? Someone raised under positive reinforcement (left), or tough love (right)? I think most of us want conservatives dropping in from the ceiling and getting it done.
So I've been working on expanding my mindset to accept multiple points of view and leave behind us-versus-them winners and losers thinking. Opening my mind to notions like not knowing and letting go. Seeing the power in being wrong sometimes, allowing others to help, and delegating to be part of a stronger team. It's sure hard sometimes though.
Sorry if that's more than what you were asking, but hey, I guess I'm interested in it!
For anyone finding this, I don't want to appropriate these conditions, because they're more of a cluster of symptoms and I wonder if the main indicator should be that medication is required to function. I've been able to mostly cope so far unmedicated, but do struggle periodically. This Venn diagram helped me see that I'm mostly the middle down, without as much in the top circle:
I associate strongly with this, my memory is almost entirely compartmentalised. Even to the point of what happened earlier today being a fog unless I can find a leap off point.
The answer is start a business, it’s a strength to be able to deep dive into all areas and leap between them at will, I’ve found.
I'm diagnosed as ASD, and a psych has said I'm almost certainly ADHD but untestable. I have an unusually acute visual memory - I can accurately describe the room I was in while Churchill's funeral was on TV, when I was less than 3 years old. Most university exams were effectively open book because I could recall the pages I'd read as images.
I'm not convinced all the stereotypes about ASD/ADHD superpowers are true myself. And yes, autism super skills don't equate to commercial success for most of us.
Interesting, I used to have an extremely strong visual memory. It was like you said, seeing the words on the page of my textbooks (if not verbatim then largely).
That was mostly when I was 13-18. I can’t say it’s causal, but around the time I discovered weed (17/18) I pretty much lost this ability. I was never a particularly heavy or regular user, but it’s pretty easy for me to segment my memory acuity into before/after age 18. Of course at that age many things are changing, all very quickly. So who’s to say what the cause was. Maybe it was destined to decline with age anyways.
I do fine for myself now, but now I tend to rely on process and flow states rather than memory recall for getting things done.
This sounds familiar, including an unstable or uncertain view of oneself caused by – depending on the situation – not knowing if one's pretty smart and inventive, or a total idiot not capable of living life. Finding the right environment and well, just age help a lot.
> This sounds familiar, including an unstable or uncertain view of oneself caused by – depending on the situation – not knowing if one's pretty smart and inventive, or a total idiot not capable of living life.
This is me as well! In college, I once met my professor for lunch and I knew he had a matching taste in music and I listened to a lot of music and was excited to meet someone with an eclectic taste like me. He promptly asked me my favorite bands and I couldn't think of a single one! It's become a recurring nightmare of mine and something I still struggle with today: I can't just reach in and grab a memory, it has to be associated with something that triggers it to be pulled back up. I don't have any kind of list functionality and that extends to todo lists, chore lists, family/friend lists. Even when I finally find something that ties into what needs to be listed, I lose track of where i am in the list before i can get even 3 items listed...but start talking about some interesting history, philosophy, psychology, science and I will recall vast sums of knowledge. My current job in project management is a perfect fit for me because i mostly respond/react to changing business priorities and my recall of history is super useful in that context. When I have to start in a new area or new feature, I rely on my stakeholders to get me lists of pain points and I can then apply my skillset to mold it into a refined vision for development.
Also, big tip: don't be afraid to say you need someone to remind you of things; as soon as someone broaches the topic, my mind goes to work and my recall is activated. You'd be surprised how often others are just waiting for that overview again to get back up to speed.
This is how my memory works, especially for autobiographical things. Aka me a direct autobiographical question and I may not be able to retrieve it. Find an association and I can recall with quite astonishing clarity and in ways which I can confirm, with testing and with historical research, aren’t mere confabulations.
But you're living in US. In US you got paid crazy salaries for programming. Why do you work at failed startups? Just get some job with crazy salary, work there for 5 years and then retire.
may be it's difficult to go through the typical interview loops for such jobs as they are not designed to be inclusive for ND etc despite all the diversity and inclusion BS (more often than not) at such workplaces.
I just wanted to interject that my struggle wasn't with interviews, but in suspending disbelief in order to focus and work in ways I didn't believe in. Because I could trivially automate most of the work I'm forced to do, so I struggle to find meaning in work itself. And when I did automate, they just gave me more work at the same pay until I burned out. So it's just as important not to take a job you can walk onto. Work for someone you want to be someday.
My struggles were largely due to moving back to the city nearest to where I grew up after college, which wasn't a tech hub for 20 years, although it's becoming one now. So I've been on a career odyssey. Now most of what I know is obsolete, but I'm having a hard time adapting to my new reality after so many decades of negative reinforcement. I agree with Paul Graham about moving to where the energy is. Network effects are everything.
Your interests seem to lie closer to the systems and hardware side. Can you elaborate on why your career is in CRUD apps? What about working for SpaceX?
Well I wanted to say "solve warp drive" but didn't want to sound eccentric.
I'll lump the comment by ghufran_syed in with this. I'm fond of SpaceX and deeply admire what they're doing. But honestly my heart is in helping people, rather than taking humanity to new heights. I originally wanted to be a genetic engineer back in the '80s during the AIDS crisis, and because progress on cancer was glacial then. Prejudice was a lot higher than it is today. So the powers that be didn't want to do a moonshot for genetics like they did with the X Prize in the '90s, and I went into tech instead. Today if I could do it all over again, I'd like to see a moonshot to cure all genetic disorders by 2030 with tools like CRISPR and mRNA vaccines.
Loosely that just means that from the context of a show like For All Mankind, I identify more with NASA than I do with Helios. Although Dev Ayesa's non-hierarchical work structure resonates with me more than what Elon Musk is doing. Ayesa's was the original vision of the '90s tech scene that we've lost today under wealth inequality.
On that note, I'm concerned about Musk's embrace of center-right politics and the cognitive dissonance we're seeing around free-speech-for-some. Humanity is moving the opposite direction towards egalitarianism. I hope that he comes around, but until then, I can't really endorse any of his companies anymore. And that makes me sad on a profound level. I'm sick of losing my heroes.
Anyway, the gatekeeping around medicine is so high that maybe I let myself give up on the dream of genetics. Which is sad too, because AI is what will solve it. We don't have large epidemiological studies or a simulation where we can rapidly iterate on cures. Although we do have a mountain of data in Ancestry and 23andme. I don't think that medical researchers have any idea what programmers would be capable of in that space if we were given autonomy. Ethics aside, I see that as the last frontier until we move out into the stars.
Sooo, with my passions out of reach, I turned towards basic survival, mostly CRUD apps to make rent. It's hard to climb a corporate ladder when getting to the top doesn't mean anything to oneself. I don't want success, I want financial freedom so that I can start getting real work done outside of external expectation. To invent real solutions that would help free people from their day to day chores and bills so they can self-actualize. That's why I'm such a proponent of UBI. When any of us struggle, we all struggle.
So far none of the projects I've been involved with have won the internet lottery yet. And my body/psyche won't let me work through burnout like I used to. Somehow I have to start over, and that's daunting. I suspect I'm not alone in that feeling.
> For me, I can't remember that I have an appointment tomorrow
I have seen this cited a few times as evidence of ADHD, and without any comment at all on your own situation (a stranger, who I don't know, on the internet), isn't this in particular mostly true of everyone? I have a calendar and a todo-list app specifically for this reason.
ADHD is the latest in a very long line of "vaguely applies to everyone" diagnoses. The history of psychology is full of them. Asperger's was in vogue a few years ago, chronic fatigue syndrome is for people who like scary diagnoses, irritable bowel is one with a reputational devil may care, codependency is a bit antique, long COVID is topical. Any sufficiently motivated person can diagnose themselves with these. And boy are there motivations: have one of them and you instantly become special. (And yes before anyone says it, there are many genuine cases.)
This is why self-diagnosis isn't an actual standard, but also your statement is that of ignorance. ADHD can be seen more of a chronic condition, people do forget minor details once in a while, but when you start to have that happen almost daily, even after a few minutes or hours, that is more akin to ADHD. Another analogy is, everyone has to urinate, but when you have to urinate every 5 mins, that is a problem, that is ADHD. ADHD affect the ability to perform executive functions first, which is it's main trait, it also come with it's own set of other problems like memory, so writing off ADHD as a trend, is reductive, imo. It's not something actual sufferers label themselves to feel special, it's more like society labels them to call them lazy or "special".
Have you ever done that trick where you position your fingertip in just the right spot where the nerves on the retina converge, causing your fingertip to disappear from the field of view?
When I first did this there were two surprises, the one I expected, when I saw my fingertip vanish. And then a bigger one I did not expect, which is noticing I had never noticed this deficiency before, despite it being literally right before my eyes my entire life.
When I was a teenager I held something approximately like your view on ADD, (there was no ADHD variant yet). That it was mainly a crutch, a blame-deflecting explanation for failure sought by those who couldn't get their shit together for character flaw reasons. This attitude made me turn down an offer by one of my professors, who also happened to be a clinical psych., to connect me with someone who might be able to diagnose whether or not I had this issue. I went without a diagnosis for another decade before circumstances press me to reconsider my position.
The very first time that I took medication that was prescribed to me was like that optic nerve blind spor revelation, but in reverse (and magnitudes larger in effext): a deficiency that had been with me my whole life, but completely invisible not because I could not see it, but because I saw everything through it, suddenly vanished.
The effect is difficult to summarize in a few words but it's as if I had gone my whole life not knowing that I needed to wear reading glasses (in a world where they were still quite rare and uncommon) - attributing my inability to remain engaged with any text longer than a few sentences without becoming strangely fatigued to a lack of willpower or mental conditioning - and then putting them on. "_this_ is what everyone else sees?!"
I don't have a good memory at all, but for some reason, if I listen to a podcast a second time I can recall exactly where I was as the podcast goes on.
For example, if I listened to the (fantastic) “search engine” podcast about pig butchering I would know where I was walking my dog, or cleaning the kitchen, etc…
It's not just you! I make the same association with podcast episodes, except I usually listen to podcasts while gaming, so for me it's in-game locations or quests.
> It would be easier for me to design spaceships than manage my bills, but I seem to be relegated to doing chores for the rest of my life and dying penniless.
You know I was watching Amadeus about 15 years ago. It was the first time I had even heard about Salieri. In one of the first scenes an aged Salieri fails at a suicide attempt. Enraged and out of his mind he yells past his wardens (I think at a mental asylum) - "I am Antonio Salieri - the patron saint of mediocrity".
WTF I thought to myself. The "second best" musician was bemoaning his mediocrity. What ever hope would someone like me ever have.
It's been a long time since then. Fuck it if I was not going to have an opportunity to work on interesting things and am relegated to building stupid crud apis in my 40 hours! At least il make money so my family benefits while i get to build compilers, game engines, deep learning frameworks from first principles in my spare time (and I have a lot of it once I realized my work is not me).
Nobody can take that away from me. Nobody can take that away from you!
> mainly remembers things as a fractal of associations.
I have described this as a graph representation, without any visual/dimensional embedding. I naturally represent things as configurations of connected things, both in long term and working term memory.
I have that same uniformly connected view of existence, from spacetime Planck distances and quarks on up, through chemistry, life and artifacts, through to societies and systems. It is one graph.
And also no practical sense of time, but see our history from the big bang, to alternate universe endings, with all our history and current events along the way, and our quantum multiverse foam of versions that we cut through, as one seamless thing.
One drawback, is I often have trouble putting into words something I can clearly "see", on the spot without effort. Even with regard to "normal" topics. Too many connections, in familiar or tractable forms (to me), that we don't have words for.
Although given time I can explain things well, I just have to compile the order I see into words.
And I have no trouble visualizing and spacial reasoning about anything dimensional/graphical.
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Super side track, for extending spacial visualization:
Imagine points in space whose brightness vary, and must have the same brightness to collide. That's 4D.
Now imagine groups of points changing both their brightness and position at the same rate, regardless of the relative differences in brightness and position. Those points are translating through 4D space together. Move points together through normal 3D space, and through brightness changes, and then different amounts of each together with varying rates of change, or even cyclical change. That's general 4D translation.
Now consider and practice how to dynamically tradeoff between a points brightness and its distance in any 3D direction, using a sin/cos relationship. Starting rotating between one of x, y and z, against w (brightness) is easy - it is just 2D but with different pairs of axes. Then practicing rotating between brightness an any 3D direction. Then a series of partial rotations, between brightness and various 3D directions. Finally, work out how to rotate a 4D point around the direction defined by the origin to another 4D point. That is general 4D rotation.
That was the hardest step. All down hill now...
Practice rotating and translating 1D lines and line segments, by translating and rotating their points together.
Now practice the same for 3D planes, triangles, squares, etc
Practice visualizing, translating and rotating the points of 3D objects. Then 4D shapes, starting with a 5-point 4D pyramids and 16-point hypercubes.
Imagine objects constructed from several hypercubes, starting with the 4D equivalent of three hypercubes making an L-shaped object, a 5-h-cube plus, etc. Add/remove hypercubes. Add/remove hypercube spaces within a hypercube.
Then start to play around with 3D in a 4D environment. For instance, start with a cube with an empty cube center, and pass another cube that starts outside of it, into its center, without touching, using the 4th dimension. "Paint" a 3D cube, or 3D pyramid, onto a 3D side of a 4D cube. Etc.
Once you get familiar with using brightness to visualize the 4th dimension. This takes no work at all, you are now familiar with the 4D and don't need that hook anymore.
e across a lot of situations, you can stop treating
Now you can reintroduce brightness as a hood to starting exploring 5D. :)
I don't think our brains have any barrier to higher dimensional reasoning, except lack of exposure and familiarity.
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The variety of internal representations we must all have will be interesting to discover, catalogue and compare, if we can one day detect and watch our detailed thoughts in action.
Fascinating! I do have trouble visualizing 4D. The closest I get is to think of a hypercube as a cube moving through time, that's how the corners get connected. So the extrude progression goes point to line to square to cube to hypercube and beyond. I'm still stuck on rotations, because it's hard to see sine and cosine looping with a time dimension. Or to rephrase, a cube can spin as a change of coordinates on 3D axes by multiplying the vertices by a matrix like in 3D rendering. But doing that with 4 is weird, and the closest I get is to think of the 4th axis as arbitrarily "sticking out" of the familiar 3, instead of being orthogonal to them. I'll meditate on the brightness representation you described.
Watching Donnie Darko was the first time I saw reality as a 4D crystal instead of 3D + time. An argument could be made that there's only one photon in the universe, that's everywhere all at once, because it doesn't perceive time when moving the speed of light. With all events preordained, setting aside free will because that's probably a quantum interaction with the 4D/5D/ND multiverse. So time can't actually loop, because quantum uncertainty is fundamental to the universe, meaning that time travel isn't possible. We could try to replay a recording of reality, but it would diverge from ours more the longer it ran.
I've been experimenting with letting my 3D body/mind operate semiautonomously and observing with my higher self. I meditate with my eyes open and spend a lot more time taking it all in, rather than fixating on the minutia of the day to day. And everything generally works out fine without my micromanagement, which has really helped my mental health.
1. Start with just one point moving around in 3D and changing brightness. Make it move up/down, right/left, forward/back, and in/out (brightness).
Contemplate the points distance from you as it moves around. At median brightness, the point is just its 3D distance from you.
If its bright, it's further "in" to you, if its dark it is further "out" from you, relative to its 3D distance.
2. Once that makes sence, do it with two dots moving around, passing each other in brightness and 3D position, but never colliding unless they are on the same 3D point with the same brightness.
Now move them around separately, but imagine the line between them. If they have the same brightness, that line is the normal 3D line segment between them. But the more their brightness differs, the more the are also offset in 4D.
When they are different brightness at the same 3D location, imagine the brightness line between them getting longer and shorter as their delta brightness increases and decreases.
3. Once that makes sense, now imagine two cubes. They are the same 3D location, but with different brightnesses. When you connect each pair of corresponding corner points together, with "brightness" delta lines, they now form a hypercube..
Any point within their 3D volume AND within their brightness interval, is in their enclosed 4D space. Any point outside their 3D volume OR outside their brightness interval, is outside the hypercubes 4D interior.
That is how I see a hypercube. Just two cubes overlapped in 3D, separated by a brightness (4D) delta.
4. So now you see two of the six cube-sides of the hypercube.
One side the lower brightness cube, the other the higher brightness cube. They are x,y,z cubes separated by w (brightness.
You can puzzle out the other six cube-sides. Two x,y,w cubes (separated in z), two x,z,w cubes (separated in y), and two y,z,w cubes (separated in x).
To easily identify them, think of a 3D cube inside another 3D cube. Imagine they are really at the same 3D location, but the inside one looks smaller and inside because its further away from you in brightness.
(This has the same meaning as before, but you are looking at them at a 90 degree different angle now so you can "see" some the brightness difference as position difference. Just like looking at a cube end-on, you see a large square containing another square, but the "inside" square is just the same-sized opposite square farther away.)
That can make it easier to spot all eight cubes. Starting with the inside, outside pair, then each pair of cubes in the six other cube-sides.
Boom! (If that works, ;)
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I have barely played with 5D, but 4D for simple things can get easy quickly. I should create a tool or game for learning this stuff.
"You are in a 3D maze of twisty little passageways, walls and doors appear and disappear as your lantern flickers ..."
"> Pick up the Third Eye Tiara. Put it on"
"Suddenly, your vision expands in a direction you somehow never noticed before. Everything looks normal but different. How have you been overlooking so much around you?"
You are in a 4D maze of twisty little passageways, ..."
The reverse of this is "severely deficient autobiographical memory", which has been in the news recently as well (and I think discussed on HN too).
I think it's interesting that I consider myself to have a good memory but it is by far best at verbal associations (e.g. facts about a specific topic, object, word, or concept). The autobiographical part feels quite weak for me: I often find it hard to remember experiences in my life "by theme" (e.g. "think of a time when you felt X", "think of a time when you did Y very well or poorly"), and I very often don't remember what year a particular thing happened, or who was present with me on a particular occasion, or what I have or haven't done before with a particular friend or family member. I certainly have many vivid memories from my life, but they don't seem to be indexed that well by date, topic, or person.
I've been lucky enough to travel frequently, but I feel like I would be unable to answer questions like "how many times have you been to country X?" or "in what year did you first/last visit country Y?". (But I would probably be able to draw a decent map of specific places I've been, on various scales, and remember specific restaurants, train stations, landmarks, foreign language vocabulary, impressions of history and culture of various countries, etc. -- just not necessarily things like "when did you go there?". For example, my nephew recently asked me my impressions of Singapore, and I wrote him a six-page letter in reply with tons of particulars about all sorts of aspects of life/culture/politics/geography of Singapore, but I was unable to remember what years my trips there took place.)
Anyway, all this reminds me that "having a good memory" is definitely not just one thing!
My experience is similar. I feel like I experience past events more as modifications to my world view rather than a log of moments. I like it, to be honest. I don't need to know the exact details. The only time it gets me in trouble is people sometimes equate remembering an event as somehow "caring" about that event. I forget details fast. Sometimes people interpret that as not being interested in the people I met or the significance of the event. I'm always glad when folks of less common memory models share their experiences, I think it helps people understand that there's so many ways to experience life and consciousness.
Memory is weird. I was once on a street in maybe 2005 with my mother when a song from the 90s came on the radio. I was thinking that the last time I had heard the song we were at the same red light, but something like 10 years prior. My mom then said, "I think we were in the same spot like 10 years ago the last time I heard this song". It was a very bizarre moment as the song wasn't important to us or anything like that which should have made it memorable.
> I feel like I experience past events more as modifications to my world view rather than a log of moments
That's interesting - I'm similar. I think of it in terms of remembering conclusions, rather than the reasons for the conclusions. Which can make it difficult to explain my reasoning sometimes - I tend to only remember the axioms/assumptions, and the conclusions, and have to try and recreate the intermediate steps every time.
Heh, in deduction systems there is something called proof erasure, I believe asserting that any two proofs of the same proposition are equal. Maybe your mind's inference is working on something like a proof erasure principle? :-)
Well, that sounds good! I was previously riding high on coming out of Mayers-Briggs with a personality type that sounds like some sort of all-knowing robot god. Proof erasure principle sounds like an excellent followup (-:
I've often felt the same, although I've been unable to describe it as well as you have. My memories feel fuzzy and non-discrete, like there are no threads to pick at. This is one of the reasons, I often struggle at such improptu questions as well, and find it hard to communicate what I feel.
It is a relief to hear that I'm not alone in experiencing this.
Lately, I've been realising that it might be because I'm neurodivergent (as to the exact pathology, I can only guess it's in the spectrum of ADHD). It'd probably explain a lot of things in my life.
Great write-up, This matches my experience exactly, but I've never been able to put it into words this well.
The different ways in which people brains work differently from each other is so interesting to me. feels like there is a set of stable configuration you can run in there to get to a functional brain.
Act III of episode 585 of This American Life (a WBEZ radio show broadcast on NPR and distributed via podcast) discussed this phenomenon and spoke with a few individuals with HSAM:
One of the individuals was a script supervisor in Hollywood responsible for ensuring continuity between scenes during filming. But it also ventures into powerful emotionally resonant territory, touching on the bittersweet implications of experiencing loss when memories never fade.
I re-listened to this and I think all of this episode is worth the time investment if you have not heard it. The first act is with director Lulu Wang and the real life inspiration for her movie The Farewell and the second part is an interview with Dunning behind the infamous Dunning-Kruger effect.
Video game personality Tim Rogers supposedly has HSAM, and described it like this:
> This is a condition which requires me to remember everything that ever happens within my earshot and eyeshot. No: I describe it impressively: it turns life into noise, and it is useless. Please listen to my noise now, because if you do not, who will? I have lost the ability to hear it.
His short story "Just like hamburger, exactly like hamburger" also largely centers on the experience of his memory:
"For thirty seconds, I remembered the time a man on the street in Oakland, California pointed a gun at me. I remembered everything I remembered the instant the man pointed the gun at me. I remembered telling a beautiful girl on a hot day in a cafe in Shin-Osaka Station about the man pointing a gun at me. I remembered telling her about what I’d remembered that day. I’d told her I’d remembered my fight in elementary school — where I’d hit, again and again, the kid who’d bullied me an entire year. I remembered telling her that when the man pointed the gun at me I remembered my fight and I wished I’d killed the kid who bullied me. I confessed to her that it made me know I am a terrible person. I remembered confessing my terrible personhood to a girl in a cafe in Shin-Osaka Station. She’d told me I was beautiful and I was wonderful. So I was in a car inside a waterfall and I was wishing that other people could make me, instead of my making myself. Then I remembered my friend and his wife and their two cats, dying in the middle of the night in their house because their 3D printer leaked carbon monoxide while they were asleep."
Johnny von Neumann was another likely candidate for having HSAM, based on all those stories of him being able to repeat almost everything he ever read verbatim. I wonder if it had anything to do with his mathematical prowess, given that autobiographical memory is usually considered a separate thing from wherever math goes.
Can this lady(or other people with HSAM) actually recite what they've read in the past verbatim? It seems like she can just tell you what she was doing or what happened on a given day, but didn't delve into how far that goes - maybe she can tell you she was reading book X, but couldn't necessarily recite passages from book X?
Her father, Jason, said he would show Emily a series of coloured bowling pins for about 10 seconds and then spin her around, asking her to name the order they were in.
“She would knock them off right away in terms of identifying every pin, in terms of, you know, red, yellow, green, blue,” he said.
Her mother, Julie, discovered Emily -- at age five -- could watch a Peanuts cartoon and then recall and repeat the dialogue from any point in the episode.
This is fascinating, but I’m left confused at the banality. Maybe it’s just the way the article was written, but truly, who cares that she can remember what was playing on Netflix three years ago? It does cause me to wonder if brains are attuned to certain things - like in this woman’s case, is she particularly interested in celebrities and that’s why all the examples given are out of the tabloid headlines? The article left me with a lot of questions.
>This is fascinating, but I’m left confused at the banality. Maybe it’s just the way the article was written, but truly, who cares that she can remember what was playing on Netflix three years ago?
Anybody who can understand the implications this has for understanding how memory works, creating memory enhancing drugs or gene alterations, and enhancing human cognition? I mean, DUH!
I mean - is that really the case? It almost sounds like she’s just passively absorbing banal shit rather than there being any kind of consciousness. Kinda like a camera with an endless hard drive. Interesting, but what do you do with it?
>It almost sounds like she’s just passively absorbing banal shit rather than there being any kind of consciousness.
So? They don't want to use her as a trove of historically important information, but to study her as a person which "super memory".
For that, it doesn't matter if it's about human anatomy, quantum physics, or what was said in every episode of Melrose Place.
The mechanism by which those are absorbed and retained, and in such quality and recall is what's interesting, the content is not important.
>Kinda like a camera with an endless hard drive. Interesting, but what do you do with it?
If I was an engineer for a storage company I'd very much like to know how an "endless hard drive" works. It would solve tons of storage and archiving problems, and could make trillions.
For human memory, a 2x or 3x or 10x increase in storage/recall efficiency would be a huge thing.
Sorry, I don’t think I’m making myself very clear… I think what I’m after here is almost like survivorship bias. Yes, she’s remembering all these things, but I’m wondering about all the things she isn’t either remembering or in control of remembering that would have otherwise been within here sphere to have remembered. From the article it wasn’t clear to me what control she actually has over any of this. Does that make sense?
I think you are speaking past the person you're talking with. Yes, as a skill, it's probably got limited utility for her. However, we learn more about how the brain works by studying people whose brains don't work like everyone else's brain, and trying to figure out how they're different. Therefore, it's people who want to learn more about how the brain works who "[truly care] that she can remember what was playing on Netflix three years ago"
>Yes, she’s remembering all these things, but I’m wondering about all the things she isn’t either remembering or in control of remembering that would have otherwise been within here sphere to have remembered.
Yes, now it kind of makes sense. But why assume her ability is counterbalanced by having trouble remembering other stuff? Nothing of the short is hinted at in the article, and if she had any such issue, I'd expect her or her parents to have noticed. And even if that was the case, why would that make it any less interesting to study?
"Passively absorving banal shit" and remembering it would be any less important to study than some conscious ability to chose what important thing to remember. The latter might be more apparently useful to the person and in general, but a super memory mechanism is interesting enough to study on its own, even it just concerns past lotto numbers.
It's also not the case that "all the examples given are out of the tabloid headlines" - the article gives all kinds of other examples (from a "memory game" as a kid, to answering questions about what she wore, ate, etc at random dates on past years).
In any case, this Nash person has a beautiful mind!
Yea the choice of questions to ask her was ridiculous. I mean start there maybe, and escalate to something more interesting, or go further back in time etc. Such a lack of imagination.
It's almost like everyone wanted to believe and didn't want to push the limits to break their impression of it being some super power.
Also with the other woman they used as an example, the only thing she did is say that X date was a Thrursday or something, which might simply be a trick and not a memory recall.
Marilu Henner is somewhat known as a prodigy. She's a member of Mensa, things like that. The clip shown in the video was chosen poorly because it doesn't really convey her abilities.
I just checked her Wikipedia page, and besides a passing mention of her HSAM its pretty spare. I seem to remember (ba-dum-tiss) that it used to be mote comprehensive.
Sure, and that’s kinda interesting in a savant way, but what was less clear to me from the article is whether she’s actually strong at memories where there is consciousness.
The article mentions that given she is 18 years old and still in school, she mostly is aware of pop culture events and entertainment, but is less aware of current events or the broader world.
This is pretty normal. Most kids aren't keeping up on politics or business news, especially if they're hyper focused on school (as she seems to be).
She did mention that her memory seems to be calendar based. She might be able to master the periodic table a day at a time. Jan 1, study hydrogen. Jan 2, study helium. Jan 27, study Cobalt.
That's technically different than what OP is asking about. She could have a perfect memory for dates and experiences in her life but not have indefinite perfect recall for something more fact-oriented like the periodic table.
It sounds like her fact-recalling abilities are deeply tied to memories of experiences and conversations, so she could probably intentionally structure a study session to take advantage of that, but it doesn't mean she automatically can recall everything she reads.
Edit—looks like in general people with HSAM do not have better than average memory as measured by other kinds of tests:
> So far, the studied conducted at UC Irvine suggest that individuals with HSAM have superior abilities in autobiographical memories but are no different from age- and sex-matched control participants on standard laboratory memory tests.
If I'm not mistaken, the question here is whether they will be using episodic or semantic memory in the recall of the periodic table. Meaning - can they recall learned facts as well as lived experiences? Will they linearly remember the moments of learning about each element? What is the granularity of their recall?
From what I understand, if they are asked about let's say April 17th 2009 they linearly scan through all the April 17ths. So there is a filtering step that ignores all other 364 days. But they also don't start from their earliest memories so how does that filtering work?
Up above I linked a short story written by a man with HSAM. Here's an excerpt that's a dialogue between himself and someone else with the condition:
---
“How many have you seen?” I asked her.
She went on looking at the dog. She blinked a couple times.
“Are you allergic to dogs?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve seen sixteen Pomeranians in my life.”
“Nice. I’ve seen, uh.”
We were silent two minutes while I counted.
“I’ve seen fifty-eight Pomeranians.”
“Shit, that’s a lot of Pomeranians.”
“Well, you see them on the train in Tokyo sort of a lot.”
“How many poodles have you seen?”
“Fourteen,” I said.
“You answered very quickly.”
“I counted them a few months ago.”
“Why did you count them?”
“I was trying to get to sleep. I count memories when I am going to sleep.”
“That’s interesting.”
“It’s gotten more interesting as I’ve gotten older. It’s like Memory Golf: I try to think of things that have only happened between three and five times.”
“Why three and five times?”
“It’s hypnotic,” I said. “Three or five times gives you a little slice of every part of your life. You can write a complete and thorough autobiography about anything that’s happened to you between three and ten times.”
“Why not more than ten times?”
“Then it’d be too long.”
“How many cups of coffee have you drunk in your life?”
“Whoa — whoa. Please don’t ask me that. I’ll start counting and then I’ll slip into a coma for a year.”
“Sorry. Now I am thinking about it too. Oh no. I hate it.”
“You have to be careful with this stuff. You can’t write an autobiography about all the cups of coffee you drank, or all the times you’ve used the toilet. It has to be something that’s happened between three and ten times.”
“Not about something that happened twice?”
“No. It might just be a coincidence.”
“Not about something that happened once?”
“Maybe I’m wrong.”
“Maybe you’re not.”
“Whenever I tell people about this, I use the example that I’ve eaten a cinnamon bun thirty-two times in my life.”
“How many times have you told people that you’ve eaten a cinnamon bun thirty-two times?”
“Uh, nine.”
“You could write a complete and thorough autobiography about the nine times you told someone you’ve eaten a cinnamon bun thirty-two times.”
“I’m going to have a stroke if I think about that.”
There was a great 60 Minutes on this nearly 15 years back, where they picked random facts from historical record and got pretty shocking immediate recall:
I think where their attention is and therefore what gets encoded is similar to the rest of us. In one instance they were unable to recall what the interviewers were wearing after spending two hours with them. They remember their experiences visually, essentially. So if information was not actually recorded, it can't be searched for.
On a different note, I'm curious how long people with photographic memory store the info at the same fidelity. Does their perfect recollection of a landscape they looked at for a few minutes fade somewhat after a year or so?
I read somewhere years ago that each subsequent recall of a memory is remembering the last time you recalled it—in a sense, an entropy-like phenomenon called memory reconsolidation.
> For Emily, it was validation that she wasn’t, as she puts, it “weird.”
Being one of only like 100 people with the same superpower? Yes, not weird at all :P
Wasn't there some theory that we forget things slowly in order to keep us sane or something like that? Given that these people have perfect recall and remain completely normal and functional far more likely makes it an unintentional fault that needs fixing than an evolutionarily selected-for attribute.
> Those with superior memory remember the good, but they will also never forget the bad. They feel the pain as if it were today. Some with HSAM struggle with anxiety and depression as a result.
Yeah and so do lots of the rest of us, doesn't seem like that much of a correlation.
Even if you could remember everything, I am curious how you keep it straight. I may be extra boring, but a lot of my life is rote. Day 452 of Job is really similar to day 451 and 453.
Why not? It's not constant super awareness of your memory, just having all of it available if you need it. Instead of trying to remember something and drawing a blank you just remember it. At least that's my understanding of it.
I honestly really envy people who can maintain long term memory without constantly refreshing it. All the classes I've ever taken soon got rm -rfed after the final exam, except for the handful of things that I needed to keep knowing on a regular basis.
What's great about Emily's life as opposed to Marilu Henner is Emily has access to Wikipedia and the rest of the Internet. It'll be interesting to see the limits of her memory in the future. Will she be able to remember every time she gets into those Wikipedia deep dives where you end up spending hours reading about some random topic, following link after link? If so, she really will be a super hero.
> Emily has access to Wikipedia and the rest of the Internet
True, but I think we've forgotten that there was actually a lot of information available before the internet. Bookstores, libraries, lots of magazines, and even TV (with fewer options but still non-stop availability). Of course, back then it was harder to pick and choose what info you had access to. But still, I'm always surprised at the amount of useless info and details that I know from --where??-- before ~1995.
It raises a few interesting questions, Im sure there is already lot of research in the area.
- What about storage? The brain seems to be limitless.
- Seems like there are more mutations that improve memory, but overal our memory is terrible? Doesn't have seem to be a favourable quality, maybe that changes in an information society
- So why do we forget in the first place? Bio clean up? Trauma processing? Focus?
Humor aside, you'll find most Jeopardy contestants actually know the majority of the answers to any given question on Jeopardy (single and double), and the determining factors are more about buzzer technique, ability to perform on-stage, and shrewd wagering on daily doubles.
Sony can't really afford to "ratchet" up the difficulty either since that would result in an arms-race of trivia questions that would drastically reduce the appeal to the mainstream viewer if they saw categories like "Descendants of the Zulu Royal Family", "Musculoskeletal Radiology", "Polymer engineering", and "Civil Servants".
You should tell her to get in touch with researchers. Even if she doesn't quite have HSAM, they'd probably be interested. In fact, they might be even more interested to see someone who lives in the gap between HSAM and not-HSAM.
This reminds me of Kim Peek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek) the inspiration for Rain Man. Peek supposedly memorised thousands of books, including phone directories, sports score publications etc...
How far could this ability be pushed? Could someone basically become a human database, able to run queries right from their mind? In ancient times this might have been a very useful skill for those in power to employ such a person.
Jeez, she has an autobiographical memory and the best they could cone up with to exhibit this were questions like “What DreamWorks film did Jack Black voice in?” I wanted to see her recite Pi to 500 decimal places lol
Sounds similar to folks who can memorize many digits of pi in the sense that they can visualize a landscape of numbers and they just have to play that movie in their head, similar to how ordinary people can visualize commuting from home to work when closing their eyes
This girl uses her memory superpower to remember irrelevant celebrity facts and Netflix release dates..? Not sure if this is a reflection of the wider culture but this is pretty depressing.
For me, I can't remember that I have an appointment tomorrow, but if you ask me how computers work, I'll start with explaining electron orbitals and band gaps, doping, masking, VLSI, assembly language, C, functional programming and where AI is heading from first principles.
Unfortunately instead of being some kind of superpower, it's mainly been debilitating for me, because I've spent my career writing CRUD apps in an endless series of failed startups. Because most people don't think this way, and instead see only the use-case before them as a stepping stone to another goal, usually financial. It would be easier for me to design spaceships than manage my bills, but I seem to be relegated to doing chores for the rest of my life and dying penniless.