Fifty years ago, while in high school, I recall reading an article in Scientific American about some interesting experiments that were carried out to control major cases of epilepsy. The patients were people whose epilepsy had progressed so far that they were often suffered seizures of such intensity that they were at risk of death. In desperation, the doctors surgically severed the corpus callosum, the bridge between the two sides of the brain. This was effective in eliminating the worst seizures, but created all sorts of new problems. The two halves of the brain of the patient were no longer able to communicate, create a great deal of mental confusion. They did a lot of experiments with these people and learned some fascinating things.
In one of the most striking experiments, they would show a picture of something so that only one eye could see it. Then they would ask the patient to write down the name of the object using the hand controlled by the OTHER half of the brain. Sure enough, the patient couldn’t do it. The left half of the brain couldn’t tell the right half what it was seeing, and vice versa. But then they noticed the patients muttering to themselves, so they encouraged them to speak out loud. The patient would say the name of the object, and then the patient could right down what was seen. The half of the brain that knew what the object was told the other half through the medium of speech.
It occurred to me that communication across the corpus callosum is probably imperfect; in effect, we ALL suffer from much reduced versions of the problem that the epiletic patients suffered from. This in turn suggests an idea: perhaps we can improve communication between one side of the brain and the other by speaking out loud. I have experimented with this on a number of occasions when I was attempting to recall a weak memory. The trick is to verbally hypothesize and then to determine whether it ‘feels right’. For example, on one occasion I was trying to recall the appearance of a person I had met the previous day. I couldn’t remember much, so I started hypothesizing out loud:
“He was tall.” Something inside me felt that this was wrong. OK, so the person wasn’t tall.
“He had blonde hair.” Again, this didn’t feel right.
“He had dark hair.” Same problem: it didn’t feel right.
“He was wearing a hat.” Something lit up inside my brain. He was indeed wearing a hat! That’s why I couldn’t recall the color of his hair.
“The hat was elegant.” Something said Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! so I tried something else:
“The hat was kinda crummy.” Bingo! I knew that was right.
And so I went down a list of possible traits, making random guesses and deciding which ones felt right and which ones felt wrong. It didn’t take long before I had nailed down so many elements of the image that suddenly the memory of the image sprang back to life. Yes, of course, that’s the guy! I told myself.
I don’t know if this technique will work for anybody else; give it a whirl when you need to recollect something; see if it works for you.