December 23rd, 2021
I had a somber realization last night. I was mulling over my poor memory; it seems that I simply cannot remember lots of facts. I am unable to recall people’s names; the weakness is so serious that I no longer even attempt to memorize people’s names; it’s a futile endeavor. I even forget the names of famous people; I often have to refer to some identifying association of the celebrity.
Yet I also remember a vast array of tiny facts. Did you know that the Indo-European root word for “king” shows up in dozens of different English words in the form “reg”, as in regal, regulation, sovereign, region, and regular? Or that a snow-covered landscape is quiet because the surface of snow is irregular? I can tell you stories about Heliogabalus (a Roman emperor), Mucius Scaevola, or Charles Babbage. I know all sorts of stuff about Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the Arthurian legends, computers, geology, or cognitive science. In some ways, I am a huge encyclopedia of knowledge; in other ways, I can’t remember the most basic things.
My big realization last night was that there’s a pattern to my strengths and weaknesses in memory. Simply put, my mind is process-intensive: I readily recall information that is part and parcel of a process, and cannot recall anything that is not part of a process. This explains why I cannot recall people’s names: they are devoid of any process-based pattern. There is no algorithm in the universe that can produce people’s names; the only way to remember them is to maintain a dedicated list of static facts.
On the other hand, I can remember that bit about the root word for “king” because it’s part of the linguistic process by which root words are built into other words. I remember the sound performance of a snowscape because I understand the physics of sound. The story of Heliogabalus illustrates an important point about human psychology, as does the story of Mucius Scaevola. Charles Babbage is part of a larger abstraction about the way society responds to innovation.
Thus, my cognition is built, at a fundamental level, on Processes rather than Objects. For some odd reason, my thought processes are radically different from those of almost everybody else. Perhaps it’s because of a mutated gene somewhere in my genome. It can’t be my upbringing — I have three brothers who do not share my cognitive oddity. Perhaps I was abducted by aliens at a young age. Perhaps it is the natural result of intense curiousity pursued with great diligence. There’s no way to know the cause of this mental eccentricity.
This realization leads to a depressing conclusion: if my understanding of processes is the result of some fundamental cognitive eccentricity, then my efforts to teach the concepts related to Process versus Object are futile. People who don’t share this mutation just can’t get it. It’s as if I’m a rodent on an island, possessed of a genetic mutation that greatly enhances my adaptability to the environment, but also makes me genetically incompatible with all the other rodents. Try as I might, I cannot bequeath my mutation to future generations. I am doomed to live out my life without the possibility of intellectual heirs.
And have a merry Christmas!
