Comments on: Thanks for the memories

By: Sergey

Sergey — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:19:39 +0000

A Russian joke: “What is the name of this German guy due to whom I almost lost my mind?”
– Altzheimer, Granny”.

By: Sergey

Sergey — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:04:14 +0000

Strange things happen to our memory skills as we approach certain age. Some skills obviosly deteriorate, while others become more acute compared to what they used to be. Last year I noticed troubles with recollecting people’s names, even those I knew well. Strange, but it is only about their names: the persons themselves I remember quite well, their past lives, personal traits and so on – these memories are not affected. At the same time, I began to recollect word by word the books I have read, poems, songs and so on which I thought I completely forgot, hundreds of them. Many of these songs and poems are really idiotic, like propaganda stuff of Soviet era. There were good reasons to forget them – but I can’t. Some are vulgar and obscene, relicts of street culture of my youth and adolescence. Is this a symptom of something or just normal ageing?

By: Butch Malahide

Butch Malahide — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:03:23 +0000

By the way, you may be interested to know that there are sites dedicated to solving this kind of mystery. Two of the best ones are the BookSleuth Forum at Abebooks.com

http://forums.abebooks.com/abesleuthcom

for all kinds of written works, and specifically for fantasy and science fiction there’s the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/topics?hl=en&lnk

which is for general discussion of written sci-fi and fantasy, so story ID queries should include YASID (Yet Another Story ID) in the header.

By: neo-neocon

neo-neocon — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:43:39 +0000

Butch M: I already found that out about the Heinlein novel, and where to find the Anderson story. I've got a new post in the works about the whole experience. You have no idea how long I wondered about that story. It's a bit like this one, a mystery I'd solved earlier. By the way, the Verna story at the link above always reminded me of "The Pied Piper," which as a child I found very compelling and somewhat scary (here's the Grimm version, and here's Browning's poetic version, the one with which I was familiar as a child). I wonder if that was intentional on the part of author Jack Finney.

By: Butch Malahide

Butch Malahide — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:41:19 +0000

What did I do wrong? Let me try that again.

http://www.abe.com

By: Butch Malahide

Butch Malahide — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:39:35 +0000

You’re welcome! I’ve enjoyed lurking on your blog, so I’m glad to be of service. By the way, there are several sci-fi stories titled “The Star Beast” (e.g. a Heinlein novel), be sure you get the one by Poul Anderson. By checking the dates and contents on the ISFDB page I linked to, you may be able to figure out which collection you read it in. Used copies will be plentiful at sites such as .

By: neo-neocon

neo-neocon — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:13:23 +0000

Sergey: It has been speculated by many that the Luria book was the inspiration for Borges' story Funes.

By: neo-neocon

neo-neocon — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:10:49 +0000

Butch Malahide: thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!!

I have tried to find the source for over forty years, no kidding, and came up empty. I had a feeling if I wrote the question on the blog, someone would come to the rescue.

I loved that story when I was probably around ten years old. I remember it was tigers (or lions), too. So it must be the same story. I’ll check it out further.

By: Sergey

Sergey — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:34:12 +0000

Properly handling memories includes ability to forget. Without it overflow of information causes desorganization of thought process. Such cases are rare, one of them was described in detail in a book of a Russian psychologist Luria: “A little book about a big memory”. It was case study of a patient, Shereshevsky, who never forgot anything. He could recollect in detail every day of his life, what weather was in every hour of this day, where he was, what he heard and sought. He became a mnemonist, that is, showed to public his extraordinary abilities. He could memorize by a single glance huge tables of random numbers and then wright them down by memory without mistakes, cited long texts consisting of random words years after he read them. This all was a torture for him: he tried to develop special mental techniquies to forget, like burning this imaginary texts written on paper in his imagination. Nothing worked. Also he had synestesic perception: sounds has colour and texture, letters had taste and smells of their own. Many memories were painful because of bad smells and noises associated with them.

By: Artfldgr

Artfldgr — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:45:12 +0000

I have that problem Libby
while it allows me to tie things together that most don’t or can’t it also has me not forgetting slights and other such things
we forget for good reasons
if not then we would all have better memory
in trth our memories are great our recall sucks