I was in a college psych class, and the teacher was doing some kind of exercise about memory, patterns, and retention. He began with, “for instance, if I asked you what number the first letter of your name is in the alphabet, you wouldn’t be able to tell me right aw–”
“Ten,” I said.
“What?”
“J. J is ten,” I said again.
He stared at me.
“I happened to learn it while looking at the alphabet when I was five or six, and it just stayed in my brain,” I told him.
Then we did an exercise on retention. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “and then I’m going to send you out of the room for five minutes, and when you come back, you have to repeat as much of the story back to me as possible.”
He told me a long and meandering story with no plot or structure, just a random series of events, place names, actions, etc. Then he sent me out of the room.
I looked at the wall for a while.
He called me back in five minutes later, stood me up in front of the class, and asked me to repeat “just as much of the story as you remember.” Apparently while I’d been gone he’d been telling the class about how eyewitness accounts aren’t reliable because people don’t remember things well after a certain period of time.
So I told his story back to him– not verbatim, but certain phrases were exact– and watched the consternation in his face as I accidentally blew up his (valid! and extensively studied!) lesson about how bad people’s retention is.
“It’s like a song,” I tried to explain to him, and the class. “Or a poem. Every part of the story has a little tag to remember it. I looked at the chalkboard while you were saying this part. My leg itched while you were saying that part. A chair squeaked during the next part. Then I just have to come back and go over all the sensations that I had while you were”
“Sit down,” he said.
I sat.
Turns out I’m Autisms Georg adn should not have been counted
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