While reminiscing over the long gone days of high school, I grew interested in the actual mechanism of memory as I was noticing a few fairly serious holes in my recollection of events just a couple years old.

I’m currently engrossed in a supposedly non-technical clarification of Gödel’s Proof, so I haven’t had a chance to research the topic. But, who needs science when you can have subjective introspection?

I began further testing my memory by attempting to recall some more obscure memories. We always remember our phone numbers or how to divide, but it’s a bit more difficult to remember when we first saw our number or where we first learned to divide. I found my memories of these events to be a composite of visual and factual impressions and deductive interpretations of what I would expect the memory to contain.

For example, in the first case described above (phone number), my “base” memory comprises receiving the phone as a gift and unwrapping the box which had the phone number on a sticky note attached to the top. Atop that is my knowledge of my phone number as well as the distinctive colors of the phone’s brand and other external knowledge of the memory’s contents.

The dreamlike blur obscures much of the detail, but I visualize the black and red of Verizon Wireless with a photograph of the device on the box with the yellow sticky note that contains the phone number. I was able to compare my memory to the actual box and found it to be surprisingly accurate. The memory’s murkiness meant that the actual positions of the elements was never clearly defined, but aside from the color of the sticky note (the actual one was pink), the general idea was correct.

The complete visualized memory was based on:

1. Some original visual memory
2. My basic idea of the sequence of events
3. Assumptions based on related external knowledge

The mechanism for memory storage and recollection seems very interesting and is definitely something I’ll be looking into.