on memory

Sometimes I worry about my mental acuity. Specifically, my memory. Feels like I have to write everything down to remember it. I have things set up to facilitate this—pen, sketchbook, and post-it notes always at the ready—but I still worry. No one else seems to need memory aids to this extent.

Raid is a big example. I always jot down notes in my sketchbook as I go. In many cases, I’m able to internalize my notes and just use them to refresh my recollection at the start of each raid session (if at all). But sometimes they just won’t stick. For Agdistis, I was consulting my charts mid-mechanic every pull. I’m pretty sure this is purely a personal problem. No one else has a book of raid charts sitting at their elbow.

A more recent example: In PoE2, I found a new helmet with better defenses but no elemental resists. My cold res is capped with other gear, but my fire and lightning res both dropped. I could cap the lightning res with lightning runes, leaving my fire res at 69% (out of a max of 75%). I had a brief discussion with HGR as to whether being at only 69% fire res was a big deal. Then I runed up my gear and put in fire runes since we had just been discussing fire resistance. This was not just a momentary brainfart; it was a total failure of short-term encoding. I looked at my resists and was like “What the fuck? Why is my fire resistance capped? And why is my lightning at 57%?” I had completely forgotten the particulars of the discussion I had five minutes ago. HGR recapped everything for me, and only then did I remember.

HGR suggested writing such things down in future, which I can and will do, but man it feels bad needing to do so. I’ve always prided myself on my memory.

Of course, there are many different kinds of memory, and many different kinds of encoding. I do best with narratives and characters, whether real or fictional. I do poorly with spatial and certain kinds of procedural logic, which is why I can tell you all about an incident five years ago, but cannot recall the mechanic that was explained five minutes ago. My short-term visual encoding is poor, and I actively compensate by converting as much as I can to semantic encoding; if I am trying to remember someone’s outfit for blobservation purposes, I will mentally write it down as “checked blue-gray scarf over gray jacket, jeans, straight shoulder-length honey brown hair.” But I am good at remembering FR colors, which is pure visual memory (with semantic tags of color/gene names). I can tell you all about the color accents of clay, cerulean, grapefruit, and lead in various genes. LD has brought a whole new color lexicon that I am gradually absorbing: cimmerian, bushveld, haliotis, prismatic, briar.

My auditory encoding/retention has always been horrendous, which is why I’ve never tried audiobooks. I just plain don’t think I could follow a story in that format. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately—if my vision grew so bad I could no longer enjoy reading text, I would definitely at least try audiobooks, although I don’t have faith it would work for me. But surprisingly, I do fine with watercolor tutorial videos, which are purely audiovisual (and I don’t make any special effort to convert the information to semantic). I never paint while watching videos. Videos are at my computer. Painting is at the dining room table, frequently the next day because I tend to watch videos at night. Even though I treat it as a chill spacing-out activity, I can remember what I saw and heard.

I dunno. Memory is complicated. I wish mine were better though.