Late at night, when I can’t sleep, in my mind I walk through all the places I have lived in my life.
I don’t mean this in a metaphorical sense. I mean, I can actually visualize walking through the rooms. I know where the furniture was placed. If we rearranged it, I can remember each different configuration. I can remember the pattern of the wallpaper and where we kept the toiletries.
Sometimes, I will mentally walk around my block in San Francisco. I can remember which doorway the old Russian lady was always hoovering in creepily. I can remember the layout of the liquor store on the corner. From another apartment, I can remember all the noteworthy points of interest between my apartment and the ocean.
If I am really trying to bore myself, I will force myself to remember where all the light switches were located in the apartment Mr. A lived in in China. I visited him there for two weeks in 1996. I can’t really go back and check, but I am pretty sure I am right about where things are, because I can see them in my head.
That is a little weird, right?
Can you remember where you stored the tampons when you were in 7th grade? Can you visualize the contents of your grandmother’s bathroom drawers from when you were 6?
My memory isn’t photographic, exactly. I don’t picture every detail of every room and it is a 3D memory, not flat. The items I paid the most attention to stand out. Things I didn’t care about seem kind of vague and blurry. I can remember my bedroom and the living room of the trailer we lived in until I turned three, but I can’t remember what kind of kitchen cabinets we had there.
When I was in high school and college, I used to draw designs down the margins of my notes. If I wanted to remember what I wrote, I only had to picture the design next to it and I could mentally bring up what I wrote. I couldn’t see the words, exactly, but I would know the jist just from imagining the picture.
I can’t remember numbers to save my life. No matter if I write them down or not, I will almost always transpose them when I have to repeat them or write them down. I am also terrible with names. If I see them on a list or a nametag, sometimes I can remember them, but usually I have no idea what the names are of people I meet. I can, however, tell you exactly where we were positioned in the room when we were talking.
It is weird in my brain.
“It is weird in my brain.”
Yes, I would say so!
I”m the exact same way. Remembering every house from birth until now, dorm rooms, hotel rooms, etc. I even remember all of the houses that we’ve looked at while house shopping. When we drive by a past potential, I’ll ask my husband if he remembers the weird kitchen in a certain house. He thinks I’m crazy and doesn’t even remember that we looked at the house! I wonder if we missed our calling in architecture?
facinating! I often “walk” through my grandmother’s apartment where I spent a lot of time in my childhood. I’m bad with numbers, but not all of them (I still know my two aunts phone numbers which I learned when I was a teen) and pretty bad with names. I usually remember where I was when I talked about certain things too… memory is such an amazing and particular thing, no?
I’m the exact opposite. I’m great with names (which is good because I’m a teacher and can remember whole classrooms full of names on the first day) and great with text, like I can remember specific quotations down to the exact word, even if I’ve only read it once. But I have no visual memory at all. I get lost easily, and drove my husband nuts when we were house hunting because all the houses we looked at blurred together for me. I had to take pictures of them all.
I’m the same in terms of remembering houses, where everything was etc. And like you, the items I didn’t pay much attention to are more on the edges and “blurry”.
Wow, so similar here. I can remember room-for-room the house we lived in when I was three (and all houses since, including furniture placement and where key things were stored). And I could absolutely visualize full pages of my notes in college. But numbers? Very poor memory there. I am much better with names since I picked up on my husband’s devide of associating another descriptive word with name. In my case, it is often a description of the person (I worked with an agency for months before I could keep our three male contacts straight — finally they became Tall Tim, Nice Mike and Dickhead Dave. No problems after that!
Maybe you are the next contender:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/20/magazine/mind-secrets.html
I remember things like that, but I am rubbish with numbers. Someone tells me what they paid for something and 2 mins later I forget. I also remember things like peoples faces and which movie star married who, how many children they had….trivial facts like that and it is NO USE TO ME WHATSOEVER !!!
I thought I was the only freak who did this!
When I was a child, I drew a picture for mother of the bedroom of the apartment where we lived for the first six months of my life: window here, dresser here, my crib here, etc. I placed it all correctly. There are no photos of that apartment — except inside my head.
Cool! I can do the same thing. I remember once being impressed with myself for being about to mentally walk through a house that I’d spent a weekend in, once. I think it’s a kind of spatial memory. I also used to remember what a page of notes looked like. But have you ever remembered something, walked across the house and forgotten what you came for? I usually have to walk back to where I thought of it to trigger my memory again. I don’t think it’s a bad thing as long as I remember to work with it.