How is your memory indexed?

My Facebook friends have heard me complain a few times that I have apparently exceeded my brain’s capacity to keep track of people. At Google, I have worked with hundreds of people, and it’s entirely embarrassing when one of them sees me at lunch or elsewhere on the Google campus and says “Hi Eric!” and I completely blank on their name. I recognize them, and I know we worked together, but I don’t remember any of the details. A couple weeks ago, somebody waved me down in the cafeteria, and I had lunch with him, and talked for 30 minutes without me being able to remember his name or what specifically we had worked on together.

The funny bit is that once I got back to my desk and looked up his name, all of that information came flooding back in. And that’s how it works for me in general – when another Googler says hi and I can’t place them, a glance at their name badge will trigger the memory cascade of how we know each other. As far as I can tell, my memory is indexed on people’s names, not on what they look like, so I can’t look up information on them with their face, but only with their name. I was talking about this with a friend yesterday, and he thought it was the weirdest thing ever because he is a visual thinker, and faces are what trigger all the memories for him.

The analogy to a database is clear – in a database, there are many fields in each record, but one of them is generally marked as the “primary key”, which the database will index on and optimize lookups for. If you try to look up a record by a different field, it will be much slower and more inefficient.

So I’m curious how other people feel their memories are indexed. Are you a visual thinker and seeing a person triggers all the memories you have associated with them? Am I the only text-based thinker?

P.S. Based on the On Intelligence theory of pattern-recognition, I wonder if my memory indexing on text/names is because most of my information gathering as a child was by reading, rather than by learning from my peers. I definitely think in terms of text and ideas, and that’s part of why I have a blog – text hyperlinking is a perfect fit for how my brain works. I also wonder if that’s why I don’t get Instagram – maybe Instagram is the equivalent of blogging for a visual thinker – it matches how their brain works.

2 thoughts on “How is your memory indexed?

  1. All faces, all the time. I forget someone’s name within minutes of meeting them (sometimes seconds) but I’ll recognize their face years later. And upon recognizing their face I’ll know where I first met them and all the context associated with our history – even if I haven’t seen them for a decade.

    Mind you, some of the details of that shared history have been forgotten – but that’s just my overall poor memory. Anything that CAN come back will be triggered by their face.

  2. I think its normal. I also think it is part of like … if someone know my name, I should be able to know their name … kind of thing. And the fact that you don’t remember their name created enough of an emotional response that cause you to remember all this and write about it.

    I don’t get why you don’t get instagram. You are visually oriented; just like most of us.

    Maybe it is more related to language, skill, performance, and what you do everyday.

    For example, I don’t get how actor remember their line. I can not even imagine the process.

    That’s my 2 cents. L8R!

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