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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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>\n