Memory

I often need a little rant about my memory, but it's the sort of rant you can't really have to real people without sounding like an idiot. I'm assuming real people don't read this but if they do, I hope that they will suspend judgment of me and try and understand what it's like to be like me.

I have a really good memory. I'm not trying to boast (I really hate boasting: other people doing it or me sounding like I am) but it's just a fact that I've gradually come to realise. For years and years I just assumed everyone's was as the same, and it drove me absolutely mad how illogical, inconsistent and plain contradictory people were, and even why they lied. I have come to the conclusion that although we are all some of those things some of the time, a lot of what I thought was that is actually that other people's brain simply don't remember things in the same way mine does.

I'm trying to use this newfound knowledge to stop myself getting so frustrated with people. I'm teaching myself to just answer the question when it's put to me for the 17th (or just second...) time by the same person. I remind myself that when people recall an event or conversation or scene with errors, it's not their fault, their brain just doesn't record conversations word for word.

In this respect it's also helping that my memory is no longer pretty much perfect. I forget things too, and so I can see how it happens to others. I don't know if it's just because I'm getting older (getting on for 30 soon... this could be a whole lot worse in years to come!) or because there are just more things to remember. But this is also hard for me to adjust to because I'm so used to my memory being reliable and being able to recall anything that's happened, that I find it difficult to deal with when I can't remember, or remember wrongly.

Despite the current intermittent failings of my poor old memory, it is still pretty good generally (read here "quite a lot better than most people's"). On first thoughts, who wouldn't want a fantastic memory? You don't lose stuff, you don't have to revise because you already learnt the stuff once in lessons, you don't have confusions because you know what happened in the past, etc etc. This is all very true, and it does make life easier and a lot more efficient in many ways. The trouble comes when you put other people in the equation.

The person with the good memory, if he or she doesn't try to hide it, looks like the annoying know-it-all. It's actually very uncomfortable often knowing that you're right. I find it very hard to let things go that aren't true (unsurprisingly, with the whole autism thing), so even when I stop myself correcting people they can often see it on my face. I don't want to be right, because it makes them feel bad, and it makes me feel bad because I think they think I somehow feel superior through being right. But I don't - I feel worse. It's not anything of my own virtue being able to remember, it's just the way my brain works.

Another, purely selfish reason for not liking having a better memory, is that it's annoying when other people forget! If people move my things, it's a big problem for me, because I know where I had put them, but now I have no idea where they are. I guess if people don't always remember they're used to having to look for stuff. So much time is wasted going over things we should know when we could be doing new things. I used to snooze through half of my AS Psychology lessons because they would go over the same things every lesson, which we'd already covered, so what was the point of listening? Or a current common one, in dancing lessons when working on a syllabus, if the teacher has checked the book and corrected a movement (for example an arm we have been putting in the wrong place), I will retain that correction for evermore, but others will do it right that lesson and then revert to the old way. For a couple of weeks it will look like I'm doing it wrong, until they check again and get corrected again, and I will think "that's what we've been doing all along!"

Over the past couple of years, as I've been more aware of myself and my strengths and weaknesses and how and why I respond to the world, I've developed some techniques to try and appear more normal and less obnoxious. Maybe some of these will be helpful to people, or maybe you think they are a terrible idea. Let me know!

Question and get someone else to find the answer you already know: In the above situation of the dance lesson, I have worked out I can ask "is the arm there in first or fifth?" without sounding like I think I know best. Phrases like "I'm sure we've discussed this but I can't remember whether it was... or... Can we check?" or "hold on, did/didn't we do it like this last week?" (but if they say no don't insist we did!)

Just pretend you don't remember: I don't like this method very much because it's not really truthful and as I mentioned, I really like the truth. But it can be a useful method of not sounding like a pedantic annoying autistic person. Using this method a few times can dilute the unnerving impression of someone that remembers everything to an annoying extent.

Pretend you're not sure: add a disclaimer/say your statement in a slightly questioning of British-ly apologetic manner, for example "I had the vague idea it was this but I'm not certain/don't quote me on that/I'm not sure where I got that from"

Just let it go: I think I need to learn that sometimes it doesn't actually matter. The fact or truth being known may not have any effect on the matter in hand and you may sound like an idiot if you insist on it. But it kind of goes against the grain even writing that, because if people aren't at least truthful and factual to the best of their knowledge, what can you trust and build on? So I think I'll have to work on that one.

Keep your mouth shut: this was the method I adopted until the age of at least 20. I never spoke up about anything. I just assumed that other people knew better, that my opinion or experience was irrelevant. The trouble with this method is that you can end up with a very negative view of yourself, and all the good gets hidden away with the bad so it doesn't benefit anybody else either.

I'm now trying to find a balance of re-finding my old silence, because sometimes it is wise to stay silent (but I need to get control of my face and body for that to work!), and being tactful in finding ways of getting facts into matters where they do need to be known. And of course I'm working on not getting as frustrated with others and myself forgetting, because it is a human thing that happens, not people's choice. We can't magically implant correct memories so we have to be patient with what there is, and everybody accepting they can be wrong is a step in the right direction.

I should mention, this is long term memory we are talking about here. My short term memory can be shocking. I have trouble keeping track of everything I need to do so I live by lists, and if somebody at work asks me what happened yesterday I might have to think really hard before answering!

As always, please feel free to ask questions or share your own experiences :)

Chris Packham: Fingers in the Sparkle Jar talk at Hay Festival 2016

I never really felt wholly connected. I didn't really understand them, I didn't understand the way they, sort of, worked, as it were. I understood the way animals worked, I was beginning to understand that at least, but I didn't understand the way they worked.

I was in a world of one and they were going to their parties, and doing things, and girls wanted to snog boys and vice versa, or not vice versa as the case may be, but I just wasn't there. And I was initially very confused and frustrated and angry, very angry. I didn't realise, I couldn't identify, I thought I was wrong. I thought there was something wrong with me. Why didn't I fit it?

One of those, my Biology teacher, I wouldn't be having this conversation with anyone today, if it weren't for his energies and direction he gave me at the time. He seemed to identify my obsessions and think they should be put to good use.

I was always getting caned for saying what I thought. I mean, if the teacher had BO.... she did have BO! Why wouldn't I say that? That didn't compute with me. But it didn't compute with her either.

I see it all with I think what to many people would be an astonishing clarity. I remember all of the details in the book, you know, visually very powerfully and brightly and accurately I think.

With a power of observation like that, and a pen like that... why you don't turn it on any human in the book.
Um, I suppose I like animals more than people.

[Relationships with animals are] very strong and they're very trusting and they're very complete, and perhaps more than most of the relationships I've had with humans.

There is no competition between myself and them.

I genuinely enjoy coming second to a tiger. It's a privilege to share my life with both of them... I feel a great deal of comfort in the fact that that bond between her and her animal is more powerful perhaps than the one we have between us.

Initially it was very superficial. When I first picked up ladybirds and I put things into jam jars it was the perfection and the sheer beauty of them...
As I grew older and I began to understand how the natural world lives in this remarkable, complex but dynamic harmony, how everything integrates and has a place. So the starling isn't as beautiful on its own... It's more beautiful when it's connected to everything that it plays a role in. Where it's eating something and being eaten, when it's shaping that community. And at that point the human species was left far behind, because we don't do that. Everything we do upsets that natural harmony and disturbs it, damages it and destroys it. So my liking at that point for the human organism failed considerably.

At the time I was immediately struck by a difference. In the way [the people of the Sumatran hunter-gather tribe] that they behaved, that they moved, that they carried themselves, their whole attitude. Everything that came out of them... was different... It was only afterwards that I realised that what I'd sensed and seen was that these were perfect people. They were in harmony with that environment. And when they moved they moved through it with a grace that I'd never seen anyone move... And the way that they interacted with us, without wonder, awe, without any jealousy or envy for the trappings that we have... They had an enormous self-confidence because they were fitting, the fitted into that environment. So I saw perfect humans once, in Sumatra.

We have the ability to rectify so many of the things that we've done and are doing wrong... but unfortunately we're not implementing them. And this makes me again, enormously disappointed in humans.

So we will solve this, but why smash it up to start with? Why not build on what we've got left now. So I'm very frustrated with the human species.

Yeah. I have. Perhaps not quite with the same intensity as that kestrel. I think there was a mark left by the bird and its loss, which hasn't ever really been addressed. But yes, I have had other animals that I've lived with and lost that I've found pretty much the same. Both while they're alive, the immense joy at being able to spend time with them, share my life with the, and the irrecoverable loss when they disappeared... I'm not fearful of it. I think that you give everything, you take everything back. So I wouldn't not culture more of those relationships in the future... I know that when you get on that train, it's going to be derailed at some point.

Killing for no reason is not something you ever see in the natural world. There's no other species on earth that will kill something else unless it has a reason to do it... but we will do it without any... I still struggle with killing things for no reason. It doesn't compute with me.

The book essentially is about how we develop an appreciation for life and try and develop an understanding of the role that death plays in life.

Because we don't know when we're going to die... we never think it's going to happen. We think life is limitless, it just goes on and on, and this means we don't count rainbows, we don't feel things as profoundly about thinkgs as we should, because we think we can do it tomorrow.

I had things dying all around me, I was reading about extinct creatures, the dinosaurs, and yet it was always "when you leave school, Chris", "when you go to University", "when you grow up", "when you have a family" and it was like, "hold on, that may not happen, because it didn't happen for those tadpoles. They didn't even get to grow legs, let alone go to University!" So I've always been confused by our reluctance to address death, and I think it's because we don't know when it's coming, and if we did, I think we'd have a much healthier outlook towards it.

How did it all come right? One of the most instrumental aspects.of that was punk-rock. I had got to a point when I was sixteen, in '76, when I'd realised that I was different from everyone else and that I really couldn't connect with them and I'd become very angry with them for excluding me. And then all of a sudden there was this immediate device of being able to identify very clearly to everyone else that I wasn't like them. I liked the music... and the ethos... It was very clear to me to say certainly to my peers "I'm not one of you and I'm pretty pleased about it" and so it was an ideal separating mechanism. It didn't solve all of the problems: I still thought I was the one that was wrong, but it was an ideal way to show other people that I wasn't part of their world.

Anger needs to be used for a purpose. It needs to be used creatively, so you have to turn that into a way of making progress, whether it's personal or other. And I still stick with that now. I do get very angry about things, but the anger now is directed at trying to come up with a solution, rather than scream and shout, spit and wail and make a terrible noise with a guitar.

I'm not ever satisfied... I think that that is a useful fuel, dissatisfaction, and I do fear contentment. And I think for me, I worry about contentment breeding flabbiness and lack of energy and direction. And happiness is something that I don't think can be sculpted. Happiness is perhaps something which comes fleetingly, when it's unexpected, and it has to be treasured and again that goes back to that thing I was saying about knowing when you're going to die and how much treasure, and how much weight you should put on circumstance...
I began to understand that things like that don't last. They can be fleeting and they must be treasured. That's why I get up every morning and I run with my dogs... and I enjoy every moment... because that may end at any moment. So happiness is something that I don't try to make, but if it happens, I don't waste.