Brain farts…

As I lay awake in bed this morning, for some reason I got to thinking about my gym membership, and how it’s a recurring charge on my debit card. All of a sudden I got really confused, and couldn’t decide if “recurring” was an actual word or not – it just sounded incredibly wrong for some reason. To make matters worse, the word “occur” showed up in my head as “accur”, which definitely isn’t a word and just confused the hell out of me even more. Finally I was able to “see” the right spelling for occur in my head, and that cleared everything up. But the weird thing is that apparently the “right” version of the word/concept “occur” that’s stored in my memory is a picture of the correct spelling of the word, rather than a sound byte of the correct pronunciation. Which makes me wonder, what the hell do people who can’t read/write think like?

This weird memory stuff reminded me of another strange thing about my brain – I’m completely incapable of reciting the names of the months backwards (that is, without “cheating” and re-memorizing the order in reverse). This came up somewhat embarrassingly in high school when I had to take a “pre-concussion” test that was required of all athletes – the idea being that if you got a concussion you’d retake the test so they could see how badly your brain got scrambled. The lady administering the test asked me to recite the months backwards, and I was like, “Um… yeah… I can’t really do that.” She kind of just stared at me blankly and then moved on to the next question. It was pretty funny.

Same goes of course for the alphabet. For whatever reason the alphabet is stored in my head as kind of a playable audio file of the nursery rhyme – I can start it from the beginning, but I can’t really pause it and I can’t really start from an arbitrary location (I can start from “qrs” though, not sure why). Like if you told me to recite the alphabet starting from the letter “d”, I’d have to silently start from the beginning – I just can’t get the nursery rhyme to start from “d” for some reason.

And obviously thinking of the alphabet as an audio file makes it ridiculously difficult to say it backwards – I don’t even like trying to anymore, it just flusters me way too much. But I think this is really interesting though, because my roommates can do this kind of backwards recitation stuff pretty easily. Sam the astro guy in particular is really good at it – he says he can “see” large chunks of the alphabet in his head (in much the same way that I can “see” a copy of the word “occur”), so all he has to do is read them backwards. If you listen to me trying to say the alphabet backwards, it’s painfully obvious I’m doing it in a horribly inefficient way that requires tons of computation, whereas Sam is clearly doing it the “right” way.

Okay, so this is all kind of weird, but the next question is: why would I have a visual memory of the word “occur” but an audio memory of the alphabet? I find that really really odd, and I can’t decide if it makes any sense or not. Plus I wonder what makes your brain decide to store this stuff in one way or the other – why does Sam do things differently from me? Is it genetic, a product of our educations?

Anyways moral of the story is that cognitive science is craaazy.