Probably shouldn’t admit this.

[Bigguy]

I remember an old episode of “My Favorite Martian” where Uncle Martin read a book he liked. So, he used a machine that wiped the memory of reading it so he could enjoy reading it again, as though for the first time.

Mrs. Sharon and I have always liked TV shows and movies. Even in our younger days, we’d stay in a watch a movie or TV show rather go clubbing or partying. We enjoy each other company and are happy just being together watching something.

With the Covid lockdown, we’ve taken that to a whole new level. With streaming services, we’ve got so much material to draw from. So, we got after it.

On day we were looking for something to watch and saw a series that sounded promising. Going to the menu we saw that somebody on that account had already watched that show. ????? We both accused each other of having watched it alone. We both denied it.

As neither of us remembered watching it, we decided to start watching it. (again?) If we suddenly remembered the show, we could quit. S1E1, neither of us remembered it. ????

Somewhere in S1E2, we BOTH started to remember a few scenes. We still didn’t know what was coming next, but we recognized a few scenes as they played. This has happened with a couple of other shows since that first.

The only thing I can ascribe this too is that the Mrs. has one of those Martian memory machines, and is gaslighting me about it so that we can enjoy really good shows we’ve already seen. I mean at the young ages of 67 (me) and 72 (the Mrs.) I’m sure we aren’t just losing it.

Anyway, I’ve got my eye out for that machine. If I find it, I’ll reverse engineer it, get a patent, and retire in luxury.

[RevolverRob]

There is a theory, that I've heard about that if you watch enough/read enough you eventually forget you saw/read it in the first place.

I don't know how true it is - not being an expert in memory recall or cognition @Glenn E. Meyer

[Bigguy]

There is a theory, that I've heard about that if you watch enough/read enough you eventually forget you saw/read it in the first place.

I don't know how true it is - not being an expert in memory recall or cognition @Glenn E. Meyer

Sounds good to me. I'll buy that over I'm just losing it.

But all joking aside, I took a psychology class on sensory perception and memory in college. (An elective that sounded interesting.) It turns out that human memory isn't a DVD or even a VHS tape. It is malleable and relational. Something like a TV show or movie, that has no connection with income (work), family, or other life changing or threatening occurrences, are given a low priority in the human brain. (And storage priority) It is likely still in memory, but the pathways to it are overgrown and unusable.

I can't remember a TV show I saw two years ago, but I remember asking my wife to marry me, our wedding, and the birth of my son, with chrystal clarity. That's not seniality, it prioritization.

[blues]

There is a theory, that I've heard about that if you watch enough/read enough you eventually forget you saw/read it in the first place.

I don't know how true it is - not being an expert in memory recall or cognition @Glenn E. Meyer

I don't doubt it. Certainly, not with the classics...Les Miserables, Count of Monte Cristo etc. But there are many books I've read that when I come across them again they seem "vaguely familar".

Same for certain TV shows...though not so much the ones we grew up on.

[Joe S]

The lady of the house can watch the same things 15 times in a week if she likes it and has the time. I find that I have to start to forget it a little before I can enjoy again. But even then, I am prone to getting up and spontaneously grabbing a book or starting chores or going on a walk in the middle. The screen just doesn't tend to hold my interest much.

We often will watch an episode or two of a series, and then months later, I'll ask if she would like to return to it. She always maintains that I must have watched the pilot alone, as she can't remember. When she's not home, I don't even turn on the TV, never owned one until she moved in. Different kinds of brain.

[Glenn E. Meyer]

Source confusion - here's a rundown of such memory tricks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misattribution_of_memory

[Totem Polar]

It can always be worse. I had the dubious experience of logging into an account at one of the schools I teach at to get started building a class I only teach in spring. This was in 2021, during the pandemic. There, in my online canvas files, was a shit load of video lecture that I had shot for the class under some degree of duress—as felt by many instructors worldwide—in SP2020. I had NO MEMORY WHATSOEVER of having shot all that footage, and yet there I was on video, in my home studio, with segment after segment, and lesson after lesson on file from the previous year.

Pretty fucking disconcerting, frankly. To be fair, there was other stuff going on in my life at the time that made the pandemic seem like an also-ran problem, in all, but yeah… memory can be tricky, and absolutely comes apart under stress.

On the upside, the person that I co-instructed the course with confessed to having had the same experience logging in to discover all these power points for her portion of the material from 2020–also with no memory at all of having built the slides.

Even better, since all that shit was still there, it was a lot less work to get the class up and running than I was expecting.

[Half Moon]

It can always be worse. I had the dubious experience of logging into an account at one of the schools I teach at to get started building a class I only teach in spring. This was in 2021, during the pandemic. There, in my online canvas files, was a shit load of video lecture that I had shot for the class under some degree of duress—as felt by many instructors worldwide—in SP2020. I had NO MEMORY WHATSOEVER of having shot all that footage, and yet there I was on video, in my home studio, with segment after segment, and lesson after lesson on file from the previous year.

Pretty fucking disconcerting, frankly. To be fair, there was other stuff going on in my life at the time that made the pandemic seem like an also-ran problem, in all, but yeah… memory can be tricky, and absolutely comes apart under stress.

On the upside, the person that I co-instructed the course with confessed to having had the same experience logging in to discover all these power points for her portion of the material from 2020–also with no memory at all of having built the slides.

Even better, since all that shit was still there, it was a lot less work to get the class up and running than I was expecting.

Brownies... 😜

[0ddl0t]

The most disconcerting 6 words you'll ever hear at a bar:


"You don't remember me, do you?"

[Rick R]

Memory is the second thing to go…