Xuen Tey - Week #16 - Timelines
Most people’s minds seem to follow a linear pattern. This event happened, then this one and that one and on and on, with neat little dates, a sequence easily translated into a straightforward timeline from the distant past up until the present day. I’ve heard my friends easily tell me that a specific event happened in a specific year or date or time, and I have no idea how they do it.
I’ve mentioned my memory being like puzzle pieces, with different memories that have to be pieced together, but I never mentioned that I am terrible with puzzles. Even if I did have all the pieces, I would get terribly lost trying to organize them into what is at the start, what’s inbetween, and what is at the end. I’m not good at trying to organize past events. My childhood, in my head, is organized by grade, since I can tell what grade I was in based on which teachers I had and I felt that was a much better way to track stages of my childhood rather than tracking my age, which wasn’t terribly easy to track since I felt about the same at all ages. If I ever wanted to try and compile a proper timeline for all of the random moments I recall acros my early years, it would lead to me staring down a very messy sheet of paper, trying to place what year I was in second grade, or in fifth grade, or how old I was at the time.
This came up because one of my friends and I was trying to explain the plot of a specific game to another friend of mine, but all the different stages kept on getting mixed up in my head while my other friend seemed to have a more clear understanding of the timeline than me, and it made me realize that most people don’t really struggle to organize their facts the way I do.
Hi, Xuen! I think it’s so cool how brain functions vary so dramatically across people. Your blog reminded me of the “mind’s eye” concept I read about a couple months ago. Specifically, in an experiment where people visualize an apple in their minds, some people can fully create 3D renditions with specific colors and textures, while other people struggle to imagine anything at all. There are even some people with hyperphantasia who are able to imagine with such detail and immersion that it’s similar to actual sight. Anyways, I find it very interesting that you have felt around the same at all ages. Though, like you, it can get a little hard to remember the exact ages of events, I have found that I feel like I’ve lived completely different lives throughout the years. Maybe that makes it easier for me to place events clearly because I’ve had defining and specific events that I can tie to each age. However, I do relate to organizing memories by grade. I think different grades are such concrete and different hallmarks so the events inside them are naturally easy to separate. I too, when remembering events, usually start with “in first grade…” or “in middle school…” Now that I think of it, I also sometimes generalize grades too. For example, as I just said, I usually group middle school memories into one category instead of separating between seventh and eighth grade. It’s super cool how memory works. I really enjoyed reading your blogs this year!
ReplyDeleteThank you for all your introspective blogs this year! I enjoyed how they were all somehow entwined with each other, in a way that just flowed seamlessly even after weeks in between them. Timelines are great, awesome, especially for APEng where all the events in a novel seem to pass by in a blur. And they're usually great for my own life, where like you said, memories that are just so messy and scattered in your mind. But being too linear is boring! I'd rather have my past be a collection of just all the good moments. Because in the end, it won't matter anyway. The time period isn't too important; as long as the memory happened, it doesn't really matter when it happened. Some things are just more difficult to keep in track, but organization was never my strong suit either. Not everything has to be perfectly in line, and I like the way how sometimes the nicest things will stand out in messy places. Thank you again Xuen! I loved having you in my cohort this year!
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