Memory

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You know that's kind of the situation I'm in. I've been out of school for a couple of years and without much going on in my life. Honestly I think that's why I'm beginning to realize so many of these things about myself. They've always been present to varying degrees, but I've always been busy with life. So despite my hangups, I've just had to work pretty steadily to try and push past them. Now that I'm in a sort of no man's land without much idea of where to go next, I have a lot of time to ruminate on the factors that have gotten me here. If only changing these factors was as easy :/

Good luck to you though I know how much of a struggle that all can be, seeing as how I'm experiencing it myself at the moment. But it sounds like you're taking positive steps toward change I hope things work out for you.

That did help actually The article seems to put into words more or less what I experience. I'm going to do some more research on the working memory subject, this has all been enlightening to me so far.

I appreciate everyone's responses!

So that's why I seem to be getting stupider! 0_0

I was wondering about that. There were things I could do as a kid that I couldn't do as a teenager and there are things I could do when I was 20 that I can't do now. When I was 20 I used to be better at using a computer for non-work stuff than I am now.

Maybe that's because back then I had the time and patience to set things up just so and now I'm really impatient so I want everything to work straight away. The older I get, the harder I work and that means I have less brain energy for other tasks. Also when I was 20 I hadn't yet seen the horrors of Windows 8 and 10

I used be able to spend ages setting custom themes on Android but now I've forgotten all that because I no longer have huge amounts of free time. What free time I do have is not high-energy free time. In other words 8 hours free time when I'm tired is less free than 8 hours free time when I'm not tired. Also I forget how to use Android due to my bizarre obsession with old BlackBerries.

But now I kind of get why middle aged people like iPhones and Macintoshes so much. I used to love customizability. I'd spend hours on theming. But your middle aged professional who works long hours wants something he can use out of the box. Android and Windows 7 were highly customizable yet by the same token, the default settings on both sucked. Whereas with Macintosh and iPhone, since there's little customizability other than changing the background image, what you see out of the box is already as good as it will ever be. That's why boring overworked old people love Apple so much.

Also my abilities as a student degraded. Top of the class in primary school, bottom of the class in high school. It felt like my abilities stayed the same but everyone else got smarter really fast. They went from stupider than me to smarter than me. It felt like my memory and intelligence stayed at the same level. When I was 8 I had the intelligence of a 12 year old and when I was 16 I still had the intelligence of a 12 year old. Maybe that was an illusion because as a teen I was on Risperidone which sapped my intelligence, energy and will power and totally robbed me of the opportunity to have a good education. I was going to school stoned, sedated and exhausted. I remember when I was 7 feeling like I was much more intelligent. This was also an illusion brought on by being prescribed dexamphetamine. Anyway I went from maths being my strongest skill and writing essays being my weakest skill in primary school to maths being my weakest skill and writing essays being my strongest skill in high school. Go figure. I was always good at arithmetic. As a young boy I was praised for it. As a high schooler they didn't bother with arithmatic. They had other forms of maths that frightened and confused me. I didn't lose any abilities but the other students gained some.

Anyway, to answer the OP's question yes I have experiences were I can remember enough to get an encyclopedic knowledge of some special interest/obsession but can't make myself remember stuff about a practical, useful subject when I'm not obsessed with it.

Terrible that I never get obsessed with subjects that are actually useful. e.g. Right now I'm studying on weekends to get my ISTQB certification. Not only can I not retain much of it. I can't even concentrate while I'm studying. It's so boring! While I'm studying my mind will wander to other subjects. This would never happen if I was studying something like Super Nintendo games or Star Trek.

It's like I can't make myself interested in something unless I inherently want to be interested in it and I can't fake wanting it. But NTs can be better students because they can force themselves to be extremely interested in some useful but boring academic subject and so excell in their studies.

Also I have the typical aspie short term memory problem of not being able to hold a lot of stuff in my head at once, which makes be bad at multitasking and also bad at switching rapidly between tasks (other people can switch instantly but I take a while to change gears so rapid task switching slows me down immensely (if only my boss got that)). I once read a book that said the aspie brain is like a computer with a massive hard drive and 640K of RAM. Can remember lots of facts but not much working memory.

Last edited by RetroGamer87 on 28 Aug 2016, 10:08 am, edited 2 times in total.

Well, that puts me in my place! (Just kidding, this is a very interesting post.)

^ The older and more boring I get the more I feel like joining the club

I can see a few advantages in Apple. I like how the iPhone has a silence switch and I hate how Android has multiple volume sliders and the volume buttons control the ringtone volume when I want to turn the media down before it starts playing in a public place. I like how the graphical threading is better optimized than Android and how they come with more internal memory. SD card memory stopped being useful when Android started saying certain things can't be installed onto SD card, yet they still made phones with 16GB of internal memory (half taken up by preinstalled crapware) and 192GB of useless SD card memory.

I like how OSX has collum view but hate how the columns are never wide enough to see the file names and even if you widen them, it won't remember, it will go back to narrow the next time you turn on the Mac. I like how OSX printscreen saves directly to file. You can do it rapidfire. But I hate how the maximise button doesn't maximise. I hate how there's no Winsnap. I hate how the included mouse is uncomfortable. I love how easily the Macbook Air fits into my inside jacket pocket. There should be more PC laptops like that. There are definitely apple things I want to see in PC and Android.

While I don't like Apple's patronising attitudes at least they had the sense to keep their tablet and desktop operating systems separate, unlike Microsoft making horrible Windows 8/10, designing them *only* for the Surface, to the detriment of desktop and laptop users. Just because they wanted to sell a few million Surfaces they condemned hundreds of millions of desktop users to a GUI that's designed primarily for touchscreen use!

/tangent. I will soon be joining the boring old people club. I'm nearly 30!

Getting back to brain stuff I think the brain has limited resources so it can only be good at a few things. For a while last year I felt like I was becoming more charismatic. I was also falling behind at work. This year I really pushed myself at work and started getting better. Also I become less charismatic and started speaking in my old monotonous voice. Why? Because I was really tired. And when you're tired you can't be charismatic.

I used to think those ditzy extroverts who can't do basic arithmetic were just stupid. Wrong. They can keep track of dozens and dozens of people, making mental models of all of them while I can't even remember that many names.

Being social uses a seriously large amount of brain power. That's why the ditzy extroverts have little left over for more intellectual pursuits and while the bookish nerds have little left over for social pursuits.

Actually it has been theorized that being social was what drove the evolution of human intelligence. Being inventive is not a survival advantage because when one caveman invents a better kind of club the entire tribe can start making them without actually having to invent it themselves. Now we all use advanced technology that we didn't invent.

But read some Jane Goodall and look at the power struggles in Primate groups. It's like something out of Game of Thrones. It may be that being able to form alliances to fight off rivals who are forming other alliances turned into an intellectual arms race of outwitting that is responsible for the evolution of human level intelligence.

When I read about this theory it gave me a newfound respect for ditzy extroverts. They're not idiots as I thought they were. Being that extroverted is actually an extremely complex intellectual task. They may have less brain power left for intellectual pursuits. The very smartest people are good at both.

^

A lot of Apple's success comes down to the way they market their devices as an elegant and easy-to-use solution to everyday computing - i.e: computing for dummies, although they never say this. The design and look of the stuff enables them to persuade people to pay high prices for what in many ways is mostly a high-tech status symbol.

You must have big inside pockets if you can fit a MacBook Air in them!

I agree about Apple's patronising attitude. That's why it gets called 'The Church of Apple', there's a lot of preaching. I tend to buy online and avoid going into Apple Stores. Dealing with their 'geniuses', who sometimes treat you as if you don't know how a mouse works instead of someone who's come in to spend quite a lot of money, always makes me want to hit them.

Yes, a lot of their design decisions are very sensible. They seem to have their act together more than Microsoft do.