Monday, December 14, 2009

The Base Layer

They moved like hundreds of white flies
hovering in the air above the frozen ground
Afraid to land because it was so cold.

Each snowflake in turn,
brittle and light,
would gradually descend until it met the pavement
suddenly exploding into a thousand pieces
becoming fragmented clouds
of crystalline dust

Friday, December 4, 2009

My Memory for Names

The part of your brain that saves and retrieves information is called the hippocampus. It turns out that memories are formed in connection to other memories, and are stronger if there is something to associate with them. (The strongest memories are formed when there is an emotion attached to them).
So why does my brain have such trouble with names? Is it because I'm not associating them with an emotion, or is there some rationale for the way it's working?
For me, the priority seems to be:
Boys name or Girls name
Number of Letters
Number of Syllables
Specific letters in the name
and then I lose track of what my brain's doing from there. So if I were to build a catalog of names to make it easier to recall one, I would start from there.

Girl>4 letters>Two syllables>ends in a vowel
Tara, Sara, Olga, Lisa, Tina, Gina, Emma, Kara,
closely associated with
Amy, Stacy, Lacy, etc.