Context-Driven Associative Memory

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I have another wordy wall of text, and was wondering if anyone else can relate to this:

My memory annoys me a lot of the time (and seems to contribute a lot to uneven skills on my part).

Edit to add: I don't think it's associative memory, although it works through associative memory. Anbuend suggested a movement disorder. This makes sense to me..

It's all associative. I remember things because I remember other things because I remember other things because something or someone in my environment triggered an association. And the associations may not always be obvious and it is often difficult for me to draw a connection based on an explicit reference:

If you ask me to name as many animals as I can with names that start with g, I won't get very far. I don't associate the letter g with animals, or really anything except the alphabet and words and slang terms that actually sound the same. I mean I can come up with giraffe and gorilla, but that's really it. If you ask me to name my favorite movie, I can't do it (I might be able to name several movies I like, but the list will not be consistent each time). But if you ask me about a specific movie, I can talk about it at length - assuming I had a strong reaction to it.

I've been trying to dredge up a lot of childhood memories to better explain my history lately, and I can't just sit down and think "What happened in the first grade?" and get much out of it. I actually have two memories I explicitly associate with the first grade - being fitted with glasses (and having to wear them) and asking my first grade teacher if she had hot flashes. But then because of that, I remember why I knew what hot flashes were - my mother went to Planned Parenthood one day and took me along. I didn't have a book to read so I read the pamphlets in the waiting room. All of them, including a couple of booklets on vasectomy and hysterectomy. I ended up taking these booklets home and reading them a lot. The consequence of this is that I managed to get a fairly unusual version of sex education and knew more details about male and female anatomy than many kids 10 years older than I was. I just didn't know what all these details meant. And the association stops there.

Or I find there's topics I want to talk about, but I can't because I haven't really organized my thoughts about them because nothing prompted me to. One is that I've wanted to really lay out my communication difficulties to my therapist, but just wanting to wasn't enough. I needed a prompt - and someone explaining to me the other day that my excessive need to clarify myself when people misunderstood me read to her as extremely defensive (in fact, she believes this is the correct interpretation of my behavior), which resulted in my writing probably a good 5,000 words on how I communicate and where I think many of my deficits lie. This isn't something that I'll post anywhere or show my therapist (it makes my brain sound like a machine, which seems to bother or confuse neurotypicals). But I can at least use the information in it to create what I hope are more accessible explanations. This also gave me the framework to discuss my history in school, despite the communication writeup not having anything directly to do with school.

And even topics I can talk about I can't always talk about because the information is in my brain, in a database - for example - where I just need the right prompt to access it. In most conversations this isn't relevant. In some, it is, but I am unable to bring the information out without finding a prompt (and I sometimes use google to trigger the prompt). Sometimes someone says something and the information flows whether I want it to or not.

Sometimes, I build up disparate pieces of information that relate to the same thing, but I am not able to explicitly connect them to each other, so it is difficult for me to access them all at once. I might be able to access a group of them through association, but I am never able to put them all together. That is, until something triggers me to start making connections, or I receive information that establishes those connections, in which case I switch from feeling like I know maybe a limited amount about a subject some of the time to knowing a lot more than I realized, and knowing it all at once ... sometimes.

Sometimes I know about a thing in one context and can't interpret it in other contexts unless I can make a connection that highlights it in that context. Like, I know that I take things literally - sometimes without realizing it. I know that I sometimes miscommunicate with people and this can cause arguments. I did not connect these two things - that my literal interpretations were not just occasionally quirky, but could and did actually cause communication difficulties - until a friend pointed out to me that she had noticed that literal interpretations would get me into trouble. This is maybe not the best example, but it's the one I was thinking of.

One thing I also find odd that I think is related: If you give me a paper or post or article to read and say "Check out how the writer mentions a specific topic," I will look for that topic and I will probably not notice much else because I am looking for that topic, and I discard the other information as irrelevant unless it triggers something else (which is actually less likely in this situation because I am focused on one thing). If you hand me the same article and say "You should read this" I am much more likely to notice more details about the article.

There are a ton of appropriate examples for all of these that I could use, but because all of my thinking was in terms of communication and information, that's what I am able to relate it to right now. I am not at this moment able to make connections to other skills or activities that go beyond these things.

I also think this association contributes to my random topic switching in conversations, where verbally (and in chat, sometimes even in post/comment threads) I associate from topic to topic and get completely lost and sidetracked from where I wanted to begin. This happens less in text because I can always look back and see where I was, which will usually bring the associations back on track. It complicates my communication at times, though. I do think this aspect is related to ADHD - all of it may be related to ADHD, for that matter, but I think it's not just ADHD.

I think some of it is, also, that I do not think primarily in words, and so these things exist in my mind as something until I can access and talk or write about them, at which point they become explicit language. And I think the act of translating them from one medium to the other helps make the knowledge more concrete and real to me, but the newly integrated whole ends up back in my mind, existing as something again until the knowledge is triggered and again I transfer it to language.

Now I just need to work out why I fixate so much on cognition.

Last edited by Verdandi on 16 Feb 2011, 6:54 am, edited 2 times in total.

That is the way human memory works. All the memory "whizzes" peddle some method of association.

ruveyn

I do realize that humans remember things by association, but I am trying to work out why I find more explicit memory tasks more difficult than they seem to be for others - like the "name animals that begin with G" thing, something similar being used to test vocabulary (although perhaps it's a poor test) or as an executive function test.

Last edited by Verdandi on 15 Feb 2011, 4:35 am, edited 2 times in total.

Hmm, that's not what I've observed in NTs over the years. I am extremely association-driven like Verdandi described, I can hardly remember anything at all from the past unless something triggers a memory.

I also know the database thing, except for me it is very often as opposed to rarely; unless I carefully plan out what I want to say in a conversation, I won't be able to think of anything at all, which often makes me look stupid even though in most cases I'm much smarter than the person I'm talking to. So because of that, many people in real-life think I'm stupid, since I can never form thoughts well, although online I can express myself a million times better.

Thank you, this is what I am talking about.



I'm not sure what you're referring to with the often/rarely comment - could you clarify?

I get this problem with conversations. One reason my therapist thinks I am so good at communication is because I have basically been reciting forum posts I've made in various places as well as conversations I've had in chat at her. But when she pushed me out of that framework I couldn't say anything at all.

I also have a lot of, I guess, database data so I have a lot of possible scripts for conversations, which makes it easier to have something to say at least some of the time - unfortunately, it's not always relevant.

I can totally relate to everything you said!! ! If someone asks me something to remember, I can't come up with it just like that, and I look really stupid. But in a certain context with the right triggers, I can remember everything. I wonder if this might also explain my issue with remembering people... I don't remember faces OR names, but if I talk with that person for a while and then they say something that is a trigger, it is like a key has suddenly unlocked my memory and I can remember EVERYTHING - where we were exactly when we chatted last, and all sorts of things. It kind of scares the person lol

I have this problem too - I thought I was exaggerating it and mentioned to an old friend - and she confirmed she'd seen me doing it a lot.

Okay, I remembered something that may explain this more clearly:

My grandfather (who I suspect had more than a few AS traits, but I don't think had AS himself) made a tractor out of car parts and scrap metal that he used for a ton of work around his farm. One thing he also did was let his grandchildren - including myself - do was drive it. Anyway, it had a manual transmission, and I could operate it pretty easily, and drove it pretty well in the pasture (at least when I wasn't accelerating to high speed and taking risks, which got me into some trouble).

A couple of years later, I tried to learn to drive a car which also had a manual transmission. I was completely unable to do this. Nothing I knew from the tractor transferred over, and in fact despite the controls being virtually identical, I never connected the two until the past couple of months. This is the kind of limited context I mean: I can have a skill in one circumstance, and not in another. The same with knowledge.

And at different points in my life I have told people, "Yes, I learned to drive a stick on my grandfather's tractor" and "No, I completely failed to learn to drive a stick in my cousin's car" without connecting the two, or even having both pieces of information in my mind at the same time.

If I can remember more examples, I'll post them.

The inside of your mind sounds so exactly like the inside of my mind that it's kind of scary. Thanks for writing this, it clarifies things about my memory I wasn't able to articulate.

I'm glad my self-absorbed introspection helped. And thanks for saying so.

I'm not sure association is the problem. As pointed out by ruveyn, association is how memory works. But I have similar challenges in recall, so I'm thinking its more that I can't build my own associations or I get stuck on an association. Something external has to make the bridge to a memory, I can't easily make that bridge myself. Or like the thing with animals starting with the letter "g". I don't do so well on those because I get stuck on the list. I thought gar, gnu, then started going over the list again and again but not adding anything to it. But if you had asked me to list animals with hooves, I could do fine because I can picture them in my mind. So what triggers my memories seems different as well.

Yes, you are probably correct about that. Maybe it's another matter of executive function in some way. I think you're right about how the associations are built - or rather, not built.

And yeah, I can list hooved animals easily. I can visualize hooves, I can't so easily visualize words that start with g.

Hi Verdandi! Interesting post!

What you've described is very familiar to me too. Your example about driving stick shift in different contexts reminds me of once when I spent eight hours - literally all day - in a panic reviewing the rules for driving and looking at maps of the highway I would have to drive on later that day and researching the differences between minivans and cars (I had never driven a minivan) because I had to drive a minivan on unfamiliar highways and it was like starting all over again even though I had five years experience as a driver in other contexts.

I think it's an issue of not seeing clear boundaries where NTs see them. Boundaries let you define things and see things with enough common traits as the same, whereas otherwise you (someone with AS) could go on infinitely finding ever more miniscule differences between two things that to an NT look and are the same.

I've gone through this with some things, but not others:

Like, a lot of video games have controls in common, and I actually have an easy time going from one to the next - they're easily categorized similarly for me.

However, there is one video game in a familiar genre (real-time strategy - the game is Sins of a Solar Empire) that I cannot figure out how to play because it is not very similar to other RTS games (Warcraft, Starcraft, Dawn of War) and I end up closing the game up after five minutes because I can't work out what to do at all.

Most people I know just dove in and played. I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to do that.

I've had other games like this as well, although sometimes I come back to them weeks or months later and they're easy to learn. In fact, this happens so often I should have mentioned it in relation to learning stuff while not thinking about it.



I think you have a point there. I also have a tendency to split hairs and then split the split hairs.

Last edited by Verdandi on 15 Feb 2011, 9:18 am, edited 3 times in total.

Sounds like my memory as well.

Isn't that weird? Maybe because animals don't start with letters. Words start with letters.

I still haven't got past gorilla, gar, giraffe and gnu. I'm beginning to think there are only four animals in the world that start with "g".

Wait. I just thought of guppy.