StarTrekker wrote:
It's not savantism I don't think, but I have the ability to memorise large chunks of spoken dialogue by pairing every phrase with a mental image. The image serves as a tie back to the words, and I can use it to pull the words up and repeat the dialogue verbatim, even after having heard it only once. I do this a lot with song lyrics, because I get bored at work and like to sing to myself, but it's really annoying when I don't know the whole song, so I use my pictures to memorise the lyrics.
I use that same technique to memorize things most of the time, but it takes me much longer. I certainly can't do it the first time I hear/read it. A while ago I memorized Carl Sagan's
"Pale Blue Dot" speech and recently I have taken note on how it's stored in my memory, for a lot of it there are pictures paired with words as you have described but it took longer then my first time hearing it to form and memorize those. For most portions of it I actually have a mental photo of a text version of the speech that I looked up while I was memorizing it which I can read from, it's really quite interesting. I have looked at that and studied it enough that reading from it is rather easy in many places and I can even tell you where all the line breaks are. For most of the speech when I'm reciting it I have both the image for that part of the text and the text scrolling past at the same time as if the image were transparent and I could see the text through it, this is helpful because I am less likely to get it wrong.
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Also known as MarsMatter.
Diagnosed with Asperger's, ADD, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder in 2004.
In denial that it was a problem until early 2016.
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