I don’t mean that metaphorically. When diagnosing my ADHD, I scored 30th percentile recalling unrelated sentences. The bad 30%. Drunk people do better.
I’ve successfully memorized a mere handful of things, and I can sum them all up right here:
- My birthdate (but not how many years old I am)
- My address for ≈20 years, and my current one
- 4 phone numbers, 2 of which are nigh-identical
- My dad’s, brother’s, and sister’s birthdays
I know theirs because I think of my sibling’s birthdays as relative to mine, and dad’s is a day away from a holiday.
I still can’t remember mom’s. I know. I remember the month, and when it approaches, I look it up.
In my first relationship, I forced myself to retain our anniversary and her birthday. Because if I didn’t, that information would no longer be relevant, if you get my drift. It was really hard. Strong emotions are my one lifehack for this, but they need to be industrial-strength.
And I’m pretty sure I remembered the anniversary only because it was October 3rd, and I had just seen Mean Girls.
So how do you remember anything then
Immersion helps. I can’t remember anyone’s name until I’ve heard them called ten times by others.
When that won’t work, there’s only one thing I can do: understand it. If I learn how new information relates to a system as a whole, I’m good to go.
That’s why I blow hard at names, addresses, and dates — most of the time, they’re arbitrary.
This also means I learn differently. I understand for most folks, memorization is the easiest solution. But for me, I have to dive in and really grok what even the arbitrary bits are. A lot of coding terms are literal jokes (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor and GNU’s Not Unix, for example), but learning those stories makes them stick.
As a result, when learning something big, I have an extended, frustrating period of incompetentence and hopelessness, then suddenly it all clicks and it’s second nature. This has its ups and downs. Pro: second-nature knowledge is a powerful asset. Con: but sometimes it’s knowledge about, oh, some real-life examples:
- Minecraft engine quirks
- Obsolete HTML elements and attributes
- Weird animal facts
- Homestar Runner