Memory

The in topic in my life this week seems to be 'memory'. Last thursday, our reading class discussion was on memory. I think the students found it stimulating too. Even though this is a general topic, one would hardly think of learning the terms like explicit memory, implicit memory, and such. Everyone suddenly started analysing if they encode memory visually, acoustically or semantically more. Or if they use implicit or explicit memory more.

It occured to me that my implicit memory might be more prominent than my explicit one. I remember things that happened when I was very young, like 2 or 3 years old, but only the 'feeling' of what they were. Once, I got hurt by a nail when my grandfather's house was under construction. I somewhat remember that it was at night, and that I felt the pain, and I remember seeing blood. But I can't recall who were there, what was the occasion and what I was doing. At other time, I remember feeling happy to watch my grandfather's buffalo grazing on a deserted rice-field. And I was wearing a pretty orange dress made of chiffon. LOL. Weird. But that's the nature of memory.

The little one, forced to do his Bahasa Melayu home edition school work this morning got really excited when he 'listened to his brain' and got everything correct. He proudly held his book to me and said, "my brain says if there are two things, the 'penjodoh bilangan' is 'sepasang', if it is animal, it is 'ekor' and if it is something long, it is 'batang'!" And he went on and on on how his brain is always telling him correct things. Well, I said to myself, it's good that the little one has discovered the way his brain works. And most especially, that he's beginning to make sense of the 'penjodoh bilangan(s)'. Way improved from his last attempt :-). Memory is amazing.