Today marks my third day of the full Lumosity experience.
Today's Training Games
Spatial Speed Match (Speed)
Memory Matrix (Memory)
Familiar Faces (Memory)
Eagle Eye (Attention)
Chalkboard Challenge (Problem Solving)
Lumosity gave me a lot of memory work today. Surprisingly, that has so far been my worst of the five attributes the site focuses on (Speed, Memory, Attention, Problem Solving, & Flexibility). My best has been Flexibility, followed closely by Problem Solving.
If you asked me before this started, I would have assumed my ranking of skills would have been (from most-skilled to least-skilled) Memory, Speed, Flexibility, Attention, Problem Solving. That Lumosity suggests that list is exactly backwards is very interesting to me. I've never enjoyed math class very much, and that's always been the subject in school I had to work hardest at. I can generally understand Math as concepts, but the actual cranking out of computations is far more difficult to me. I make silly mistakes, confuse numbers, miss steps- in short, the general panoply of errors that the non-gifted mathematically tend to make.
That Memory is my worst skill so far is very surprising. I have always thought of myself as having a superior memory. I can recall exact lines from books I haven't read in years. I remember exactly what the apartment I lived in with my parents from birth until 4 years old looks like, from the layout of the floor plan to the color of the couch (a horrible brown amalgamation). I remember the color of my grandmother's shirt the time I went on a ride at the fair, got sick to my stomach, and she bought me ginger ale (whitish, with purple stripes). Lumosity really doesn't measure that kind of memory.
I am beginning to wonder if maybe we can distinguish Lumosity's conception of memory from what I think memory is: Lumosity memory is visual recall.Other terms for it might work as well. It's the kind of memory that helps you with math, or that helps you remember where your car keys are, or helps you to remember that trash day is Thursday and you need to take the cans out to the curb. It seems to me a very functional sort of memory, a practical ability.
My own memory perhaps should more properly be called sensation memory. I remember quite clearly the feeling of events. This leads me to remember minute details of those events which led to that feeling. It seems, though, that divorcing the pathos of an experience from its visual details renders it much less meaningful to me. Maybe emotion is the trigger that makes my memory work. Those cards with the shapes on them don't affect me in any way- they're just visual stimuli. So I remember them less clearly. Perhaps my brain does not flag them as important, or maybe my memory requires a suite of sensations to construct a clear memory. This seems to me a very artistic type of memory. And that makes sense, because it's that kind of memory I tap into when I'm trying to write something. It's not practical, or useful, in the standard sense of helping you live your life. But it helps you to create, because it gives you a pool of sensation to draw from when you need inspiration.
Either way, my struggles with the memory games so far has been enlightening, and somewhat humbling.
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