In Memory of Memory

What is your name?

...

What is your favourite colour?

Anandh

Where are you from?

Violet

Which animal you like the most?

Coimbatore

Who is your favourite hero?

Cheetah

What is the highest peak in the world?

Mt.Everest!... No!!...Rajnikanth.....Rajnikanth..

Your game over Anandh. Good try! Your score is twenty. Okay next is Meena's turn. Meena, where is Taj Mahal situated?...

Some of us might remember this game we used to play during our school days. The rules of the game are very simple. Someone keeps on asking you very simple questions one after the other, and you keep answering them. With a tiny modification - you are not supposed to answer the first question. You just let it go and the person poses you the next simple question. Now you give the correct answer of the first question asked. You score a point. Then the third question, and you give the correct answer of the second question. One more point and so on. You score till you end up giving the reply of the question being asked rather than that of the previous question asked. There is also a time limit within which you are supposed to give your answers.

Pretty simple, eh? Just try your hand at this game with your friend. To adjust for your advanced mental faculties compared to that of us during the school days, your friend may be asked to make questions a little complicated like - (Qn 1) Imagine yourself sitting playing in a crowded park across a road. You see a green Maruti Swift pass by. How many tyres does the car have?, (Qn 2) One fine morning you wake up and realise that you are alone in the middle of a huge monument. You take a walk and realise you are inside the Red Fort. In which city are you in?

Most of us might have seen Memento (C.Nolan/Eng/2000) or Ghajini (Murugadoss/Hin-Tam/2008-05). The lead character suffers from anterograde amnesia or also-popularly-known-as Short term memory loss. The hero often clicks with his Polaroid camera to remember even basic stuff like the location of his apartment. Further the walls in his room are fully covered with sketches, emergency phone numbers etc. In short, the person does not seem to remember anything...well, its not "anything", it is "anything new". He is aware of his past. But again, only till a point. He is totally incapable of forming new memories beyond that point. Given all this constraints, he relies purely on his Polaroid and countless sketches to avenge the death of his beloved! That is how the movie plot goes. The movies were a huge hit.

Coming back to our game. Why did you find it difficult to score more than four or five? The answer is in the way we store information; the way we remember things. Very broadly speaking, our "memory space" can be viewed as something made of two partitions. The bigger, robust one is called the Long term memory (LTM). It is like a computer hard disc with unlimited storage space. Also, whatever is there is there forever.The other smaller partition is, of course, Short term memory (STM). Something like your computer's RAM. It has a very limited capacity and things here are ephemeral.

The things that we try to remember go and sit in the STM first. They can comfortably be there for about 10 seconds (roughly), after which they begin to disappear. If one is interested in remembering the information for a longer time, it has to be necessarily sent to the hard disc of our memory. The movie's hero had a problem in doing this after his head injury in a scuffle with the villains. So whatever was there in his LTM, like the duets he had danced with Asin, was readily available to him. No LTM, No flashbacks! Events happening after that injury never went into his LTM and thats why he ends up using instant-photo cameras and Post-it Notes.

So why did Anandh find it difficult to score beyond four answers? To begin with, he hears and remembers the first question (What is your name?). This is in his STM. He does not try to move it to the LTM. Well, no problems there as the next question will be posed within the next 10 seconds and he can comfortably retrieve the first question sitting in his STM, and answer it. The next question. (What is your favourite colour?) There's a discomfort now. Unlike the unlimited capacity of the LTM, our RAM can not handle too many things at a time. Still Anandh somehow manages to store the second question in his RAM; process the first question sitting already in his RAM and give out the answer. By the time he reaches the third or the fourth question he is worn out and his STM shouts out "I can't!".

Wait...in a TV programme a few days back there was this little girl who went on and on, and finally the person who gave up was the one who had been asking her the questions! How is that possible? Is she an extraordinary specimen?

Somehow she knew there is something called as LTM. On hearing the first question she immediately processed it, got the answer and - stored the answer in her LTM. The second question asked. She got it and stored it in her STM. Gave out the answer to the first question from her LTM. Processed the second question sitting in her STM, moved the answer to the LTM. The next question asked. The same sequence followed. And finally, the person who was asking the questions shouts out "I can't!"