I have the ability to rigidly compartmentalize knowledge into classes or categories, and only access things when I need them, using keys in my surroundings.
In short, when I'm at work, I know a lot of things about our products and my coworkers. When I am not at work, I can't remember that stuff.
I call it "situational memory". I don't know if there is a formal name for it, but that's what I call it; memory banks that are triggered by surroundings.
This has been wonderful for me in a wide variety of high-stress jobs, because I can simply leave the job at the door when I walk out at night. 20 minutes later I couldn't tell you what I was working on, who with, or what I needed to do the next day.
At Burningman I was a radio operator for some of the teams that produce the event, and work in the background. There is an entire language around radio communications - and how to manipulate a radio to switch amongst dozens of trunks and hundreds of channels - that I could not even begin to elucidate here. I'd have to be standing in the desert, and then I could run a radio like a WWII squaddie at Dunkirk.
So, coming home from vacation to quarantine has been An Issue.
Trying to get stuck back into work, after more than two weeks away - and then not even being able to be back in the office, to get visual cues - has been a TOUGH transition for me!
I literally spent 20 minutes trying to figure out the name of a guy I speak to every single day, and enjoy working with immensely. I finally found a newsletter on our intranet that had a photo of him with a caption of his name underneath. GREG! HIS NAME IS GREG!
To help trigger my situational memory, I went into our closed office yesterday, got my keyboard and mouse and a couple of the things off my desk, and set them up at home.
And CLICK! I was able to get into my work flow again.
Do other people's brains work this way? It seems like I might be a bit of an anomaly, since I see so many people talking about sitting up at night with their brain spinning on things, or unable to "leave work at work", etc. So I am curious... is this familiar to you...?
This is super interesting! I don't know anyone who operates this way, no. Or maybe not to the extend that you do so it's not very noticeable. Personally, I find my brain mostly useless for recall. Prices of things, what day it is, my exact to-do list from that meeting 10 minutes ago, the details of that important story you told me. I have friends remind me of absolutely insane stories from my life, I have no recollection of. I have on occasion forgotten to take the keys with me, to an apartment I was showing. I've mixed up days and missed a training shift at Burning Man 2 years ago. As a kid, I would forget my house keys pretty much twice a week and figured out all kinds of funky ways to get into my house through the various windows. My boyfriend jokes i purposefully always forget my wallet to get him to pay for stuff. So I've mostly given up on "trying harder" and found systems to circumvent those problems. I would be completely lost without my calendar and notes app on my phone. Got a code lock for my front door. My watch tells me what day it is. I started the travel vlogs, mostly to be able to jog my memory about the travels I went on. I tend to understand how things work very quickly, but I also don't remember 99% of what I've learned at school over the years. It's crazy to me how everyone's brains work so differently. For example, people with no sense of direction or no feeling for the passage of time baffle me.
I think I developed it as a self-defense mechanism. I saw so many people being totally consumed by their work, 24/7/365, that I rebelled against that and developed a way to wall things off and make them inaccessible until I needed them. I think it started with the "mind palace" memory technique. Where, to remember things, you think of a palace... walk in the front door... on the table on the right is _______ ... on the wall is a picture of ______ , and so on, until you can remember all the things you need to remember. What I did was, instead of using a mental palace, I just used my workplace to trigger those specific memories. That way, they didn't bother me when I wasn't there. At least... that's what I THINK I did... I'm kind of applying post hoc reasoning to an unconscious decision, but it feels right in my head. This is super interesting! I don't know anyone who operates this way, no. Or maybe not to the extend that you do so it's not very noticeable.
Everyone's does, whether they realize it or not. Work stuff, in my experience, is keenly tied to jargon. I think this is a reason so many industries have so many buzzwords: by shifting into the register of the occupation you can access specific memories associated with that occupation that are otherwise absent. This is one reason we can "get back into" something quickly but not if the language isn't there - I did CAD for decades and a lot of the processes are the same for Photoshop. But since Photoshop uses an entirely different vocabulary my experience with CAD is actively detrimental to my understanding of all-things-Adobe.Do other people's brains work this way?