The very first blog I published—when I was still a graduate student, some twenty years ago—was called The Fiction Reboot. I titled the first post “initializing sequence” because I felt a bit like I had just fired up some launch codes on a space machine. It began as a way for me to review mystery fiction, and I did interviews with wonderful writers, including Stephen Gallagher, who has remained a longtime friend. I also had the privilege of interviewing Christopher Fowler, who wrote such wonderful books about the Peculiar Crimes Unit. That word, peculiar, attracted me immediately. I have been called weird my entire life, but peculiar—it’s got that tweed-jacket-wearing, smells-of-pipe-tobacco-and-whiskey quality, doesn’t it? I aspire to peculiar as a levelling up of my weird.
I’m hyperlexic with an eidetic memory, meaning I tend not to forget things so much as cram them into my brain soup with all the other facts. And if you stew things around long enough in there, they run into each other and form the most interesting connections. Add to that an insatiable desire for new knowledge, an autistic’s special interest info-dumping potential, and decades of training as a researcher—and you get a person with a LOT to talk about that just doesn’t fit into usual conversations (or paid projects). It also doesn’t really fit in the character limit of most social media posts. But hey. That’s what blog’s were made for.
Unfortunately, blogs are kind of chopped off, isolated places. We like social media because we can interact (from a safe, introverted distance). I don’t just want to talk about weird stuff. I want to HEAR about weird stuff. Take memory for instance. I mentioned a minute ago that I have eidetic memory. What is that? I am SO glad you asked. It’s sometimes called photographic memory, and I hate that, since the brain does not operate as a camera. What it means, though, is recall with precision for things seen visually in the mind. Temple Grandin is famous for it. Tesla had it, too. But there are gradations, and generally, what TV tells us about total recall —about memory in general— is wrong. (I am coming back to the interaction stuff, stay with me).
We tend to think that a memory is stored like a photograph. We saw Susie in her yellow bikini carrying a blue beach towel. But that “image” doesn’t get stored in our brain as in a photo album, complete and ready to be brought out again later. Instead, what you see is broken down and shared across neurons, and the connections help store the memory. The more you see a thing, the more connections, the more easily you can recall it later. But it’s not a whole picture. It’s stored in the electrical thingamumy of your brain’s individual firing cells. So when you want to remember something, you have to pull all of this data back together again, essentially recreating it—and sometimes the neurons putting the new one together are NOT the same ones who captured it the first time. Not only that, but we tend to add in other bits and bobs on the way. You might end up remembering Susie in blue not yellow. You might remember Susie but age her up to the last time you saw her. You might remember the bikini and not who wore it. Internal and external factors change the image, because you make the image—you don’t pull it in full form from some storage locker.
So why in heck do some people seem able to do it? Ha! We don’t know! Well, we know a bit about it, but frankly that magic memory machine is a mystery still. Some people have curiously accurate recall. Some have no recall at all for things like faces and may be face-blind. It’s weird as all hell, and I think about it A LOT. Partly because I have one of those peculiarly good memories, which means I recall things that everyone else involved have forgotten. It’s like being alone in my own memory.
I tell you all this because THESE are the things that keep me up at night. I am not an expert on memory. I am a curious human with a lot of extra information looking to share it, and also to have additional weird things added. So I have started this beehiiv site because while it is a newsletter of sorts… and a blog of sorts… it gives you the opportunity to comment. And that’s what I hope we’ll do. Have conversations about the peculiar things I muse about. I will talk about writing. And fiction. And nonfiction. And whether a lightbulb might be changed by a porpoise and two orangutan if they really worked at it. And I want you to join in.
Also I’d like you to sign up to get them in your email. Not too often. I mean, I have a job. But won’t it be nice to get a bit of peculiar musing in your in box now and then?