#MEMORY

[feral-ballad]

Jane Hirshfield, from The Beauty: Poems; “Entanglement”

[Text ID: “You are there. I am here. I remember.”]

[climeslover]

Image Description(ID) A series of six photos of text written in ballpoint pen on yellowed paper: 1. someone is telling jokes they heard from you 2. someone is still using the phrases and words you used 3. someone still smiles when they remember a moment with you 4. someone is still listening to the music you've showed them 5. someone admires you from afar and is inspired by you 6. someone learned how to love from you

End ID

[sumemoryapp]

Easy Mode!

[flowerytale]

Joan Didion, from Blue Nights

[hiddenwwi]

Inside German WWI field hospital outside Saint Mihiel.

[napalm-waistcoat]

There have been numerous studies conducted on the impact of search engines - especially following the ubiquity of smartphones - reducing memory retention. This is because people no longer feel compelled to retain information, as the machine will remember it for you. It'll remember everything you ever need to know! Whether it's historical information or the name of that actor you can't recall.

That trend was already disconcerting enough. Generative AI and LLMs have taken this phenomenon and evolved it into its next stage.

generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???

[nightmare-from-heaven]

Hey. Your brain needs to de-frag. Literally it needs you to sit there and space out.

If you want your memory or executive function to improve, stare out a window at the skyline or sidewalk or trees or birds on the electrical wires for like 20+ minutes per day. (With no other stimulation like a podcast or TV if you can manage but hey baby steps innit). If you're fortunate enough to have safe outside with any bits of nature, go stare closely at a 1 meter square of grass and trip out on the bugs and shapes of grasses and stuff.

Literally this will make you smarter. Our brains HAVE TO HAVE this zone out time to do important stuff behind the scenes. This does not happen during sleep, it's something else.

That weird pressurized feeling you get sometimes might be your brain on no defrag.

Give your brain a Daily Dose Of De-Frag.

[dikdikpronouncedxylophone]

The most terrifying part of having memory issues is when you can feel something from 5 seconds ago be thrown out the window and there's an empty hole where it once was. You remember that you forgot something.

[prokopetz]

A thing they don't tell you until it's too late is that training your memory to be good at one thing comes at the cost of everything else. I can edit documents in my head and quote conversations I had twenty years ago verbatim. This morning I reached into my purse and pulled out a jar of raspberry jam with absolutely no recollection of how it got there.

[squeegin]

💔

A personal comic I made in honour of my late mother, who passed away ten years ago this month. I will admit that was one of the hardest comics I've ever had to make. I miss you so much, Mom.

[caintooth]

seeing people my age talk about how scared they are of memory loss, which they only associate with old age, is so surreal to see as a 24 year old who has actively experienced memory loss for a long time now

there are causes for memory loss besides dementia and alzheimer’s, i hope y’all know that. dissociative disorders, trauma, brain injuries, thyroid problems, even just stress and lack of sleep can fuck up your ability to store, process, and access memory. and that’s just a few of the many causes i can think of off the top of my head right now.

please stop treating disabled people like some scary “other” that you might become only in the distant, decades-away future. we are your age, too. you may become one of us sooner than you know. stop acting like memory loss marks the end of a life, when so many of us have so much living left to do!

[feral-ballad]

Linda Pastan, from Waiting for My Life: Poems; "What We Want"

[Text ID: "and in the morning / our arms ache. / We don't remember the dream, / but the dream remembers us."]

[gawki]

Oblivion

A painting about ADHD - more details in comments.

[laddersofsweetmisery]

I don't see enough people mourning over the slow death of physical media. And I don't just mean TV shows, video games, or movies--which don't even get me started about how we don't really 'own' anything anymore. It includes notes, journals, and letters to one another...so much of our history is lost when we lose a password, a website goes down, a file/hardware is corrupted, or a platform disappears. History that doesn't seem important until you no longer have access to it. Physical media does a lot for memory recall. How many memories will we lose because we don't have something tangible to tie it back to? Something to hold in our hands and stir up those memories we thought were once lost? Sometimes I wonder what the difference between burning a book and losing access to physical media is when someone can pull the plug and remove your access so easily.

[crumbsinthesea]

"It wasn’t until about two years into the pandemic, when the “vax and relax” era was clearly not going to work, that I had to reckon with my system for organizing time. I couldn’t delay the future any longer; I couldn’t continue protecting the story of my life from the pandemic’s incursion. So I accepted the terrible fact that the pandemic was going to continue indefinitely and was not merely an event in my life but rather the container in which the rest of my life would take place. This was a difficult reckoning. It required that I come to terms with a great deal of grief about the failures of those around me; about what I lost and will have lost; a privilege in thinking that these were the sorts of world-historical changes that happened to other people, at other times. But it was also a reckoning that rescued the orderliness of time, for me. It was as if the clock was un-paused, and life resumed its forward march. I think most people stabilized their warped sense of time by other means. Instead of accepting that the pandemic continued on, that we failed to contain it and so would need to incorporate its ongoing reality into the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, they instead transformed the fantasy of after into their reality. After the pandemic, after the lockdowns, after our world ruptured. They were able to interrupt the prolonged uncertainty that the pandemic had brought to all of our lives by erecting a finish line just in time for them to run through it. And as they ran through it, celebrating the fictional end of an arduous journey, they simultaneously invented a new before. This is the invention of memory. The Pandemic became something temporally contained, its crisp boundaries providing a psychic safeguard to any lingering anxieties around the vulnerability and interdependence of our bodies that only a virus could show us. No longer did it threaten to erupt in their everyday lives, forcing cancellations and illnesses and deaths. It was, officially, part of The Past. And from the safety of hindsight (even if only an illusion), people began telling and re-telling the story of The Pandemic in ways that strayed from how it all actually went down. It was a way to use memory as self-soothing."

--Emily Dupree, The invention of Memory