I have a serious problem with information recall. Names, faces, phone numbers and addresses just wont come to mind without strenuous thinking. The slowness of my recall has caused me to doubt my intelligence. Just then while writing I had to think through a list of related words (cleverness, knowledge, information…) before I got to the word, intelligence. I have some knowledge of somethings but I just struggle to access it. When trying to explain my frustration, I have described the process as follows.

I imagine a homunculus in a dark cave, sitting on a pile of information in the forms of scraps of paper, photographs, old books, newspapers and notebooks. This mound of trash somehow resembles the filing system of my brain. Now when I want to recall a piece of information like the name of my cousin’s eldest daughter. My mind begins to work. The homunculus sitting on top of the pile begins to pick up pieces of paper one by one but can only read by torchlight (candle light on bad days). It then discards the irrelevant names, places and numbers back onto the pile. Occasionally the torch will dim and need a smack to get the brightness back up. The unsystematic approach means that the homunculus will pick up the same piece of paper a number of times before it gets frustrated and rolls it into a ball and casts it to the far side of the hill. Eventually finding a pile of loosely familiar family related names a recognisable name appears on a piece of paper. The name is then cross-reference this with a list of likely names I had been thinking of at the same time. If there’s a correlation this it’s fed into a probability meter and only when the likelihood is high enough do I then feel confident that the homunculus has completed the task. If only it were that simple.

During the search the homunculus has to defend itself against a number of winged creatures attempting to stop it finding the fact. These come in the guise of self-doubt, time pressure, google and most of the seven deadly sins. The first to approach is the google monster which shrieks ‘just google it’. Generally the google monster is only defeated by information that wont be on the internet like the name of my cousins oldest daughter. Then self-doubt appears, this winged beast tries to convince the homunculus that it won’t find what it’s looking for because, I just don’t know it and best to give up and admit that I don’t know. Self-doubts secret weapon is when it whispers “just ask you wife”. Time pressure causes the homunculus to rush and disregard the scraps of paper without reading them properly. I have to give it a good talking to in order to calm it down and do a proper job. The Google monster usually beats the homunculus on time sensitive occasions. Some of the winged beasts are representative of distractions such as the phone, the television and starring out the window. The rest are well represented by the seven deadly sins (Sloth, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Pride, Wrath and Envy), all are reasons to either give up, stubbornly proceed even if I know I don’t know, loose interest, get distracted or get more and more enraged by the terrible, inefficiency of the whole process.

I think this has lead me to be a master procrastinator but that’s for another blog.