h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

(Not wishing to blow the trumpet of my own entry, you understand....)

For people with Synaesthesia (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A558371) mnemonics are often spurious, as their own neurology helps thm to recall things vividly and accurately. Look hard at yourself, to see if you do have any synaesthesic tendencies, and practice them to maximise them! even if you are not a true synaesthete, it's possible to get a reasonably effective artificial synaesthesia going, especially for the short term, like revising for an exam. Make the most of your best sense: if you're visual, use diagrams, if your auditory, use songs. It's no good trying your room-mate's failsafe revision technique if you're brains are wired differently!

I don't know if this is related to synaesthesia (great entry, BTW! ), but I thought I'd put my post here, anyway...

Almost all my memories are linked to a very complex 3D image of a calendar, making it easy for me to pinpoint memories in time (don't ask me how this calendar came into being - it's been with me as long as I can remember...). How accurate it is, is debateable, of course, but in most cases where I've been able to verify the time, it's been right, down to the hour. It's a visual image, but at the same time, there are emotions and colours involved that are not... uhm... part of the calendar itself... well, I said it was complex, and it's hard to explain, so I won't go on... Anyways, it works the other way around, too, imagining a date/time on the calendar brings forth one or more memories from that time.

I have a strange calendar image as well - which makes it extremely easy to pinpoint events chronologically.

And, BTW, I am a synaesthete as well. I have an extremely good memory, for most things.

My strangest offshoot of synaesthesia (at least I believe it is) is the assigning of songs to locations. It's hard to describe, but at seemingly random points in time, if, for instance, a song comes on the radio, wherever it is that I am at the moment becomes "associated" with that song. It doesn't always happen - and I'm not aware of it happening until the next time I hear the song, and immediately think of the place.

It could be a song I've heard a million times, and never "assigned" before...And I'm talking really silly places, like a stoplight, or railroad tracks, or the convenience store. No logical explanation as to why it happens, where it happens, but it's always interesting to have my memory triggered by a song. It's a permanent association (songs still trigger memories of places I haven't been in 15 years) and as far as I know, I've never replaced an association.

I guess a good example is, whenever I hear George Thorogood's "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer," I think of the intersection at the far end of my road, because I heard it there once. I could tell you the time of day, the weather, and so on, about the moment in time and place that is associated with that song. Very odd

And of course, I do the whole coloured numbers and letters bit, which I never knew was "different" until I was a teen, and then never knew was shared by anyone else until earlier this year.

Thanks for the positive comment Leeneh!

I think I know what you mean, Kate, because I do it too. I drive people bonkers by being able to cross reference ("Gosh - such and such a song, that was a hit in the summer of 1983") because I can remeber where I was when a piece of music was played - it's very handy for pub quizzes!