I’ve been thinking about memory lately. Specifically, its role in the nature of what it means to be a nerd or intellectual.

Let’s start with fandom. Many a clueless celebrity has lamented the fact that fans of a media product know more about the product than they do, and they wonder what kind of person stays awake all night memorizing obscure bits of trivia about things.

And they don’t ask kindly, either.

The problem is that nobody actually does that unless they are about to compete in a trivia contest. There is no need for a nerd or geek to stay awake all night memorizing anything.

We don’t have to. We just naturally retain information better than the average Joe.

Memory has been recognized as a function of intelligence ever since Piaget handed out his first questionnaire. People of high intelligence are capable of retaining so much information because they have the mental CPU power to do it. It takes a powerful mind to, without even thinking about it, condense, organize, and retain so much information.

Add in that this information is about something they love and that intellectuals naturally enjoy learning about subjects they like, and it is no wonder that we of the nerdish set end up knowing so much about the things we love.

We learn new things about it purely for the enjoyment it brings.

I am no exception. I retain information so well that I never had to study in school. I simply remembered what the teacher had said. That was it.

Granted, my body of knowledge is more eclectic and varied than some, and hence lacks the impressive thoroughness of some people’s knowledge of Star Trek or Game of Thrones or whatever, but I still know a lot more about various things than a person of average intelligence, and I can truthfully say that I have never tried to memorize anything.

I never had to.

So that’s the deal with nerds and celebrities. I know that it can be very stressful for an actor to face a bunch of people asking bizarrely specific questions that sort of imply said people think you are your character, and I am all for celebrities hiring guard nerds to answer those questions for them.

But it’s not that we make a specific effort to learn all this stuff.

It just comes naturally.

That said, I am beginning to wonder just how much this high density memory of ours plays a role in a larger sense of what it means to be a nerd and/or an intellectual.

I consider nerd to be a subspecies of intellectual. Others might disagree, especially people who think they are better than nerds even though they too know an awful lot about an obscure topic.

I mean really, what is the difference between knowing all there is to know about Star Trek and knowing all there is to know about 18th century Welsh poetry?

Besides the latter potentially leading to an actual paying career?

But I digress. The particular aspect of memory I am going to examine next is the retention of biographical memory.

As we have recently learned from studies of people with eidetic (aka “photographic”) memories, having a powerful memory is a double edged sword at best, and a downright curse at worst.

The problem is emotional distance. Forgetting things over time is part of how we heal from them. The emotions fade and grow dull, and we are able to think about our experiences with something approaching clarity and wisdom because of it.

But the sharper your memory, the less it fades. And we automatically prioritize negative memories over positive ones because in the days of the caveman, it was more important to remember where the bear lives than to remember where the berries live.

And so this memory of ours can keep every trauma fresh and intact as if it just happened. In fact, if the phenomena is strong enough, the very boundary between memory and reality becomes blurry and weak. The difference between the past and the present diminishes and this phenomenon, along with its attendant fear of the line disappearing completely, inform a lot of what goes on in the life of someone with an “excellent” memory.

The avoidance of negative experiences becomes acutely important if you know that you will remember it all in high fidelity later. This leads to being risk-avoidant and timid, and gives one the impression that you feel things more strongly than others.

That’s as may be. Clearly that’s not a thing anyone could ever prove, or even measure. But we can establish that you might well remember things more strongly than others, and that might very well make life a lot more difficult for you.

If only we could choose to delete things in our minds!

Then we come to the issue of pointers. In order for you to remember anything, there must be something which stays in your consciousness that points to the information. We all have something like a card catalog in our minds that tells us where to find the information we are trying to remember, otherwise the chain of memory could never even get started.

And each of these little pointers takes up a certain amount of space in the conscious mind. Individually, they don;t seem like much, but not only does a high-capacity memory full of information require more of these pointers, but the pointer itself has to contain more information in order to point the way to the right cluster of memories.

So these high capacity memories of ours impose a particular kind of extra burden on our consciousness, and the older we get, the more we learn and retain, and the greater that burden becomes.

I am not saying that these observations on memory explain all that there is about being an intellectual. That would be the foolhardy over-application of an exciting new idea.

But I do think memory plays a role in what makes us intellectuals who we are and is a key for understanding how so many people with completely different lives end up falling into the exact same patterns.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.