February 2, 2009

• My Brain

  I was sitting on the floor and thinking yesterday in my own little world where nothing else could touch me. It was then when I realized something quite odd about how my brain works and how it is different from everyone else’s.

  Most people you see have a memory that works like a hash. That is when an event occurs from which they need to reference information a function fires in their head. The function is passed in the reference information and returns “roughly” where in memory the relevant information is. The person then does a swift search through the possible one to three responses returned by the function and chooses a reply most suited to the situation at hand. In other words most people’s brains are random access memory stores.

  In contrast, I think my brain is more like just a simple singly linked list. Meaning when there is something I want to say my brain has to scan through the contents from some arbitrary point, one record at a time, following the links in the chain until it comes across the information that is needed. If along the way I miss the data, the comparison fails, or there’s a system error, then I have to start the scan all over again from the beginning. This obviously takes significantly longer to pinpoint a needed piece of datum.

  In ordinary conversations I find that most often by the time I reach the data that I need to find which presents the data that I want to say, the conversation has long since moved on through several other topics and my original statement that I finally found is now out of place and irrelevant and perhaps already stated. So instead I grab on to the next point in the conversation, start my scan all over again, and so it repeats. Again and again. All the while I am quiet. Listening. Observing. Remembering. But most of the time, saying nothing at all.

  This is why I prefer communication online. It moves at a better pace.

  • 1:58 pm
  • 3 Comments