The Book of Ashes

Lots of mail, almost missed my appointment... 1:07AM

Yesterday was quite productive. I have two projects under way at the moment. One, making updates to my friends milk run program for a little dosh and two writing an image indexing program for myself and possibly for further sale. It is going to rock (at least for me). A few other projects are on the horizon as well.

After sussing out the milk run program with Andrew and going for a walk to deliver some mail (and catching up with Vanessa) I went to the beach with Martin. It was a pretty nice day but I didn't go swimming as there were little jelly fish in the sea and I don't know which ones sting you and I don't like jellitaneous things rubbing against me in water. I also received a magazine called Tone which I hadn't paid for. Dan brought one recently and entered a competition to win one so I thought it was his but strangely addressed to me. It turns out that was just coincidence and it was a complementory copy for submitting a digital photo into a competition. Cool man! Its a good mag.

Dan, Martin and I chilled out last night with pizza's and beer (yup only one each) over at the girls place. Olivia kept us company while Jessie was making these cool doll fishes... they were pretty funky.

Today has been mail day. I receieved my passport (Bryant, Ashley Bryant, licensed to travel), a letter from work, a letter from the bank, some photos and another free mag. Life is treating me good today.

I had set my alarm for 7am this morning for an 8:30am appointment and awoke at 8am. Shit! my alarm hadn't gone off. Its so long since I used it that I had forgotten how to use it. It turns out it was set for 7pm. Fuck I'm dumb. Luckily I had woken up and made it to my appointment. Hopefully this is the last and my stupid insurance will be sorted out for good. Its definitely taken long enough.

Dan and I had an excellent discussion last night. Pretty much ranging over millions of topics but one of them was the photographic memory. It is interesting to note that a higher percentage of kids have this ability than adults implying that some loose it as they grow older. This makes sense in a way as your visual input is the most important as a kid but becomes less important as an adult as you increase your reliance on sound (talking, language, etc). This lead on to hypnotising people and how a person hypnotised could remember amazing details but when investigated it turned out that they were reproducing many of those memories. Eg if asked to redraw a picture they drew as a child, that they could supposedly remember, they would remake their hand writing as how they thought their childhood hand writing was but correcting some things that they used to do but now they couldn't remember. This leads us to believe that we remember a few facts about objects or events then recreate the whole object or event from these facts. This gives a good match up to actual events but not always 100% correct.

Another interesting question that arose is can you remember your mother when you were 15 say? I find I either picture her now or I picture her from a photo from an earlier time period. I can't actually picture her cooking a meal with a younger face (nor any of my family for that matter). This leads me to believe that we store pointers in our heads to people. When we recall an event its linked to that pointer of that person, but that person has been updated since then so you don't have all the info on them. Of course you store photos as seperate images so you can use an picture from that. Try remembering playing with a sibling when you were young, can you picture their face and them being little? Its pretty hard, you kind of can but I think you're fudging it

On the topic of memory... (continued) 1:13AM

This is an interesting thing to note. Say you are recalling a picture you drew of a plane when you were younger. You remember you drew the wings and the windows and the door and the pilots cabin but maybe you drew the wings backwards back then (lots of kids do!) and now your image of a plane is updated so you would never consider doing that again and maybe you drew the doors in the wrong place and all the windows squished up like kids do but now if you were to redraw this picture you ""remember"" you would fix these proportions and inaccuracies. Sometimes you remember an exact inaccuracies such as the wings being backwards cause maybe your mum used to tease you about how you always drew the wings backwards on a plane so you'll compensate for this and draw them backwards again but really you are only rebuilding your picture that you drew from a few facts such as 1 - you drew a plane, 2 - it had wings, doors, a tail and a pilots cabin, 3 - there was a sun in the picture, 4 - you drew the wings backwards. from these few facts you redraw a whole picture, pretty close to what the original used to look like!

Back on the topic of your mind storing pointers to objects and people. I think if you don't see someone for a long time then the next time you see them they are very different then you might start a new pointer and hence have a left off point of that person so you can always remember or picture them clearly as they were when you last saw them.

The brain is an amazing thing