[Closed] Intelligence and memory

Good to know all brainy folk go to university 😉

heh ok, could've worded It better, forgive me I've been staring at my laptop most of the day, told you I wasn't the sharpest tool :0)

But I 'spose I'm aiming my queries to those who have reached high levels of academia

due to mental health issues my memory is shocking,

Yep, high stress levels block short term memory. I have bugger all memory of when I was ill as nothing got implanted properly. On the plus side, less bad memories, on the down side a bit disturbing I don't remember anything, a year of my life has gone missing.....

An ex-employer was trying to get me to help with a patent I'd filed at the time. I have zero memory of it - nothing at all. Only when they sent me all the papers with my name on it did I believe them, zero memory of it. Even after reading the papers, I still can't remember anything about it.

Jeez, I'm not quite that bad, but feel for you :0(

One of my main reasons for doing this degree was to try and get the brain working again in the hope it'd help my memory etc

I have appalling memory. Always have. I was put on special measure in junior school because I couldn’t remember my times tables. I still can’t.
But I also have a phd in engineering and a successful career doing it. I can do calculus, I’m excellent at maths in general, still don’t use times tables
I’m just good at estimating (I don’t rely on a calculator).
I understand things by having a working model of it in my head, I don’t remember how it works based on the rules in the textbook. It’s just my learning style.

I try to remember the principles rather than the details and then rely on being able to work out the details by applying the principles to the problem.

The metric system of weight and measures is quite rational and interrelated for example. 10cm x 10cm of liquid is 1 litre and (for water) weighs 1kg. When I was working out hot much a hot tub would weigh filled with water so I could plan the foundations and floor needed I saw the tub held 1,200 litres of water so would weigh 1.2 tonnes plus the tub itself.

Water flows down a pressure gradient. Normally that means if flows down hill but if trapped in an aquifer under pressure it can flow uphill. When I look an a geological map I can make an educated guess where the water will be.

Make sense?

Replying to my own post because I didn’t wrap it up properly: my point is that I don’t think memory is important to attainment. At least it wasn’t to me, and it might not be to you. We perhaps have similar learning styles. A learning style that I particularly value in people I work with - if they “know how it works” rather than “remember the rules” as it were.

Hence the username then!

I think I'm just worried/self conscious that when I'm asked something about what I'm learning, and I can't remember (even though I understood it at the time) that people will see that as me being thick instead of just not being able to recall it

So over to you brainy folk, do you have a good memory and can you recall everything you learnt at uni? Or doesn’t memory matter that much, as long as you ‘get it’ whatever ‘it’ is?

So, back on topic.

A few years into my first job I started to think I was losing all my maths knowledge as I wasn't using it. So I started an OU Maths degree in my spare time, just because.

I spent the first year (2nd year of degree) just re-learning stuff I'd already done as Engineering (my 1st degree) had a lot of maths in it. Then the next level (3rd year) was all new stuff. I then went on to their Maths MSc course, but then bought a house and stopped it as DIY was eating up all my spare time.

Can't remember any of it now, even though I've done most of it twice! I reckon I could still pass an A level today without much sweat, but anything beyond that is all a very distant memory.

WCA put it nicely. I almost always work out what’s going in with a problem from first principles. Some idiots come along with an equation for the weight of a hot tub that they recall from college, but WCA actually understands what’s going on.

Ditto.

Last year at uni the maths stuff was tough going (45 years old and didn't do beyond standard grade) integration, laplace transforms, fourier etc, all that stuff, passed exams on it all with north of 70%.

I wouldn't know where to start with most of it now. 🙈

Does it possibly depends on whether it's something you enjoy or think is important?. My wife isn't hugely more intelligent than me, degree educated nurse, but has a phenomenal memory. She knows every patients history that comes into her unit, some of them are only admitted every 4-6 months, incredible.

But she asks me on a daily basis how to work the fire stick remote control. 😁

Yeah I understand that WCA and its a good example as aquifers etc is something I'm learning about this year

as long as I can picture something in my head I get it. Hence why I struggle with chemistry, I just can't picture it in my head (I need to go back over cation exchanges in soil for my assignment 😖 )

my point is that I don’t think memory is important to attainment.

I'd disagree.

Memory is knowing stuff without really having to think about or look it up.

Intelligence is working out stuff from other stuff.

The really clever people have a lot of both; they have a massive bank of stuff they just know, and they're incredibly good at working out new stuff from it. They then remember that stuff, work out more new stuff, and so it goes on

Thanks! The way I think about electrical measurements seams to please some people and puzzle others. Think of electricity like a river.

Volts = How fast the water is flowing
Amps = How much water is flowing past
Power = How hard it is to walk across the river

(off at a tangent now WCA, but I really enjoyed the work I've been doing around Darcy's law)

I agree with IHN - you need a balance of memory and intelligence. If you have to go back to re-read everything before you can use your intelligence to process it then you will not be very successful. Equally, if you can remember everything you were ever told but don't have the intelligence to use that information then the same thing happens.

The trick I find is to remember enough of the general points and know where to get the detail if required and have enough intelligence to know when you need the accurate detail.

[i]Darcy’s law[/i] - You have to take your shirt off and stride around purposefully twice an episode?

or this one which is what I used without knowing its name

Darcy's law at constant elevation is a simple proportional relationship between the instantaneous discharge rate through a porous medium, the viscosity of the fluid, and the pressure drop over a given distance.

For me 'getting it' is more important. I still remember when I was studying for my maths finals and had an epiphany where I finally *understood* Sturm-Liouville systems. At that point I could close the book and do something else. Didn't come up in the exam though so that was waste 🙁 These days I couldn't tell you what one looked like, other than that they have eigenfunctions as solutions (whatever that means!). So I've forgotten pretty much everything I learned at uni but that time has taught me an approach to problem solving and understanding that has stuck with me.

I suppose it varies by disciple but the point of many fields of study (and work)  isn’t to be taught and retain information  - it’s to learn how to think, reason even to learn how to learn.

it wasn’t the point of my eduction to be taught anything that I’d need to recall later. In my line or work I’m having to learn new stuff all the time knowing that in all likelihood, beyond achieving the goal in hand, I’ll never need to draw on that information again.

Your answers are somewhat of a relief, that negative self doubt creeps in so it's good to hear others thoughts

Sadly it's the second one WCA 😂

I've found my memory has changed since the advent internet/computers. I tend to remember where to find the information rather than information it's self. So I tend not try and remember details anymore and i think my brain subconsciously willfully disregards it's knowing that theres a box in the corner that retrieve it verbatim.

other than that they have eigenfunctions as solutions (whatever that means!).

Yes, we used to use Eigen vectors for something in beam forming antenna arrays. Can't recall what exactly, but I occaisonally drop it into conversations about them just to sound like I know what I'm talking about.

that negative self doubt creeps in

If you don't have that then you're probably a sociopath...

As long as we have electricity, an internet connection and know how to type something into Goole we'll be reet

Thats "Mr Google" to you 😉

I have worked in energy production forever, and the most successful people I have known have all had great memory. Not massive IQ's or suchlike but an ability to recall facts is what has got them on in the job.

Mines is crap.

OP if your memory is that bad with depression then you need to get treatment for it. My memory especially short term was absolutely destroyed with a bad bout of depression and it took ages to get it back. Even now its not that great.
Intelligence I think is very subjective anyway, what's intelligent to one person in a certain setting isn't to another.

I understand things by having a working model of it in my head, I don’t remember how it works based on the rules in the textbook.

Likewise. I'd say I have a poor memory for names, dates, and for things generally I don't understand. But the moment you can fit something into a framework, understand it, properly get a handle on it, then it's unlikely to be forgotten.

ask me what I read through last week and I can hardly remember a thing!

To me this implies you weren't that interested in what you were reading, or didn't have a way of connecting it to other things that you know? I guess that's inevitable to an extent with a new area, though I'd also take it as a sign that stuff that you're actually interested in you're likely to be better at doing.

Fwiw most memory strategies for remembering random stuff work by increasing depth of processing, often by tying things into some kind of framework (like 'memory palace' or which relies us all having a pretty good memory for location). These types of strategies do work and potentially are useful if you can be arsed to use them (not that I do, or very rarely), but I don't think they've got much to do with intelligence defined by me as understanding to operationalise in some way knowledge. Anyway - find a way to be interested (chemistry I'd find a challenge).

(qualifications: great memory for narrative, good at pub quizzes, wear glasses so people think I'm brighter than I am...)

I think I’m just worried/self conscious that when I’m asked something about what I’m learning, and I can’t remember (even though I understood it at the time) that people will see that as me being thick instead of just not being able to recall it

So I actually suffer this. I mentioned earlier I work in engineering, at a high level. So I regularly get asked difficult technical questions by my boss. Several years ago I went on a management course about learning styles. It taught me we’re not all the same in terms of how we retain and deal with information, and how we present it. Following that I asked my boss to try and direct difficult questions to me via email, rather than corner me in person. Because In person I’d bluster and cover my arse, but via email I’d have time to think and give him the answer I really meant. Over the years we know each other well enough to talk on such matters in person again but that approach worked when we didn’t know each other well.

Memory shot to pieces here too but trying to get that resolved.

I sometimes think you retain information better if you actually understand the subject matter on a macro level rather than just trying to remember string of facts. I realised later in life that the study style I was taught in school was just cramming in facts to pass exams.

The other thing is, I think, that as you get older you've got more responsibilities and just stuff constantly bubbling away in your brain that you simply don't have the blank canvas you has when you were younger.

Intelligence is the speed with which you acquire new knowledge (information is not knowledge as one also needs understanding). It has little to do with memory. Although if you are learning new things in the context of existing knowledge, that helps with the memory side by keeping it fresh. Otherwise it just falls away.

Keeping key information in a single place is helpful as one only needs to remember where that place is rather than the content.

@IHN has it about right. The smartest people I’ve met and worked with have encyclopaedic knowledge of things they’ve read, the author’s who wrote them, the connected theories on why a particular approach was better, etc. They are able to draw on that knowledge along with their own intelligence and apply it instantly to a particular problem.

When looking at a presentation at a conference, they are easily, inside 30s able to spot problems in complex connected equations, not because they’ve worked them out in the 20s it’s on screen, but because they’ve seen it before, seen it correctly applied and KNOW it’s wrong.

This is a significant advantage in almost any setting, but particularly in dynamic environments with multiple people contributing to a discussion.

WCA - as a power engineer for many years, no, just no.

Volts = How fast the water is flowing
Amps = How much water is flowing past
Power = How hard it is to walk across the river

You can have the Amps and power ones (though I don’t really like your power one - it’s ok), but not the volts.

Voltage exists even when there is no current flow. The water in your analogy is still.
A better description of voltage is potential difference - one that we used to use all the time. Voltage was the unit but what we were measuring was potential difference. Or pressure. Old electrical diagrams sometimes had high pressure and low pressure cables marked on them.

In your river analogy the volts is the difference in height between one end and the other. Bit like pressure then.

I have a phenomenal memory. I can instantly recall with pinpoint accuracy some things that I read or heard or saw 40 years ago.

The problem is, it’s incomplete and utterly random.

I have zero control over what sticks and what doesn’t and most of it is completely useless.

It’s simultaneously a gift and a curse.

I've forgotten what I was going to say....

My memory can be absolutely fantastic like near photographic for stuff I'm interested in.

Or if I'm not interested or I'm stressed awful.

It's like a newton's cradle stuff on the edge gets knocked out.

@goldfish24

Yes, I much prefer written communication because it gives me more time to think and process. I tend to discover as I write too, which is why I never found much luck with the very formal and rigid essay plans that were drilled into me at school. When I write now, such as for an essay, I start with a few bullet points, references and some headings, and then go through many drafts to discover what I know and what I think. It's like building a house from a rough concept.

If I do have to talk, I have a tendency to think openly as I do so and this doesn't go down well with most audiences; they want a presentation, not an exploration. I also trip over words and slightly stammer.

Some people have a great memory. My memory is, in contrast, average.

You'd need to define intelligence. But it is a useful skill to be able to remember stuff and then apply it to situations you come across. There's a balance somewhere. I know some people pride themselves on remembering facts but that isn't useful if you don't understand them.

I was quite good at remembering stuff for exams. But a significant amount of it was forgotten 6 months later unless used regularly. I also got quite good at doing exams as well. Spend as long studying the potential questions as you did preparing to answer them. Examiners aren't always very original in their approaches and use the same questions all the time.

@Houns

Have you looked at different ways of revising? We all process things differently. I do mentoring for exam age kids and some of them just don't know how to revise. They try to just reread notes and hope they remember it.

Reading never helped me but rewriting did.
Understanding was vital not just remembering
I liked to produce structure and order to information
I tended to focus on past papers, questions and problems to force me to work through the information.
I tended to take a slow and steady approach rather than cramming. I seemed to take in information when I was relaxed.

I'm dreadful at remembering things I've read no matter what it is, but tell me to meet you in 6 months time at a certain place at 15.27 & bring a book & I'll remember. Old car reg numbers I can remember quite well too.
I'm reading a good book at the mo but can't remember what It's about!

I’ve forgotten what I was going to say….

My memory can be absolutely fantastic like near photographic for stuff I’m interested in.

Or if I’m not interested or I’m stressed awful.

It’s like a newton’s cradle stuff on the edge gets knocked out.

While factual recall is probably less important than it used to be, because you can Google something in a minute, rather than having to dig around for ages, it is still useful to know stuff. Like several above, if I am interested in it, I will remember it, so I know all sorts of weird geeky stuff, but things like TV programmes that don't interest me- forget it. I am lucky in being able to see connections and patterns in information, which is useful in my job (tecchie).

It's very important not to confuse academic qualifications with intelligence though- that is a very limited correlation at best.

To me this implies you weren’t that interested in what you were reading

I can see how you might reach that conclusion but I don't think it's accurate. I have the same issues as the op, to the point I'd say it affects most aspects of my life, so it's a topic I'm quite fascinated by. Long term memory, short term memory and working memory are all poor for me. The only reason I'm able to function as engineer is because I'm insatiable curious and always eager to learn new stuff. Poor memory makes it a constant process, learning the same things again and again... But I only do it because I enjoy that process of learning.

This is actually something that has been equated to higher intelligence, the need to keep learning and rebuild existing ideas due to poor memory. I am however under no illusion that I'm at the extreme end of the scale, but it does draw an interesting picture that intelligence is not defined by this one quantifiable thing.

...I asked my boss to try and direct difficult questions to me via email, rather than corner me in person...

This is an interesting one. As I alluded to before it's something that has affected all aspects of my life and more recently I've realised it's one of the things that impacted my social development because it makes it hard for me to communicate in real time. I still have my struggles by other means, but I can do a lot better given a bit of time to think about what I'm saying and recall what I need to. Written communication is a lot easier for me for those reasons.

I did an MSc a couple of years back, after being out of education for many years, and not having studied science at higher education levels before.

I found the revision for the exams was basically a massive exercise in memorisation to recite info by rote. Even the stuff that required calculations required yo to memorise the formula. Easy to do the calcs if you knew the equations already.

May have been how my uni did exams, but think it's still normal. I didn't find it a very genuine way of examination of knowledge of the subject, but that's the way it goes... So if OP is in HE, then focus on memorisation is higher than the real world, where reference material is always available

Photographs, even tiny details from them stick in my mind and I know what photo the details come from.
Music I can hear a tiny fragment and know it but not know where from. Names to faces or useful facts are bit trickier. I struggle to remember typeface names these days. I used to easily identify hundreds.
I don’t know how the different cataloguing systems work in my head.

My memory is pretty crap at work, so I've just developed my own filing system and note taking methods that mean I can quickly read up on what I was doing when I can't remember a thing. I file everything in a huge directory structure which I know my way around and always have Notepad ++ open with several tabs open where I continually jot down stuff. A bit like a very watered down version of the film Memento.

My memory is shockingly bad - my wife's is shockingly good - she'll remind me about sonething I hissed her off 25 years ago, that I don't remember.

I am in a mentally demanding role as an accountant, and I do a good job of what I do. I do save emails in folders that I know I'll forget. Too much crap going on.

Useless at anything math-oriented, can never remember names, but I can recognise people I last saw thirty-forty years ago, and I never went to Uni, or college, except as part of my job on day-release; however, I’ve managed to get through my entire working life quite well, doing a whole bunch of different things fairly successfully, and I’ve worked with people who had expensive educations, University, the whole works, and couldn’t be expected to find their own arse with a map and a full set of instructions.

I'd recommend the book "The body keeps the score" to the OP as it goes over the way trauma affects memory formation, concentration etc (the title makes it sound like it's a "woo" book. It is very much not!).

Retired recently but I developed a habit of writing down working notes all the time - the company's intranet had some sort of "blog" facility so I used that - best thing I did because as long as I could remember the meta-info (e.g. I'd used an interesting method for this type of problem, rather than what the method was!) or even if not I could just search it all - I could find stuff I'd long forgotten.
I got very good at saying, "that does sound familiar, I'll check my notes and get back to you after this" in meetings!

Obviously the people who have all the facts and understanding at their fingertips as well as how to apply the material do very well, but luckily for the rest of us they are few & far between and constantly overworked 😉

I think it depends on your field of expertise: if you're a doctor (for example) you'll need to remember lots and your ability to either be naturally good at memory or be able to develop it will determine your success ; some jobs like research physics less so, I seem to remember an article about how one trait of successful physicists was that they were good at forgetting because you don't need memory you need computing brainpower.

If there are any cognition specialists on here please tear down my theories 🙂

I like to think my memory is decent but I'm also aware that 44yo me isn't absorbing new stuff but hanging onto what's already been absorbed !