In a dream that I had a few days ago, I was trying to remember the word (in English) that is used sometimes in financial terms, despite the fact that its normal meaning is 'non-religious'. After spending some time in bed trying to remember, I eventually got up and went to the computer, at 2 am. The word that I was looking for was SECULAR.
When I awoke, I checked my memory - and the word was gone. I went back to the computer, checked my browsing history and found the word again. This time I wrote it down on a pad by the computer.
Over the next few days I would check my memory and most times I could not think of the word. Eventually I used a mnemonic - Dracula, although 'regular' would be better - that was supposed to remind me of this word. I could remember the mnemonic but about half of the time I couldn't make the connection between Dracula and secular. It's as if the word has completely disappeared from my brain, or as if my brain is not prepared to store it.
And it's not as if I've never used the word: I'm sure that in my youth I used it frequently (when describing my youth movement) and a quick check shows that four blog entries over the years also contain this word (the last time was just over a year ago).
This is somewhat frightening as I am a person whose livelihood is dependent by no small amount on a good memory. This short-term and very specific amnesia may have been caused by the viral infection that has been plaguing me for the past few days - at least I'm hoping so.
I shall try and find sentences containing 'secular' (like "This person was born secular but turned into an observant Jew several years ago") in order to constantly remind me of this word. A song lyric would be best but I can't remember any song containing this word - even the erudite Peter Hammill has yet to use 'secular'.
This reminds me (a poor choice of verb) of a story by Robert Silverberg, 'How it was when the past went away': terrorists placed amnesifacients in San Francisco's water supply, causing people to forget. But the drug affected people differently: one person forgot who he was, one person remembered everything except for his wife, one person lost the previous nine months, and one - the example that I want to use - is a professional memory artist, the sort of person who can recall the seventh page in the eighth chapter of some book. Some of his memories are intact, but others ... are gone. In the end, he commits suicide (for some reason, I can't locate an e-copy of this story; I certainly have it in print).
That's how I felt: almost all of memory was intact but a certain dictionary entry had simply disappeared and I couldn't restore it.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 17 | Bar mitzva | Bar mitzva | |
| 205 | The girl who played with fire | Literature, Steig Larsson | |
| 292 | Misinformation | ERP | |
| 890 | How the mind works | Psychology, David Lodge | |
| 1429 | DBA: Pilot study 2 | DBA | |
| 1674 | The blackest day for 50 years - notes from a peripheral participant | Israel |
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