Bill Duncan<br>

By BILL DUNCAN

For the Capital Press

This may sound strange, but I am cursed with a photographic memory. If you wish you had such a gift, be careful what you wish for.

Since electronic technology switched from film, for which the principal ingredient is silver nitrate, to digital imaging using pixels mapped onto a grid and stored in the digital camera’s memory, it seems to be putting my photographic memory a bit out of focus.

When I heard that Richard Packman, a binary code scholar of sorts, was a presenter at Umpqua Community College’s Extraordinary Living Conference and would give a lecture on memory, I signed up for his workshop. Richard put on his very best college professor lecturer’s cap and wowed his packed audience with his memory tricks. He had my complete photographic memory recording each detail without taking one note.

He scolded the schools for not requiring students to memorize and recite poems and other material, which he said was a key to a good memory. He cited how as youngsters we learned the alphabet by chanting the letters. He noted how we learned spelling and grammar by memorizing the rules, like “i before e, except after c.”

He gave a litany of tricks to jog the memory, how to remember names, streets and where you last left your keys by visualizing. He suggested reminding yourself that you are “putting the keys in my coat pocket,” and retaining that clear memory of doing it.

He touched on using mnemonic devices such as “every good boy deserves favors,” to learn musical notes, or “ROY G BIV” — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — to memorize the colors of the rainbow. When computers replaced typewriters in newspaper offices, as a reporter I had to learn “CAD” to remind me that Control-Alternate-Delete would shut down the computers at the end of a workday.

Packman even touched on an old trick I have used for years. Lately, he said, medical science has come to accept this method of dealing with pain. I have had too many needles and knives poked into me during my lifetime and I do not do pain medicine very well. My method is to write books in my mind to make the pain go away. It works for me.

He gave some methods on how to relax and improve the memory through self-hypnosis techniques. My photographic memory was absorbing his lecture like a sponge.

Then he lost me when he went off on using numbers to kick start the little gray cells. At that point my old school photographic memory ran out of film. My photographic memory is word-oriented and does not recognize those binary digits, pixels and bits. He lost me as he madly put numbers up on the gray board — schools don’t have black boards any more, nor do they use chalk.

He showed how to remember months and dates with those scattered numbers he sketched on the board. I was thinking, why not just use an old fashioned calendar, but then I remembered my mother looking at my school report card and exclaiming that she didn’t understand how I could get an A-plus in English and a D-minus in arithmetic.

I was OK as long as it was a written equation where I could use word logic to solve the problem, like if Sam had two apples and gave one to Jack, how many apples did he have left? That’s an easy, readable question. It was when the numbers were stacked against me that I had trouble. According the list of supplies needed by students this year, a calculator is a required classroom device. I was born 70 years too soon, or I just didn’t have enough pixels.

Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, Ore. 97470.