Editing Blog/2025-01-15/Spatial-Textual Memory (section)

== Place on the Page ==

I recall that in the past, when reading books I could search for a section very easily by skipping back to that part of the text. This search was insanely effective. Often I'd open the book to the page that the text was on the first time, and other times I'd be a few pages off and able to search down pretty quickly after that. The memory worked the other way too: for sections that I recall with importance, I could mentally visualize the book's shape (how much read, how much unread), the page and the text's location, and the rest of the words would come to me almost magically.

Part of the change from then to now is that I am getting older and have suffered many concussions, but certainly one thing I find disorienting when using e-readers (which are otherwise incredibly convenient) is that they reflow text in some situations. I might set aside the reader and come back and the text won't be at the position I recall. Either I'm hitting some text-reflow shortcut accidentally or the text is reflowed automatically. In either case, the experience is strangely disorienting.

The other thing is that I have lost this spatial intuition in the book. I can no longer switch to the section or perform the memory tricks from before. I was curious about this so I've got a couple of paper books and one thing that I find quite interesting is that even on the first reading, I have a memory of random things. ''Precious Little Sleep'' has a distinction between SIDS and SUID in the bottom left of a page in the beginning of the book. I can see it in my mind's eye without picking up the book.

In the research, this is called 'place-on-the-page' memory and apparently, while a weak addition to normal recall of concepts and text it does actually work<ref name=potp/> as an index into the haystack. Looking through the work on memory and reading in that text it seems that this is quite common among people. Certainly it is then not strange that some of us do it more than others, since few human abilities land within a tight distribution.