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Tam's avatar

Your point here makes a lot of sense to me. But going back to elementary school for a minute, I think there's another possibility. When you learned about Sumer but also Columbus and also the American Revolution, you were picking up a lot of background information that you take for granted now. Do you know (now) that the Sumerians didn't have telephones? Do you know that big sailing vessels were important in history? Do you know that machine guns came around sometime between, say, the American Revolution and World War II? Do you know that people of the past spoke a bunch of different languages, and some of them had writing but some didn't? That and an unfathomable amount of other background stuff is what you really learned by studying specific topics in elementary school. That's what I think, anyway.

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Laurent Vaillancourt's avatar

I find my brain has a"Raiders of the Lost Ark" type warehouse stacked with crates. Ask me from a cold start to write everything I know about (Sumer)(fill in any topic) and it won't fill a sticky note. But let the situation warm up, put me at a table with 2 or 3 other folks all working/discussing at remembering tidbits about (Sumer), and my brain will...churn. Memories will be word-associated, triggering crates to be prybarred open in that metaphorical warehouse, dust billowing. Facts about (Sumer) expressed at the table will be increasingly met with "Oh, yeah, that sounds familiar", "Oh, that's right!", all the way to actual offering of my own tidbits of information.

Playing any game of "Trivial Pursuit" or keenly following an episode of "Jeopardy" will start that churning resurrection of knowledge/memories.

A clearcut example in my life was a few years ago. I sat down to draw a map of the little town where I spent ages 4-7. Casting my mind back thru the decades, the map began mostly blank and what was there was pretty dry. Then the churn began. Here was the barbershop, here was the drygoods store, here was the school, here was the gas station...and it kept going. I didn't just remember the gas station, but the name of the owner...and she had an iron Case eagle logo-statue...and before I finally called it quits, I had a richly detailed map of landmarks, places, and names.

I guess it's all there. Just requires a sincere need to haul it out in the open.

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