An Emotional Subject

This entry is partly in response to Sarah's blog post this week and partly in response to a conversation I had with Deb last week about her process of making a memory palace. Both Sarah's post and my conversation with Deb were similar in that they involved discussing the different ways people (and women, in particular) remember and make memories. Sarah wrote about her observation of Proust and how he writes about memory in an almost feminine way; in Swann's Way, memories are connected more to emotions than they are connected to images, and that this presents a sort of vulnerable and sentimental way of remembering; attributes often associated with femininity.

This same topic came up in my conversation with Deb; she mentioned she had difficulty creating a memory palace by only visualizing absurd or ridiculous images. In fact, from what I gathered as we were talking, she really couldn't approach it in that way at all to be successful at making her memories stick. The items she was placing around her memory palace absolutely had to be connected to an emotion or feeling that was also connected to a past memory...she was creating associations that were much less visual than the prescribed way of remembering by visualizing the obscene/ludicrous.

I then thought about my own way of remembering. I am an extremely visual person. In fact, a friend of mine has come to find entertainment in throwing out a one or two word description of something and then having me describe the detailed image that comes to my mind. He once told me to visualize a dancing squirrel, and the image that immediately popped into my mind was of a squirrel wearing bright green high-top Chuck Taylors, a pink and black polka-dotted shirt, and neon blue shorts doing break-dancing moves on the branch of a red maple tree. I have no problem conjuring up crazy images in the blink of an eye.

So the differences between visual or emotional memories and my experience versus Deb's experience made me wonder...is remembering by associating objects with emotion really a feminine thing, or is just automatically considered a feminine thing because woman are so often associated with being emotional and more sensitive? Are there men who remember this way? Proust was a man, and his themes in Swann's Way, as Sarah suggested, are emotional, so that makes me wonder if there are more men out there who do the same thing.

Can we really make this a gender issue? Or is it more subtle and complex than that?