Catriona, I would be grateful if you could elaborate on that. Aspects of your descriptions recall items from books such Pinker's "Language Instinct", in reading of which I was intrigued by the ingenious ways in which modern experimental psychologists could formulate and actually test hypotheses about mental mechanisms and processes. (Certainly they are popular (or lay) books, but then I am a layman, even if not a popular one.)

What I have in mind is the extremely varied range of associations by which I sometimes break through mental blocks to remember a word (or other item). Sometimes it is by indirect association of senses or ideas and the process might take days (I have an appallingly, frustratingly bad memory, and as I age it is getting appallingly, frustratingly worse.) Sometimes it is an everyday word. I might remember it via another language, a tune, a poem, a quote, a smell or memory of a place or event. There is no telling. And then, suddenly a word that had vanished via the back of my tongue might pop up quite unbidden and unforced in a sentence addressed to someone in another conversation.

In other words, the recall mechanisms might not be clearly linguistic.

Perhaps you can recall the sketch of the man interviewing a boxer;

"What is your name?"

"Happy birthday toooo yooo

Happy birthday toooo yooo

Happy birthday dear Rocky...

Rocky! That's my name, Rocky!"

Catriona,

Gosh! What a demonstration of how culture-bound a test can be! The Beatles flourished during my young adulthood, but they passed me by almost without a trace, although Beatlemania in South Africa was as intense as anywhere. I visited your site without being able to contribute anything; sorry! The principle I admire, certainly. I remember JFK's death (mainly because of the fuss my mother made!) Apollo 11 landing, the first peripatus I found, reading for the first time Sedgwick's lyrical description of its beauty, that reflected my own reaction with almost painful fidelity and intensity, the first time I happened on the nest of a spotted eagle owl or found a pair of frogmouths in a Banksia in Australia, or a Cymatomera Katydid on a tree trunk in the Transvaal. There was the amazing defecation action of a pamphagid grasshopper, and the discovery of a breeding ground of Tridactylid "pygmy mole crickets". There was my first rudimentary insight into special relativity, and my first insights into Darwinism and the concept of programming and the discovery, against all expectation, that I could learn to fence well. I remember the exquisite markings on a baby leguan swimming in calm water alongside our kayak in the Orange River, and how that same river, in the rapids, would pull you under without the least apparent interest in whether you were wearing a life jacket or not.

Conversely, I found from time to time how treacherous memories could be. The worst is not simple forgetfulness, but where one constructs memories from descriptions. I have spent hours searching for items that later turned out to be the product of internal fabrication. Interestingly, possibly importantly, it now occurs to me that such fabrications tended to lack the vivid impressions of peripheral, possibly irrelevant, details.

But hardly anything about Beatles, beyond a few vague impressions from silly news items.

Is that relevant, I wonder?

Oh well...

Cheers, and thanks again,

Jon