I have this problem whereby I can remember information that I absorbed fairly well, most of the time. Um, that's not the problem. The problem is that I very rarely recall where I might have actually read or seen it from.
Sometime in the past few months, I thought I read something about a particular difference between how black and white American parents bring (or used to bring) up their children in their earlier years. The white parent would speak continuously to the child - as we know, sometimes about nothing, sometimes echoing what the child might have said, basically including the child in conversation. The black parent would actually not speak directly to the child until the child itself is ready to speak.
Just to be clear, that was what I remembered and it might not be completely accurate.
After four or five days of trying to work out where I'd acquire that bit of trivia from, several evenings leafing through books trying to find the exact passage, and cross-checking with people to eliminate books and films I'd recently read and seen, it finally occurred to me that it might have been from a face-to-face conversation.
So I rang Lorraine. And what do you know? She named the particular study. And the author, Shirley Brice Heath.
I think there's something very strange about the way my brain is wired. I seem to keep images in my memory, even the ones which have been conjured up in my own mind as a result of non-visual mediums.
Posted by sniffles at November 05, 2001 09:12 PM