The College Blur…

You may have heard of the college blur, when many people tend to have a hard time remembering a lot of it… this often gets written off by many people as an alcohol induced problem… I myself personally remember next to nothing from college anymore, it’s almost as if I went to school, blacked out and then became conscious after it was over…  

When I try to go back into my college memory, I often feel I can pin point one of the days that it feels like my memory blacked out. It was when I started taking interpersonal communications and they started discussing how to read body language and things like that, I don’t remember a class after that… I hardly remember any class or anything I learned for that matter, there are classes I finished and I thought I dropped and even a class I am not even sure I took… I have a theory about the class I don’t remember whatsoever, but it was called ceramics and I don’t recall a moment of pottery in my college years… it may have been a class though where we did some like abstract sculptures and things like that, that I remember a little. 

The thing is, I don’t think this was alcohol induced… which I did a little drinking on the weekends in college… but I don’t think that is it… I think my brain went into hardwire mode… I tend to believe that my brain was thinking so fast, that it didn’t really take the time to make memories or it was incapable of making long term ones… I went into college with one mindset, went into hardwire mode, and came out a different person after acquiring everything I learned… 

I compare this to our early childhood years, before we have our first memories… If you think back on your life, it was like you just woke up one day knowing how to speak a language and do various tasks… somewhere along the way we are suddenly conscious with this acquired information… You see, while I know our developing brains have something to do with memory, I tend to also believe that we are just learning so fast when we are little and trying to make sense of the world, that our brain doesn’t make long term memories, it may actually hinder the process of hardwiring a lot of information into our brains… 

But, I think college is such an overload of information for a lot of people that they go back into hardwire mode… this happens to people in the trades as well, my friend who is a machinist had a similar experience learning how to program and operate machines, he doesn’t remember learning how to do it almost at all, yet he became and is now an excellent machinist… 

I just personally think there is more at play with this college blur that many people experience and that it shouldn’t be written off as just drinking too much alcohol… I am sure it happens to lots of people that didn’t drink at all as well… 

I tend to have a better recall memory as well… so I might remember more than I know if people got to talking about things… but I think I experienced a rather large hardwiring blur effect though… Then of course our brain is like a computer with limited capacity and only so much access to long term memory, often as new important information comes in our brain has to move some other stuff out… the theory is that our brain might hold on to every memory, but we can only access so much of it… will save that discussion for another day though… 

Interesting thoughts I thought though…