Fuzzy memory: A personal, fascinating experience.

A while ago I was talking to a friend from college. One of the more amusing coincidences is that he has an older brother with the same name as mine. And in this weird way - like his brother’s path is a premonition for how my future might go, I ask him every few months how his brother is doing.

A few years ago, my friend told me his brother was working at a fintech called “smallcase”.

Anyway, cut to a few weeks ago. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked my friend if his brother still worked at “Little Box”.

I was met with the kind of sounds that clearly meant: confusion. And then, right after, the question: “Little Box?”

After a few exchanges, my friend told me: the company name was “smallcase”… not “Little Box”.

And that was that.

…but the moment itself was so fascinating to me. What did I just experience?

“Little” and “box” are obviously very similar to “small” and “case”. But as nouns, they can point to pretty different things. So why did I say Little Box? Why did I not I say smallcase?

We have  all heard the whole “brains are kind of like modern systems” comparison (or the reverse), but to witness something like that happening in real time inside my own head was honestly wild.

It made me wonder if my brain didn’t store the sentence “My brother works at smallcase” the way a deterministic storage device would (like a hard disk storing a file). Maybe it stored something more like a processed representation of the event. The gist of it.

So when I tried to retrieve it later, I didn’t retrieve the exact phrase. I retrieved the “concept”, and then my brain had to convert that concept into spoken language. And maybe that conversion is basically: activate a bunch of candidate words, and then pick something that’s “close enough” and available fast.

These are obviously just guesses (and that’s what makes it fun :) ). But even if you buy the general explanation, there’s still a question that bugs me:

If my memory was created  from hearing “smallcase”, shouldn’t it still prefer smallcase over little box?

Here’s where my assumptions get even more speculative. Maybe it doesn’t search against ALL of my vocabulary. Maybe it mostly pulls from what’s currently accessible. The words that have been active recently, the words I use more often, the words that are “warmed up”.

So maybe “little” and “box” were just used by me recently (a few hours ago, a few days ago), and that made them easier to grab. And maybe that’s part of why we can talk as fast as we do: we are  not always choosing the best word - we are choosing the fastest word that gets the point across. Hence, "Little box".

Is that also why some words are harder to recall than others?

In a deterministic device, it doesn’t really matter when a file was saved. A text file you created 10 years ago vs one you created 10 seconds ago -if they’re the same size, they should open in roughly the same time.

But can we say the same about vocabulary? Or even memories?

It definitely feels harder to recall a language you hardly speak anymore compared to a language you use every day. So maybe “storage” in the brain isn’t just storage - it’s also access, and how recently/often something has been used.

Anyway. That tiny “Little Box” moment sent me down a whole rabbit hole. And it made me appreciate how weird (and kind of amazing) it is that we can speak at all.

That’s a lot of maybes, but my surface

level research does suggest there’s at least one kinda similar study. Also, in extreme cases, where the word you say is close but still wrong (like “garage” vs “barn”) - it is a well studied speech disturbance called paraphasia. Watch out for future posts. I want to dig into this more deeply at some point.