Thinking "backwards"

[geordief]

Does anyone here ever try to follow the thread of their thoughts backward?

If you start from now  is it possible to go backwards in time through your thought processes and how long of a stretch can you manage?

I sometimes try this ,normally when I am aware that I have forgotten something in my mind and, Jason like in the Minator's den I try to "retrace my steps".

I would say 10 minutes might be my personal best.

Edited July 28, 2023 by geordief

[Genady]

If you do, how can you know that you in fact follow the thread of your thoughts (assuming for a moment that such a thing exists) and not making up a new narrative?

[TheVat]

I've tried reviewing actions I've taken, sometimes to find a lost object.  I guess that is a fairly literal retracing of steps.  Sometimes it helps just to stand in the spot where I was doing something, or observing something.  (e.g. looking out back window, noticing cat chewing on grass, remembering that I need to pick up more cat food.  If I go to the back window later, and am trying to remember that, it will come back more easily)  

Occasionally, there will be something I was going to tell someone, and in that case sometimes it is helpful to try and reconstruct a train of thought.  Not sure if that is really following a thread, or more like piecing together various shards of memory to reconstruct a picture.  

The trickiest objects to find are ones you set down to answer the doorbell.  If you are like me, you don't give sufficient thought to where you are placing the item and if a long interaction follows with the person at the door it makes it harder to reconstruct memory.  

Maybe what OP is talking about is more like finding the way back to what started an odd topic of conversation.  How did we get onto the subject of X, anyway?  Didn't we start out discussing B?  Then you might follow a chain of conceptual associations backwards.

[geordief]

51 minutes ago, Genady said:

If you do, how can you know that you in fact follow the thread of your thoughts (assuming for a moment that such a thing exists) and not making up a new narrative?

That is absolutely  right.All the definition is lost so it is not like rewinding a tape.

Still it is an exercise and you can at least revisit where your thoughts took a "fork in the road"

I was also thinking that,in addition to the logical thoughts that go through your head there seems to be  a much less differentiated train of mental perceptions that seem to "follow them along"

I am not sure what connects them and whether the logical thoughts on the surface affect them or not

19 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Maybe what OP is talking about is more like finding the way back to what started an odd topic of conversation.  How did we get onto the subject of X, anyway?  Didn't we start out discussing B?  Then you might follow a chain of conceptual associations backwards

It is a game really.I wonder if a really skilled writer  would be able to sit down at the end of the day and write down all the thoughts he or she had had  since the time they got up .

Feels like there might be a mental muscle there that has atrophied in my case ,if I ever had it.

 

These days I forget where I put things more often than not.And yes ,physically retracing your steps can  normally do the trick.

[Peterkin]

It's much easier to trace back actions and even conversations than trains of unexpressed thought. The act of speaking aloud helps to fix words in memory and if you recall the words, you may recall the thought which gave rise to them. Unspoken thoughts seem nebulous; as soon as you try to catch them, they disperse like vapour. Even so, I can sometimes recapture the idea that started a train by looking for landmarks, e.g. if I ended up with "better check if Scruffy's come in", I can look for associations with cat, rain, night, front door, porch, greenhouse, plants... Oh, yes! I wondered whether the squash needs watering. Or something like that.  

[npts2020]

Sometimes that works for me but more often I will recall something later, I couldn't dredge up at the time, doing or thinking about something else completely unrelated. (I often tell people "I have a photographic memory, it's the photographic recall I have troubles with.  )

[Genady]

I've learned an important system for "thinking backwards" from my high school math teacher. It included rules such as "don't use notebooks, use only separate sheets of paper", "write only on one side of the sheets", "have a large desk, so you can spread the sheets in one layer, having all the work visible", "don't use pencils, only pens; never erase what you write", ... The point of all this was that while solving a problem you keep your trials, errors, dead ends, intermediate results, etc. easily accessible and reusable. When you finally solve the problem, you "reconstruct" a logical way through this mess.