I remember -- I have a visual memory -- of seeing the names of Richard Dysart, Anthony Hopkins, and Anthony Perkins, as playing the psychologist on Broadway in the play "Equus." I had no idea at the time who Dysart and Hopkins were -- I was a kid. But the memory is in my head. When I was a very small boy, I simply "remembered" without trying: the names of dozens of streets in Allentown where we lived for 2 years. My parents then got me a street map of the city, and I thought it was the coolest present ever. Strange thing, memory.
There's an episode of Taxi in which the ragged half-loony Jim says that he remembers telephone numbers by turning them into words, with each number representing a sound. Then he dials the number of a woman Alex wants to get in touch with. "Her number is BFTZPLIK," he says, or something like that. The funny thing is that that's how I used to grade the multiple-choice portion of our Western Civ exams. I turned the answer key into a 20-element or 40-element "word," which process took a minute or two, and then I'd grade the exams according to whether the students spelled the word right. I could go through 40 of those things in 5 or 6 minutes. So when I heard the joke on Taxi, I threw myself back on the couch and laughed my head off. "I'm not the only one!" I said.
And yet I have a hard time placing people's faces. Not their voices, though. I identify a little-known actor on TV or in a movie by the voice, and only afterwards do I make sure of the face. I can hear, in my mind's ear, the voice of every one of the kids in my grade school class. But I find it hard to remember the names of students, or rather to fix the name with a face. I double-clutch sometimes, and even if my guess is correct, I'm shy of saying the name, in case I'm wrong. Yet my visual memory of words I see is extremely strong: I can see the newsprint from 55 years ago. Go figure.
It takes all kinds, I guess.