How do our brains work?

[japhy]

I feel my brain is a hash of hashes (of hashes, etc.). I do not think arrays (as such) enter into the picture, really. I remember things via other things, not by when I learned them, per se. And I remember sequential things via linked lists (which COULD be seen as either:

$alphabet = { letter => 'a', next => { letter => 'b', ... } };

or as

$alphabet = { a => 'b', b => 'c', c => 'd', ... };

or any other multitude of ways). This implies that I think in a relational sense -- I best remember things by WHERE I've seen them. When I had to memorize the founding fathers of my fraternity (Acacia), I remembered which came after the next -- I could not say "the 8th father is ...", because I didn't have array-indexing abilities. I had to step through the list to find the 8th.

One of the brothers I just asked says he uses associative (which is compareable with relational) thinking, and that he uses linked lists for remembering sequential things. The argument he used is "when you smell a flower, you remember happy things, right?" That's associating the odor with a pleasant thing.

Then something interesting came up:

• Jeff: Most people can count backwards because numbers have a repeating pattern, but they can't say the alphabet backwards because there's not a pattern to the letters, it's just "b" comes after "a", etc.
• Will: No, letters have a base 26 pattern than just doesn't get a chance to repeat.
• Jeff: Damn.

(Maybe that was just a fun tangent, I dunno.) So I'm curious how you think your brain works in the Perl sense.

$_="goto+F.print+chop;\n=yhpaj";F1:eval