Brylcreem and the problem of eidetic memory

Brylcreem began television advertising in the 1950s with the slogan "A little dab'll do you," reinforced with a jingle: 

Brylcreem, a little dab'll do you.
Brylcreem, you'll look so debonair.
Brylcreem, the girls will all pursue you.
They'll love to run their fingers through your hair.

They stuck with this, with slight alterations to accommodate changing hair styles, into the 1970s.

For reasons explained perhaps by misfiring synapses in my brain, the jingle popped into my head this morning and I am struggling to get rid of it. That problem is technically called an earworm -- that annoying tune that won't go away -- but it set me to pondering the problem of my quasi-eidetic memory. The question is not how to get that jangling jingle out of my head but WHY is it stuck in there in the first place? 

Why do I still remember a commercial for a faux chocolate mousse marketed in the early 1960s in which a man is trying to flip a spoon into his empty dessert dish, while his wife looks at him in annoyance and says, "We see you, John." I can date this memory because there is something vaguely Jackie Kennedy about the whole set up.

Why can I sing Dinah Shore's "See the USA in your Chevrolet" song? Why do I remember the dancing Old Gold cigarette boxes?  Although, to be honest, until I went looking for an image to post here, I thought it was for Chesterfield Kings.

Much of that is due to the powerful impact of repetitious television advertising, of course. But I remember other things that happened only once: my brother asleep with his head lying in the remains of a chocolate pie that had been left cooling on the washing machine, with a trail of ants climbing up and down the side of the machine. We lived on Hazel Avenue when that happened, so probably when I was five years old. Or the dream I had as a child where I was playing in the sand alongside the driveway to our house on Southwood Drive, where we moved when I was six, and a big cloud of sand came over me from above and showered down on me. [The cloud of sand was God. Why? I don't know. It was a dream. But I remember it. I can almost feel the sand in my hair.] Things like that.

Eidetic memory is the ability to recall images in great detail after only a few minutes of exposure. It is found in early childhood (between 2 percent and 10 percent of that age group) and is unconnected with the person’s intelligence level. Like other memories, they are often subject to unintended alterations usually because of outside influences (such as the way an adult may ask a query about a memory). I know that some of my "memories" are more memories of memories -- I remember something that happened not because I remember the original event but because I remember telling or hearing about it many times over the years. If eidetic ability is not nurtured it usually begins to fade after the age of 6, perhaps as growing verbal skills alter the memory process. I think mine was nurtured unknowingly because people fussed over how much I remembered and I showed off. Of course, once I hit school age, the rewards were obvious in terms of grades and praise.

Eidetic images are only available to a small percentage of children 6 through 12 years old and are virtually nonexistent in adults.

There is a popular idea of a photographic memory wherein one recalls things after a single glance, but there is little evidence that a memory of that sort actually exists. There are a number of techniques, however, by which one can learn to memorize things in a rather remarkable manner. I learned some of those tricks over the years. And never underestimate the power of repeating something over and over and over and over and over to yourself.

Anyway, I am one of those people who was blessed/cursed with that eidetic memory thing. I was probably exposed to the silly Brylcreem commercial a zillion times as a kid and it got firmly implanted. The "We see you" commercial came along when my eidetic memory should have been fading, but it managed to lodge itself in an otherwise unoccupied portion of my memory. along with Old Gold cigarettes and Dinah Shore. Well into my 40s, I could tell you in what chapter of what book John of the Cross discussed certain issues -- and worse, I could tell you where to look on the page to find it in a particular edition of the book. Of course, those memories were nurtured by the fact that I did both my master's and doctoral work on John's writings.

One of the friends who read my memoirs commented that one reason they are so long is that my memory is freakishly complete. And I put it all in the memoirs. She assured me that most people would not care that much for a detailed account of all the pets we had. Not all of them, anyway.

Now in my mid-60s, many of those eidetic  images and sounds are going or gone. The only ones that still haunt me are things like the Brylcreem jingle or the punchline of old commercials. Unfortunately, I am like Sheldon Cooper in that I sometimes want to make a joke and pop out with something like, "We see you, John" and wait for a chuckle. Nothing happens and I am left with an unspoken Bazinga.