I was thinking back to a conversation I’d had a few days ago at a friend’s house and realized I couldn’t remember much of what had been said.

You can think of conversations as being two-way interactions, but the flow of information can never be symmetric from the point of view of one of the participants. By this I mean that while you hear what another person is saying, what you say is both heard by you and has been thought by you prior, by definition of your being able to say it. I’ll concede that you also think about what you hear the other person say, otherwise you might as well be talking to a rock, but I’d guess that the type of thought you devote to what you hear others say leaves less of a mark on memory than the type of thought you devote to what you say in order to say it. This would explain why most of what little I do remember of the conversation were things I’d said.

Why are things this way? I’ve decided it’s highly variable from person to person and in what context the conversation takes place, so that things might not be this way for you or at least not always this way. In my case, I wasn’t completely at ease. If I had been, maybe I would’ve listened more carefully to what they were saying, thereby approaching a symmetrical conversation from my point of view and allowing me to remember as much of what they had said as I could remember of what I had said.

When you’re standing across from someone, there’s pressure to reply quickly to what they’ve said, which often doesn’t allow sufficient time to think enough about what they’ve said to be able to remember it at a later date.

Instant messaging conversations are a nice effortless cheat, allowing near symmetry even if you’re not completely at ease. This is possible since reading what another person has written is closer to the kind of mental processing treatment you give your own writing than the type of mental processing laden with asymmetric pitfalls I described earlier which everyone is prone to unless the people involved are really in tune with each other.