Conversion and Reyes

[Elizabeth Bear]

I don't have any current references, though I can scramble for some online ones--most of my reading on the topic was card catalog drunkard's walk, though I refreshed the research for Chaz. (There's an auditory eidetic on this BBS, too, but I will let sie out sieself if sie chooses.)

Basically, eideticism isn't perfect, total, or photographic recall, despite what they show in the movies. (One of the ways that Criminal Midns gets it right is that their eidetiker is a visual guy--stuff he's heard, he often misremembers, and when called upon to do something like recall in detail the plot of an entire book, he has to go reread it. Also, his recall suffers under stress. As he's written, he's probably also LLI and a picture-thinker (like Tesla, who could apparently visualize an entire schematic and hold the image in his head).) When you can get the headshrinkers to admit it exists, they proclaim it usually fades with puberty, so most research on it has been done on cognitively undeveloped pre-adolescent children: claiming it's not founded in an integrative faculty seems to me in those cases a bit questionable, because, hello, isn't it a bit ridiculous to be judging adult cognitive patterns in a five year old child?

(I guess this is where I out myself--I've talked about this on my blog, occasionally, though I generally downplay it, but in first grade or thereabouts I was diagnosed with a whole bunch of interesting cognitive abnormalities: I have a tested IQ somewhere above 175 and what they were then diagnosing as manic depression. These days, I have no idea what they'd call it, but it seems to operate about like Bipolar I, rapid cycling. I've done an awful lot of cognitive work over about twenty years, and seem to have more or less hacked my brain into behaving itself most of the time. I'm also diagnosed with a math-related learning disability (dyscalculia), which is part perceptual and part manipulative, and also probably has something to do with the fact that I'm inductive to the point of near-incoherency unless I translate for more linear life forms. Basically, I have a brain that's optimized to hell and gone for synthesis, but which isn't awful good for things like adding 2+3 to get, um, 5. Though I've been training it for that, too, because neuroplasticity is fun. In any case, I can still do some pretty good tricks, like holding the entire structure of a novel in my head--though I perceive them as shapes and patterns of motion, not as words or pictures. Apparently, this is rare, even among novelists.) Anyway, as all y'all know from hanging around with me, whatever my diagnosis, in the real world it's more a curiousity than the Superpower a random bignum IQ is on TV.)

Okay, so what eideticism is, in my experience and from my reading, is a highly specialized form of recall, usually focused in one specific sensorium (often visual or auditory), which (like normal OR traumatic memory) relies on association.

As modern-day Western humans, we use very little of our brains' capacities for memorization: an educated 16th century Englishman could quote Ovid in its entirety to you, and a 16th-century touring player probably had twenty or thirty plays in repertory at any one time. Even today, a London cabbie who is "on the knowledge" displays physical changes to his or her hypothalamus apparently caused by memorizing the streets of London.

Here's a brief Straight Dope writeup: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2350/is-there-such-a-thing-as-photographic-memory

Here's a brief web report that hits the high points: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1693

Please note, both of these focus on visual eideticism.

Apparently there is some anecdotal evidence linking eideticism to Asperger's and savant syndrome. Kim Peek was an eidetiker. Daniel Tammet http://www.optimnem.co.uk/about.php appears to have an eidetic faculty specialized to numbers.

My own totally speculative hypothesis is that it's some outgrowth of the same function that provides us with traumatic ("flashbulb") memory, and it possibly, neurochemically, works about the same way.

[Alena]

In any case, I can still do some pretty good tricks, like holding the entire structure of a novel in my head--though I perceive them as shapes and patterns of motion, not as words or pictures. Apparently, this is rare, even among novelists.

I have been wondering when I would find another writer who gets structure this way!  At Fourth Street this year there was a whole panel about structure which ended up with a lot of people talking about how they perceived structure, all different ways, and I kept hoping there would be someone else who got it with how things move.  Alas, there were none.

...which, okay, has nothing to do with the rest of your post.  *g*  Sorry.

(Fascinating discussion, though.  Carry on.)

[MadGastronomer]

I haven't jumped into this before mostly because I'm having computer troubles, and typing it all up on the gimpy laptop or the OAP seemed daunting.  Now I'm back on the slow-but-reliable desktop, which works OK.

Now I'm starting to wonder if I wasn't a visual eidetic.  I used to have some absurd level of recall for text, when I was younger, and could flip to passages in a book with ease.  My recall for the written word is still better than average (in school, I once skipped the entire first half of the quarter of a class, talked to my disabilities services person, read everything the class had covered so far, walked in and took the test, and aced it, all within about three hours), but nothing like what it used to be, when I could quote long passages near-verbatim after a couple of read-throughs.  Made acting easy.

I have a memory from about 15 or 16 months (I was born in November, and snow had to be still on the ground in Maryland) of building a snowman with my mom, and putting Dad's favorite baseball cap on it, and he came home and put it on and was not happy that it was all cold and wet.  My dad remembers his dad teaching him to skip stones while his mother was giving birth to his brother, and he was 18 months at the time.  Mom doesn't remember much of anything before 6 or 7, but her father died around that time, and it was pretty traumatic for her.  My brother's memories of his entirely childhood are pretty shaky (examples: he doesn't remember about half of the shows we watched together growing up, even the ones he was excited about; he doesn't remember ever liking popcorn, even though he loved it before the family stopped eating it when I got braces).  We've begun attributing that to the Lyme he had when he was 13 that went undiagnosed for six months.  So, yeah.  Weird, wide range of "normal" and "supposed to" in my family.

[Felicia1066]

Now I'm starting to wonder if I wasn't a visual eidetic.  I used to have some absurd level of recall for text, when I was younger, and could flip to passages in a book with ease.  My recall for the written word is still better than average (in school, I once skipped the entire first half of the quarter of a class, talked to my disabilities services person, read everything the class had covered so far, walked in and took the test, and aced it, all within about three hours), but nothing like what it used to be, when I could quote long passages near-verbatim after a couple of read-throughs.  Made acting easy.

I had this same thing, or close to it, way up into my teens. Still have it to a certain degree, but not the way it used to be. I skated through most of school just by looking through the books once (and paying attention in class if I was interested) and always got very good grades - all the way up until university, when suddenly I had to actually produce stuff on my own time. I still remember things much better if I've written them down - and it doesn't matter if I can actually find the piece of paper I wrote it on, it's enough that I have written it. When it comes to books and other things I've read, I can almost always remember the broad strokes of it, even years later, and usually way more in detail than that. (And I'm a voracious reader. There's a LOT of text drifting around in my brain.)

[Alena]

I still remember things much better if I've written them down - and it doesn't matter if I can actually find the piece of paper I wrote it on, it's enough that I have written it.

Huh.  I do that too, but I've always assumed that was related to my kinesthetic memory--I have the memory of the motion of my hand, not the memory of the sight of the words.  Maybe we just get to the same place by different routes.

(Humans are strange.  And kind of amazing.)

[DavidG]

neuroplasticity is fun

Not when it's the pain gates it's rewiring

I'm also diagnosed with a math-related learning disability (dyscalculia),
...
Apparently there is some anecdotal evidence linking eideticism to Asperger's

There's a vast multi-variate sea of variation in the way our brains process information and out on the less common fringes some of that gets classified as dyscalculia, dyspraxia and the other 'developmental disorders', while moving even further out you get Aspergers and the rest of the Autism Spectrum. But it's a continuous pattern of variation, there isn't a discontinuity between 'normal' and 'developmental disorders' or between 'development disorders' and ASD. Labels like dyspraxia cover a whole web of different symptomology and co-morbid overlapping with the other syndromes is the norm rather than unusual not to mention that you get above-average variation as well as below-average , c.f your kinesthetic eideticism combined with dyscalculia, where by contrast I'm significantly dyspraxic, but very good at maths. In the end I really like the neurodiversity movement's view of things, which says 'this isn't a problem, it's who I am'.

I don't think I've ever really been visually eidetic in the classical sense, but I coasted through school and university exams never doing revision exercises,  practise essays or whatever (unless forced, and if forced it didn't make any difference in the results), just re-reading my notes a couple of times in the fortnight or so before the exam. Once or twice that's given me picture recall of pages in my notes, but mostly something a touch short of that (my handwriting is bad enough that picture-perfect recall wouldn't necessarily help ).

[Elizabeth Bear]

I don't really consider it a problem, but it is a limitation. I really wanted to be an astrophysicist. *g*

[DavidG]

I don't really consider it a problem, but it is a limitation. I really wanted to be an astrophysicist. *g*

And I wanted to be a fighter pilot When I did eventually take gliding lessons I had workmates coming up saying 'Is this really a good idea, you know what you're like...'

[Bunny M]

** My PI is wonderful, .... He also has a hobby of trying to pry out my psyche and stick it under the dissecting scope, which might even also be useful, but is a little disconcerting.

I suddenly have this vivid mental image of a youngish boy frowning in concentration as he pokes into a dark overhang under a (limestone*) rock-wall, and a pair of extremely beady, somewhat aggro and just a bit nervous eyes glaring back at him. The sort of eyes that just somehow tell you there's a lot of pointy teeth attached.

(*) Why limestone? I dunno, but it's definitely some sort of pale, sedimentary rock.

Sorry for the de-railing of the diversion (of the tangent) of the topic. 

[Jezabella49]

** My PI is wonderful, .... He also has a hobby of trying to pry out my psyche and stick it under the dissecting scope, which might even also be useful, but is a little disconcerting.

I suddenly have this vivid mental image of a youngish boy frowning in concentration as he pokes into a dark overhang under a (limestone*) rock-wall, and a pair of extremely beady, somewhat aggro and just a bit nervous eyes glaring back at him. The sort of eyes that just somehow tell you there's a lot of pointy teeth attached.

I am loving this mental image of yours.  Especially the beady eyes.

In my fandom, we don't have topic drift.  The topics often about face and dash between your legs like a skittish cat, or make a sharp turn from the path and run screaming into the roadside underbrush.

[jimsmyth]

Free-range topics are healthier, have better lives, and are more tasty.

[kayjayoh]

The previous two comments are so full of win, I can't even describe.

[tylik]

Where's a cut tag when I need one? Sorry about the length here. (And coming back to this after the general conversation has cheerfully cavorted elsewhere.)

I don't have any current references, though I can scramble for some online ones--most of my reading on the topic was card catalog drunkard's walk, though I refreshed the research for Chaz. (There's an auditory eidetic on this BBS, too, but I will let sie out sieself if sie chooses.)

Thank you - actually the two you link to are some of the ones I stumbled across. I was mostly wondering if there was a particularly good book or some such - I can hit the primary literature (in my copious free time - and yeah, since at this point my hobbies have more or less taken over my life, that's not really a complaint) and maybe there are some decent reviews, but darn it would be nice if their were a treatment with both breadth and depth.

Basically, eideticism isn't perfect, total, or photographic recall, despite what they show in the movies. (One of the ways that Criminal Midns gets it right is that their eidetiker is a visual guy--stuff he's heard, he often misremembers, and when called upon to do something like recall in detail the plot of an entire book, he has to go reread it. Also, his recall suffers under stress. As he's written, he's probably also LLI and a picture-thinker (like Tesla, who could apparently visualize an entire schematic and hold the image in his head).) When you can get the headshrinkers to admit it exists, they proclaim it usually fades with puberty, so most research on it has been done on cognitively undeveloped pre-adolescent children: claiming it's not founded in an integrative faculty seems to me in those cases a bit questionable, because, hello, isn't it a bit ridiculous to be judging adult cognitive patterns in a five year old child?

The case being referred to was one of the Russian case studies, and it was of an adult. The professor was actually making kind of the opposite point - that this person had to do a lot of replaying their own memories to find things, and that integrated knowledge is really more efficient. What I took from it was a little different because I was filtering it through my own experience - I guess it's possible that the integration bit would be a problem for some people* but I was mostly taken by the similarities to my experience trying to find things. It often seems like I have a pretty good memory, but an idiosyncratic index - it's in there (well mostly - and it's sometimes rather embarrassingly obvious how much I was paying attention in the first place) but sometimes it takes me a bit to figure out where if it's not tightly bound to a conceptual structure. (Mary Carruther's The Book of Memory - of which I only read the first couple of chapters before giving it away to a friend, and now it's all expensive - kind of got me going on associative memory matrices, which has helped with the indexing a lot. Though what she wrote was really more of a jumping off point. I am trying to avoid making some fairly bad jokes about a lot of the work I've done on multidimensional analytical databases for very large and complex data sets...)

And yeah, it's not perfect. Though there's enough solidity to it that especially as I've gotten back into academia I've had to make a point of backtracking where and when I learned a lot of things, because things that I learned watching PBS, or reading 321 Contact, or sitting in on my mom's microbio classes when I was six are pretty much as present as what I was reading last week - if filtered through my understanding at the time (though I can separate what was said from how I understood it - I just have to remember to), and with a sense of reliability of sources that was not nearly as well developed. I don't think I really understood until last year how much I relied on it all. My PI got on my case about it all when I admitted** that one of the things I'd had to be careful of during exams is to not giggle at the jokes the professor had made while he was discussing the material being covered in questions on the exams. Because really, naturally the sequence was "read question, remember that part of lecture, giggle at joke." If the joke was any good, anyway.

The sequence bit is probably related to having a coding disorder (again, great hilarity considering how much code I produce - it's a fairly specific type of dyslexia, though I'm generally quite good at compensating and I wouldn't be surprised if it was undetectable to most tests now) but I do sometimes wonder if it's partly just related to how I structure things. Kind of the way that the spatial abstracts part of the memory seems to merge over into the mathematical modeling.

(I guess this is where I out myself--I've talked about this on my blog, occasionally, though I generally downplay it, but in first grade or thereabouts I was diagnosed with a whole bunch of interesting cognitive abnormalities: I have a tested IQ somewhere above 175 and what they were then diagnosing as manic depression. These days, I have no idea what they'd call it, but it seems to operate about like Bipolar I, rapid cycling. I've done an awful lot of cognitive work over about twenty years, and seem to have more or less hacked my brain into behaving itself most of the time. I'm also diagnosed with a math-related learning disability (dyscalculia), which is part perceptual and part manipulative, and also probably has something to do with the fact that I'm inductive to the point of near-incoherency unless I translate for more linear life forms. Basically, I have a brain that's optimized to hell and gone for synthesis, but which isn't awful good for things like adding 2+3 to get, um, 5. Though I've been training it for that, too, because neuroplasticity is fun. In any case, I can still do some pretty good tricks, like holding the entire structure of a novel in my head--though I perceive them as shapes and patterns of motion, not as words or pictures. Apparently, this is rare, even among novelists.) Anyway, as all y'all know from hanging around with me, whatever my diagnosis, in the real world it's more a curiousity than the Superpower a random bignum IQ is on TV.)

Shapes and patterns and motion sounds a bit like my spatial abstracts, though they've generally been fairly closely tied to my mathematical aptitude (and also my difficulties discussing math with many people, though I'm doing a lot better with this. It is odd - generally the verbal capacity is pretty resilient, but if I'm doing intense enough math or algorithm work it almost hurts to shift over and try to talk about it in English.) Do you do abstracted mathematical relationships, but not specific arithmetical ones?

There's actually quite a bit of bipolar in my family, though it seems the major effect on me is that I have a very broad idea of what normal human behavior is. My younger brother, though, has the spectacular variety complete with psychotic breaks and lovely bits like wandering naked through NYC. (He's mostly stable, now, though I'm afraid stable in a slightly depressed sort of way.) My father and half sister seem to have gotten of a bit more lightly.

Okay, so what eideticism is, in my experience and from my reading, is a highly specialized form of recall, usually focused in one specific sensorium (often visual or auditory), which (like normal OR traumatic memory) relies on association.

As modern-day Western humans, we use very little of our brains' capacities for memorization: an educated 16th century Englishman could quote Ovid in its entirety to you, and a 16th-century touring player probably had twenty or thirty plays in repertory at any one time. Even today, a London cabbie who is "on the knowledge" displays physical changes to his or her hypothalamus apparently caused by memorizing the streets of London.

When you say specialized form of recall... is this mostly that it's closer to a raw sensory stream rather than abstracted information? (For me, for the sensory stream to persist best - and definitely for it to be indexed well - it needs to be kind of wrapped together with integrated matrices.) Or the tying to a single sense? Or...?

Though is that sort of thing that uncommon even now? I think of all the people I have known who could quote at least most of The Hitchhiker's Guide from memory - possibly a less laudable trait, but still.

One of the things I really enjoyed about Carruther's book is her analysis of how many of the things that we tend to attribute to creativity were attributed in the middle ages to memory. There tends to be a bit of a cultural bias now against "learning by rote" but there isn't anything about having a capacious memory and flexible working memory that enslaves one to the past.

Apparently there is some anecdotal evidence linking eideticism to Asperger's and savant syndrome. Kim Peek was an eidetiker. Daniel Tammet http://www.optimnem.co.uk/about.php appears to have an eidetic faculty specialized to numbers.

My own totally speculative hypothesis is that it's some outgrowth of the same function that provides us with traumatic ("flashbulb") memory, and it possibly, neurochemically, works about the same way.

So how do most people experience memory?

* As I said, really not my problem. Other than silly stuff - like getting earwormed with songs that I only heard once, and that fifteen years ago at a amateur production of a fairly obscure musical, and I mean the whole song - the only thing that's sometimes hard to deal with is just how thick memories get around things, and that's only rarely been a problem as an adult. But... had I gotten other portions of the family neurochemistry inheritance, or maybe just been slightly a different person, I suspect it really could be problematic.

** This was while I still was trying not to take incompletes in all my classes that semester. My former PI never seemed to take it amiss, even when I did a lot of quoting data from articles when arguing with her. But then, she was a visual eidetic.

[Elizabeth Bear]

Where's a cut tag when I need one? Sorry about the length here. (And coming back to this after the general conversation has cheerfully cavorted elsewhere.)

I was afraid I'd scared you off.

Thank you - actually the two you link to are some of the ones I stumbled across. I was mostly wondering if there was a particularly good book or some such - I can hit the primary literature (in my copious free time - and yeah, since at this point my hobbies have more or less taken over my life, that's not really a complaint) and maybe there are some decent reviews, but darn it would be nice if their were a treatment with both breadth and depth.

I dunno, But if you find one that somebody with a Scientific American-level grasp of neurochemistry can manage, I'd love to read it.

The case being referred to was one of the Russian case studies, and it was of an adult. The professor was actually making kind of the opposite point - that this person had to do a lot of replaying their own memories to find things, and that integrated knowledge is really more efficient. What I took from it was a little different because I was filtering it through my own experience - I guess it's possible that the integration bit would be a problem for some people* but I was mostly taken by the similarities to my experience trying to find things.

...it isn't my experience that one form of recall precludes the others.

Actually, if anything, at this point my abstracted memory is efficient enough that I have a hell of a time remembering specific concrete detail. OTOH, my learning process is extremely bottom up: I have to start with practical applications and work to theory for the theory to make any sense to me. I think this is a manifestation of the intuitive/kinesthetic thing: my brain is not good at specific pieces of data in isolation. However, if I can understand the system, then the individual processes become intuitively obvious.

It sounds to me, by contrast, as if you are highly sequential. Which I think pretty much puts us at polar opposites for thinking styles, which is kind of really neat.

Shapes and patterns and motion sounds a bit like my spatial abstracts, though they've generally been fairly closely tied to my mathematical aptitude (and also my difficulties discussing math with many people, though I'm doing a lot better with this. It is odd - generally the verbal capacity is pretty resilient, but if I'm doing intense enough math or algorithm work it almost hurts to shift over and try to talk about it in English.) Do you do abstracted mathematical relationships, but not specific arithmetical ones?

It's complicated. I do well with geometry, for example, because I can hold the whole system in my head. With mathematics, I hae a series of issues. One is that unless you have a Nashian brain that does it all for you automagically, it's not generally recommended to work complex sequences of operations as an apprehended gestalt. But my brain gestalts or synthesizes *everything*. In addition to that, I have the dyscalculia thing, which means that it's perfectly possible for me to see 3+2, think 3+2, and write down the answer to 3x2. And I will not see the error. (I'm not hypersimplifying here: it kicks in with operations that small.)

So I can work a formula, follow the steps in the correct order (which already takes maximum concentration for me), and still get the wrong answer because I made a first-grade mistake.

Historically, I've done a lot better in physics, because you can *tell* by inspection when the answer makes no damned sense, and go back and look for mistakes or re-work the problem until it does make sense. Also, I had some success a year or so back in teaching myself algebra, because if I got the wrong answer I just reworked the damned problem until I got the right one, or until I located my error.

Also, I get anxiety attacks when confronted with mathematical problems, which is probably based on the fact that I didn't manage to get diagnosed with a learning disability until after my fourth year of college.

When you say specialized form of recall... is this mostly that it's closer to a raw sensory stream rather than abstracted information? (For me, for the sensory stream to persist best - and definitely for it to be indexed well - it needs to be kind of wrapped together with integrated matrices.) Or the tying to a single sense? Or...?

Well, the raw sensory stream thing is LLI--lowered latent inhibition--which is linked to (surprise) autism spectrum disorders and, well, genius. Basically, it means the subject's filtering software doesn't work so well, so they notice more than most people. Which, if you have the processing power to work it, turns you into Sherlock Holmes--or Richard Feynman. If you don't, it can send you into withdrawal.

Generally, eideticism is described as not being more information, but rather longer access to it. The ability to hold the clear image in your head as if it were still before your eyes. Apparently, visual eidetics will scan their memory of an image with their eyes to find a piece of data. (This also bears some resemblance to techniques of guided memory used in cognitive interviews, where associations are used to bring back forgotten bits of data.)

(You may see some of this information come back in a future episode of SU. *g*)

(LLI: I do not have this one. I don't think. Unless it's why I can't hold conversations in crowds. Most people seem to be able to pick out a conversation stream in a crowded room, but... not so much. Otoh, you know the gorilla basketball thing? Those never fool me, unless they require noticing that a person has been replaced by another person, because I am fairly faceblind.)

Though is that sort of thing that uncommon even now? I think of all the people I have known who could quote at least most of The Hitchhiker's Guide from memory - possibly a less laudable trait, but still.

That's repeated exposure, though. These guys could pick up a play in a day or two. We just don't train for the facility any more.

One of the things I really enjoyed about Carruther's book is her analysis of how many of the things that we tend to attribute to creativity were attributed in the middle ages to memory. There tends to be a bit of a cultural bias now against "learning by rote" but there isn't anything about having a capacious memory and flexible working memory that enslaves one to the past.

Yeah. Also, it's a lot less necessary now. You can get the book out of the library or off the internet again any time you want.

Some of this synthesis stuff may also share genetic code with schizophrenia (yay) and even better, sometimes they may manifest the same way. (Nash's brain apparently got him information about the aliens the same way it got him information about the maths, which is why it took him so long to learn to sort out which was which. The fact that he did eventually learn to parse one from the other seems to me a testament both to neuroplasticity and cognitive tactics. And, you know, the man's own stubborn.)

So how do most people experience memory?

Damned if I know. It sounds to me like you've got more going on than eideticism, frankly--that sounds like a pretty hefty information steam.

Traumatic memory seems from recent studies to be stored as a metaphorical pyramid, of sorts. Basically, it gets encoded as an eidetic image even in a non-eidetic brain, and associations can recall that traumatic memory as vividly as if it were currently occurring. So say I hand you a rose and then slap you hard enough to knock a tooth out. The next time I hand you a rose, your brain will associate that with the slap, and send a strong signal to your body to get the hell out of this incredibly hazardous situation. That signal will include a "flashbulb" memory of what happened the last time somebody handed you a rose and you failed to run.

This is adaptive in a world where the smell of a skunk is followed by chemical warfare, and your body wants to not encounter that second skunk. It is NOT adaptive in a world where the song that was playing when your lover left you could come on the radio at any time.

*g*

[txanne]

So how do most people experience memory?

I used to have the same kind of memory as MG and Felicia. Now, though...well, here's an anecdote for your data collection. ;-) When you mentioned Mary Carruther's book, my mind's eye showed me a picture of her giving a talk to my university's medieval studies society, right after her book had come out. I saw the name, then the picture of her, then the cover of the book--all in the time it took to finish reading your sentence. I know where she was sitting, what color the rug was, where I was sitting in the room, and so on. If I were given a series of photos, I'm pretty sure I could pick out which room the talk was in. But I can't remember what her voice sounds like.

OTOH, I have a particular kind of strong auditory memory. When I can't sleep, I hit Play on my mental iPod, so I can soothe myself to sleep with a selection of my favorite pieces. I know I'm drifting off when the piece starts to skip repeats, or branches off into a similar melody. I think this is only because I'm a trained musician--my natural brain is entirely word-based. OTotherOH, musical talent runs in my father's family like you wouldn't believe, and I suspect that at least part of my language-learning talent is related.*

*no, Ed, that wasn't on purpose. :-)