Why a weak memory for your own conclusions might be what lets you think again — and another way to read a difficult Mercury.
I've noticed that a strong memory can quietly work against you — not memory for facts, but memory for your own conclusions. When you hold tightly to what you once decided, and you aren't careful to watch your own mind, it blocks you from meeting a problem fresh: the moment you return, the mind says, I already know this. The old answer arrives before you've really looked, and nothing gets re-derived. It feeds the ego, too — I already know this is a comfortable thing to believe.
But re-deriving something — coming at it again, from a different angle, with fresh eyes — is one of the most useful things a mind can do. And here is the part I keep turning over: the ability to re-derive and a weak memory may be two sides of one coin. They don't really exist without each other. If an old conclusion never fully sticks, there is room to meet the question again; if it sticks hard, there isn't. What looks like a poor memory for your own answers might be exactly what keeps the door open.
And when you do come back, you are not the same person — time has passed, things stand nearby that weren't there before — so the answer you reach is genuinely new. A spiral, not a circle. This only matters where fresh seeing is the point — a poem, a proof, a practice — not where you simply want the old answer back. I've also come to think it is another way to read what Jyotisha calls a retrograde or difficult Mercury: usually taken as a flaw in memory and the thinking mind, but read this way it isn't a broken faculty at all — it is a mind kept from settling, made to derive things again.
The careful version — the two kinds of memory, why the foreclosure is structural rather than a matter of effort, and how it sits against the cognitive-science literature — is in the paper: "When the old answer forecloses thinking again: weak retention of prior conclusions as a structural precondition for re-derivative cognition".