A few years ago, I discovered that I had a vitamin B12 deficiency. B12 is a contributor to memory, so I was hopeful that by clearing up the deficiency, my memory would improve. I'd have to say I don't think so, but it's a pretty subjective question. At least, I can say it was not dramatic, if improved at all.
Otherwise, I am quite introverted, on the spectrum. I focus on my thoughts much more than what is going on around me, and that strikes me as a more likely cause. The events are not imprinted because I am not paying attention.
* Rereading old journal entries - I didn't do a ton back then, but I did them periodically. Some things in them I'm surprised happened to me, because I didn't remember them
* Rereading old emails and chat logs and forum posts and look at old photos - I'm kind of a digital packrat, and still have a lot of that
* Meet with friends and family and reminisce - I don't do much of the reminiscing, they do, and they remind me of things I had forgotten about.
I also think part of my problem for remembering things is I don't orally tell stories about myself that often, especially repeatedly. It seems that people who do that can recall them that much more easily. Journaling and rereading the journals helps me recall stories about my life though, and tend to be the stories I do tell others when I do.
I was pretty introverted and inward thinking too, especially back then. It's possible they didn't get imprinted but I think it's also possible that memories are fleeting and can go away if you don't actively record them.
I got better for awhile about writing things down right when they happened, and the amount of detail in those journal entries are much, much, more detailed than when I try to record things even a month after the fact. Memories can slip way too easily, I think.
Speaking of which, I've gotten way behind on journaling and need to get back on that.
I have an experiment for you. If you listen to podcasts regularly while doing other stuff, pull one up that you've listened to in the past 3-5 days and listen to it again. When I do this, I will periodically get a stream of vivid movies of what I was doing when I listened to it the first time. I'm talking an intrusive replay of the sensory experience I was having previously.
My next step is to fire up a dash cam and listen to podcasts while I'm driving, then re-listen a few days later and record myself describing what I see as I'm listening. Then sync the two videos and see how close my description is describing what I saw the first time.
For years afterwards listening to the same music would make my mind imagine events in the books I was reading listening to the same music. I'm not sure exactly when it stopped happening though.
Also Biggie’s Warning and anything Visual Basic 3.0. I don’t know why
Note that for many vitamins taking supplements doesn't cut it the same way as taking them naturally through regular old food (fruits, vegetables, legumes, meat, fish, etc).
And besides B12 deficiency there could be other aspects to memory problems, including good sleep and less stress, than might even be dominant...
While it would not go so far as say there is causality to things. I would say that your description is better more useful model.
Some expressions from the top of the article: "severely deficient", "impaired", "absence of".
Sounds very much "supposed to but isn't" to me.
Psychology student here, to my knowledge this has never been proven to exist, except maybe the procedural memory of people who journal everything. But they still wouldn't have the level of detail you're describing here. Many people who think they have this kind of memory actually do not (though they may still have a very good memory).
There seem to be a couple of different dimensions of variation in how human memory and imagination work. One is what is discussed here: the ability to "vividly" reconstruct remembered events "from a first-person perspective". Apparently, some people can do it, and others cannot. Presumably, there's a range of abilities in between.
At one end of the spectrum are people with hyperthymesia, who appear to be able to instantly reconstruct every tiny detail, including visual details from a first-person perspective, of everything they've ever experienced. At the other end are people like those discussed in this article.
Another dimension is how vividly and comprehensively people can construct, manipulate, and experience sensory models in their imaginations. Again, the spectrum seems to run from aphantasia at one end (that's the inability to construct mental imagery at all) to someone like Stephen Wiltshire, who appears to have an eidetic visual memory that enables him to draw large, detailed landscapes with roughly photographic accuracy after briefly seeing a scene a single time.
People with aphantasia generally seem to assume that when others describe mental imagery, they are being metaphorical; that they don't mean that they actually experience mental imagery in a literal sense. Contrariwise, I do actually experience mental imagery in a literal sense. In my late teens I became fascinated with a series of exercises devised by Aleister Crowley, in which you practice constructing increasingly elaborate assemblies of colorful 3D shapes moving in different ways. The goal was to see how many shapes you could manage at once and keep all of the shapes, colors, textures, and movement patterns stable for as long as possible.
I assume an aphantastic person would think Crowley was joking or bullshitting, until they learned that some people can indeed construct and manipulate detailed mental images.
Further complicating the subject, we also know from experiments in psychology of perception that the brain tends to edit memories, altering their content over time. I'd be interested to know how this tendency interacts with the variables mentioned above.
I'm somewhere in the middle on both axes discussed above. I experience memories in the first person, and I remember and dream in color. When navigating, I rely on a 3D model of where I am and where I'm going, and if asked to go somewhere I haven't been before, I want to see a map that I can use to refresh and supplement that mental model.
By contrast, my mother navigates procedurally. She wants a sequence of operations to perform: "turn right here; go a certain distance looking for such and such a building,..." and so on. I _can_ navigate that way, but I find it much more difficult and error-prone than just constructing the 3D model. From what my mother says, I'm not sure she can construct a model like that at all.
Signs of the difference show up in, for example, the kind of information each of us wants when being directed to a new place. She wants detailed step-by-step instructions; I want coordinates in space and some identifying information (like the street address) to confirm when I've arrived at the right place. She will follow directions to the letter. I'll just pick a route that points in the right direction and improvise until I'm close enough to look for the confirming data.