Often I remember that something happened. Order gets wonky, even a week back. Sometimes I can kinda remember an image or a snippet, but not reliably. I gather most people hold on to a lot more than that.
Fine with facts and such. Never a problem in school.
I do have trouble remembering the names of characters and details of incidents in books I read, shows I watch, et c. Not as bad as my autobiographical memory, but not great.
And yeah, it’s frequently annoying for my wife, too.
“Tell me about a time when…” questions in interviews are interesting. I have to prep things from my notes ahead of time or I literally won’t be able to answer them. I’ll not be able to come up with a damn thing. The most stressful questions in elementary school were ones like “what did you do over summer break?”
It applies to short-term memory, too. I give myself very specific places to put things, because if I didn't I would lose track of my keys and wallet literally every day.
Weirdly enough, these issues don't seem to apply to logical or spatial memory at all, which is probably the only reason that I'm an effective programmer.
I can usually slowly work my way back through a book, maybe with a couple prompts from someone else to help me piece it back together, but only for stuff I’ve read in the past few years. Farther back and it’s gone. Character names rarely stick. I did watch the Star Wars trilogy so much as a kid that I could replay it in my head, every frame, sound effect, and line, every cut perfectly timed. Not anymore, but that part of me’s not totally broken, I guess. I think I’m not far off average on that stuff, maybe a bit below.
> Weirdly enough, these issues don't seem to apply to logical or spatial memory at all, which is probably the only reason that I'm an effective programmer.
Yep, exactly that here, too.
The typical mind fallacy should be taught a lot earlier in school.
It's not very clear as I can't really see it in front of me, but it's in my head, and there's a different kind of "seeing" happening...
One evening I asked my 5yo daughter that when she imagines something in her head, does she see it almost like in real physical 3d? She said yes. I wouldn't say yes to that question. But again, it's so subjective...
I’m fairly normal in most other ways, mentally, with really high (tested) spatial reasoning, and a good-but-nothing-special (on HN, anyway) tested IQ.
Just badly deficient autobiographical memory.
I didn’t even realize there was anything wrong until my mid 20s. Turns out this is a relatively-recently-discovered disorder of some kind, and on reading accounts by people who have it, I was like “…oh.” Not super well studied, I think in part because it tends (incredibly!) not to actually impair living an OK life. You just don’t really remember it like a normal person does.
Isn't this memory about your memory itself a pretty detailed autobiographical memory? Or is it that you can remember sort of templates and categories of things that happened but not a specific instance?
If I say: "imagine a red triangle", can you do it easily? Is it red? Does it visually exist in front of you?
I have asked many people this, and many people say it is laughably easy. This tells me it is "normal".
I can't do this. I also have a terrible episodic memory. But my semantic memory is fantastic.
My guess is it just got my brain to improve it's ability with that stuff, and the side effects helped in other areas (like this) too. :)
Never smoked or did any other recreational drugs.
I also started eating more fresh food and less frozen food, even if it meant eating-out fresh, because it was much worse when I was reheating a lot of tasteless frozen food.
But no matter how hard I try, I have focused my career into an area that requires a lot of creative effort, and I think that this has given me nearly permanent long term memory problems. Over the years, my relationships always get irritated that I don't remember anything. Actually, I thought my memory was normal, until I started to contrast it with people around me who worked in hospitality and such.