This is a mnemonic device though. The person is the device. I see them (or think about, talk to them, etc) and those memories come back kind of like a stream of things related to them.
The study seems to call out ability to accurately recite one’s life story, vividly recalling subsets of childhood experiences in details, not knowing they had mac n cheez last Tuesday.
I grew up rural and was way less distracted by trendy and/or random people all around energy. I can clearly recite events and back it up with pictures my camera obsessed father took through the 80-90s. My autobiographical awareness seems intact.
Mainstream life then and now comes along with pressure to defer expressing ourselves and serve “higher purpose.” It’s not so shocking people do so and then remember nothing; there’s probably not that much to recall if one’s path was constrained to “set aside personal exploration to serve by getting busy work job, do job all week, sit on couch parasocially recharging through others emotional performances on TV.”
That’s a pretty fractal cognitive existence. That’s why I am not a fan of lifelong “career” culture. Adam Smith wrote years ago extreme division of labor would make humans incurious and stupider than animals; current political trends seem to back up the idea as everyone clings to keeping their tribal bubble intact rather than explore new models.
Don’t smash my cognitive fractal, bro!
This is ALSO why you don’t ever talk to police. You talk to lawyers. If a cop were to ask you the same “where were you at” question, it’s probably better to not answer at all.
Otherwise that kind of question is ridiculous.
It's an odd experience having him talk in detail about a fairly normal day 11 years ago when he was two, including what we had for dinner. I can't remember what we had for dinner the day before yesterday.
There is a whole set of behavioural patterns I exhibit that all seem to tie into this. For example I have no sense for time on the scale of weeks or longer.
On the other hand I seem to remember "narrative background" well. E.g. What someone likes or doesn't like, where they're from etc. I also seem much better than others in remembering whether a topic already came up or not.
In terms of MBTI/Jungian Functions: I seem very much lead Ni.
I'm still working every day writing C++/CUDA/VHDL code, so I suppose I'm a healthy adult.
> For example, when given randomly selected dates or event cues from their past, HSAM individuals can effortlessly recall many details of what happened, even if trivial (e.g., what they had for dinner) without the use of mnemonic aids. They are neither savants nor calendar counters (although they possess extensive calendar knowledge from their own lifespan) and they are distinct from other types of superior memorizers who possess vast learning and retention of meaningless information
This is the opposite group from the study, that is the group that has superior autobiographic memory. I find this incredible because I’d have to work hard to remember what I had for dinner 3 days. I’d normally do it by unspooling my memory to identify what the day was about to try to find some context. This only works up to a couple of days. Maybe a week. But there’s no way I’ll remember anything from 2 weeks or more in the past. Anyway, I thought this was amazing.