Insanely bad compared to books or other permanent records. The human memory system did not evolve to be an accurate record of the past. It evolved to keep us alive by remembering dangerous things.

And yet I have vivid memories of many situations that weren't dangerous in the slightest, and essentially verbatim recall of a lot of useless information e.g. quotes from my favorite books and movies.

I am not sure exactly what point you're trying to make, but I do think it's reductive at best to describe memory as a tool for avoiding/escaping danger, and misguided to evaluate it in the frame of verbatim recall of large volumes of information.

When I say, "Insanely bad compared to what else in the animal kingdom?" and you respond with, "compared to books or other permanent records"

"Books or permanent records" are not in the animal kingdom.

Apples to Apples we are the best or so very nearly the best in every category of intelligence on the planet IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM that when in one specific test another animal beats a human the gap is barely measurable.

How do you know we have better memory than other animals?

This crap tier article was the first and easiest response to your question:

https://sciencesensei.com/24-animals-with-memory-abilities-t...

3 primate species where very concise tests showed that they were close to or occasionally slightly better than humans in specifically rigged short term memory tests (after being trained and put up against humans going in blind).

I've never heard of any test showing an animal to be significantly more intelligent than humans in any measure that we have come up with to measure intelligence by.

That being said, I believe it is possible that some animals are either close enough to us that they deserve to be called sentient, and I believe it is possible that other creatures on this planet have levels of intelligence in specialized areas that humans can never hope to approach unaided by tools, but as far as broad range intelligence, I think we're this planets' possibly undeserved leaders.

Can you find anything that I didn't consider?

I don't think working memory has anything to do with sentience.

The conversation was more about long-term memory, which has not been sufficiently studied in animals (nor am I certain it can be effectively studied at all).

Even then I don't think there is a clear relationship between long-term memory and sentience either.

Books and other permanent records of human thought are part of the human memory system. Has been for millennia. If you include oral tradition, which is less precise, but collectively much more precise than any individual thought or memory, it goes much further.

We are fundamentally storytelling creatures, because it is a massive boost to our individual capabilities.

Chimpanzees have much better short term memories than humans do. If you test them with digits 1-9 sequentially flashed on a screen, they're able to reproduce the digits with lower loss than undergraduate human students.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-008-0206-8

> While the between-species performance difference they report is apparent in their data, so too is a large difference in practice on their task: Ayumu had many sessions of practice on their task before terminal performances were measured; their human subjects had none. The present report shows that when two humans are given practice in the Inoue and Matsuzawa (2007) memory task, their accuracy levels match those of Ayumu.

Hmm.

So? If I write something down as a child and forget it I can come back 60 years later and know what I wrote down.

Chimpanzees can not.

The question was whether there are animals who have better memory than humans. I named one: humans are not superior to animals in all cognitive capabilities.

See Nathan's response. They trained the chimp and threw the humans in blind against them.

Like I said, so close as to be almost immeasurable.

That's a very anthropocentric view. Technology isn't a series of deliberate inventions by us, but an autonomous, self-organizing process. The development of a spear, a bow, or a computer is an evolutionary step in a chain of technological solutions that use humans as their temporary biological medium. The human brain is not the starting point or center of this process. It is itself a product of biological evolution, a temporary information-processing system. Its limitations such as imperfect memory, are simply constraints of its biological origin. The tools we develop, from writing to digital storage are not just supplements to human ability, but the next stage in a system that is moving beyond its biological origins to find more efficient non-biological forms of information storage and processing. Human pride in creation is a misinterpretation. We are not the masters of technology. We're just the vehicle of it. Part of a larger process of technological self-improvement that is now moving towards an era where it might no longer require us

I think your understanding of the words "autonomous" and "self-organizing" is somewhat lacking. If there were no humans, those things would not happen.

Further, if it were a byproduct of the presence of humans, then the backpath of invention would be repeated multiple times and spread out across human history, but, for instance, despite the presence of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, magnetite, wood and ink across the planet, the compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing were essentially exclusively invented in China and only spread to Europe through trade.

The absence of the four great inventions of china in the Americas heavily implies that technology is not a self-organizing process but rather a consequence of human need and opportunity meeting at cross ends.

For instance, they had the wheel in America, but no plow animals, so the idea was relegated to toys despite wheelbarrows being a potentially useful use for the wheel.