The second comment recounting a apparently total recall like memory of being a ten year old boy in 1977 is fascinating. Not least because of the detail about purchasing a white loaf and butter for two pounds British. That's today's money costs. A loaf of bread in 77 cost you thruppence or 4 new pennies if your regional banks had caught up with decimalization recoinage and everyone rounds up on these occasions see the Teuro when the standard 3DM loaf of bread suddenly cost you 3 Euro the next day. Rgds jm2
Dang, The same-link post is over a year old and got 2 comments. Are you pointing this out for the former, latter, or both paragraphs stated in the FAQ?
Signed, never quite grasp the repost guidelines.
Are reposts ok?
If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
Please don't delete and repost the same story. Deletion is for things that shouldn't have been submitted in the first place.
You flagged this post (Total Recall: the people who never forget) as a repeat or repost. But the FAQ for reposts allows for reposts that didn't get a lot of attention and/or are older than a year. The duplicate older post you quote didn't get a lot of attention and is older than a year.
'dang didn't flag it: he posted related past articles, which he often does (such as here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36278663). If he had intended to call it out as a [dupe] he would have explicitly done so.
Yes, I've seen the [dupe] flag. However you may understand the confusion caused as the article Dang has posted is not 'related', it is the same article, i.e. a dupe. So perhaps the question now arises as to why it was posted 'without' [dupe], yes?
Although it's the same article, it's a related in the sense that the discussion happened in the past. A submission is not considered a dupe if it's been over a year since last submitted.
So Dang was re-posting the over-year-old same article as a way of contributing to this same parent article? And though the original article is technically old, and had just two comments, it is considered a related/of interest post. Have I understood?
No one flagged the current post! It was fine as a repost because the story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, as you correctly read the FAQ.
Listing "related" links is just because readers enjoy looking at old comments on the same topic. It's there to enhance the site for curious readers and there's no implicit reproach for the repost—on the contrary!
It's pretty obvious when you have this. Semi-popular video game journalist Tim Rogers has it, and you wouldn't mistake anyone else's work for his as a result.
(There was a time maybe 10 years ago when people tried to do something called "new games journalism" basically imitating him, and it was mostly just embarrassing for everyone involved, because normal people can't construct a review of something entirely out of personal anecdotes.)
Its uncontrollability makes it as much of a blessing as a curse in a way not dissimilar to ADHD's hyperfocus phenomenon. Memories are the brain's interpretation of reality and therefore not always reliable, the ability cannot be switched on or off at will, and other people don't always appreciate or understand it which leads to many awkward situations.
Personally I'm not able to do so and never heard anyone else claim to possess that ability either. That is not to say I don't believe it might be possible to some - I just haven't come across it.
Before my own ADHD diagnosis and treatment my hyperfocus used to kick in at the most random times and it often lead me to spend far too much time on tangential or superfluous tasks or topics. My medication allows me to channel the hyperfocus into more productive directions, but it still happens when it happens.
It doesn't really work that way. For instance, if you're discussing something with your boss, and you have perfect recall about what was discussed 6+ months ago, but your boss disagrees with you, they will just use their version of previous events as the reference of record. People tend to get angry when you disagree with their version of past events.
It's a lot like the myth of Cassandra -- doomed to be able to foretell the future, but nobody believed her. Doomed to remember the past, but nobody ever believes you. Everyone is 100% committed to their own version of the past that lives in their head.
> For instance, if you're discussing something with your boss, and you have perfect recall about what was discussed 6+ months ago, but your boss disagrees with you, they will just use their version of previous events as the reference of record.
This is a misunderstanding of the situation. Even if there's a record of the old conversation, the boss wants something else now, and you're judged on doing what the boss wants, regardless of if that's consistent. It isn't great if you have an inconsistent boss, but a paper trail wouldn't help much.
Here's a fun question: if someone had near total recall, what career or life path could they take where it would give them the biggest advantage?
Gambling with cards is an obvious field. I've also worked with programmers who seemed to remember every bit of code they'd come across and that was a huge advantage (although it's a bit disconcerting when someone remembers your code better than you do).
financial goals would not rank high. If I could remember every single thing I see, I would rather become a lawyer or a doctor where I would be able to have a much higher advantage over others and that would automatically solve any financial problems. If I had a superpower, I would use it to help people as a career path because gambling would get boring real soon as the money aspect of it would just disappear in a week or so (assuming any place allows you in twice).
This is like the one where people who win the lottery become happy for a very short time but very soon after that they either go back their baseline happiness or worse, become depressed.
It doesn't really seem to me that this would be beneficial for lawyers. The most important skill for a lawyer is the same as any other business owner - the skill of getting people to give you money.
Nothing else really matters, not even winning. As long as you don't steal from your clients.
While having perfect memory you still need to be able to apply that knowledge.
Someone who can perfectly recall a whole medical book does not make him/her a great doctor. Same for lawyers or any other "bookworm" professions.
But to answer your question, I would think a politician. You will look smart and in debates you can always recall your opponents voting history, statements,...
Politician is a great example, although you definitely need a lot of other skills to succeed there.
The same would apply to being a journalist. Being a Jake Tapper or similar who remembers everything someone ever said could make you an incredible interviewer.
This is one of the great books of my life. I've read it several times, first as a college undergraduate in 1968, when the English translation appeared.
I have a significantly above average memory (read a book remember what was in it, not exactly but close), and I was told that Dermatology was the field I should pursue. Apparently it involves thousands of similar but slightly different diseases that, if you could remember them all perfectly, would make your life as a dermatologist an absolute cakewalk.
I'm a programmer instead. School sucks when people don't understand why you don't need to study, and try to make you do it anyway. I remember essentially every line of code I've ever worked on, though, which can be an asset or a challenge depending - JScript version five is still knocking around in my brain somewhere, confusing my usage of modern Javascript.
I think a boss I had a long time ago was like that. An anecdote: he originally wrote the code years back. Then, a particularly hairy debug session involving potentially many millions of dollars in damages if the problem was not found, recompiled, fixed and deployed on embedded hardware in the field - a tense situation. The programmers doubling as field techs called in to this boss (original author of the code) who hadn't touched the code in years.
Yet, after som prodding questions directed them to find a certain source file, an "if" at around line so-or-so in a 10k line (spaghetti, in my opinion) source file, make a single change, recompile and test. Of course, it worked.
That anecdote changed my understanding of his code. To me, it was badly written, unstructured and so on. (And it was.) But what use is structure and order if you can keep all of it in your head at the same time?
Absolutely, it took me a long time to learn exactly that. Even though I remember what's in the file and where things go and can build the structure in my head, that's not without a cost, a significant one. Having a bad day, can't engage your "superpowers"? Whoops, now your entire project is in park until you get a chance to focus. And of course, as soon as the project hits someone else's desk, I can't rely on them knowing the whole codebase implicitly either.
One way I've used my ability in the past is that, for example, I can just read libraries or documentation and remember them, possibly better than the author does. I've done that for several major and minor versions of Rails, all historical now, but it gave me a significant edge at the time.
On the other hand, as I mentioned, that also means there's a disturbing amount of obsolete information muddying the waters - another commenter here mentioned that he has a hard time distinguishing between his recollections of his own voice vs other people's, in his memories, and that is much how it operates for me - Was that documentation valid for Postgres 7.6, 9.6 or 14.6?
I had a coworker like that once. The trouble is that no-one but him could maintain it. So, after he already left for another project (within the same company), the managers called him back in to continue adding features to it.
In my view, it would have been better to just spend time to refactor, until anybody in the team would be able to understand it.
That episode reinforced the belief in me that KISS is the best approach in writing code. I try not to write "smart" code but simple, easy to understand, so I can go on vacation or change projects without being constantly dragged into the same codebase.
I do remember the code I've worked on over the past 7 years I've been a professional programmer, but I don't have total recall or anything even close to it. Now that I think of it, it's strange how well I can recall those lines of code from various programming languages I've used on various projects.
I've worked with some programmers who have an excellent memory and it's not always a good thing.
The problem is with these programmers is that they can very easily work with big, complex spaghetti code bases, so they will rarely take the time to organize their code base in a modular way. Because they can easily fit the whole project in their memory, they don't see the value in make a project modular so you only have to think about a small part of it.
I /definitely/ don't have perfect autobiographical memory, but do have an above-average recall for code. And a tendency to dig deep to understand how systems work.
One of the most satisfying feelings in the world is when someone has a Weird Error and you can point them to the exact spot in some complicated framework code that's responsible for the trouble they're having.
Solomon Shereshevsky, the first reported case of this sort of thing, was employed as a journalist and was scolded by his boss for never taking notes. Shereshevsky was surprised to learn that other people needed to take notes at all.
“But when it came to remembering details that did not relate to her personally, Price proved no better than average. […] School, she says, was “torture” for her – she couldn’t remember facts and figures – but she’s unbelievably good at trivia about television of the 60s and 70s, her nostalgia years. Other details, if they didn’t relate to her or her interests, were forgotten: once, she was asked to close her eyes and recall what her two interviewers, who she’d spent several hours with that day, were wearing – she couldn’t.”
This is very interesting. This seems like a learnable ability of sorts? The text states that while she had good memory she actively tried to build memories of her world before the family moved. After that episode she was like this.
As a person who has barely any memories of my life and struggles to remember even things that happened the same day, the very notion of total recall feels alien to me.
As a person who used to have total recall, count yourself blessed. Aside from ruining intimate, family, professional, and casual relationships by trivially quoting and correcting hypocrisy verbatim, and having an encyclopedia of cringe that keeps me from sleeping in peace and being a wreck when I get to address a crowd or do anything else that can make me the center of attention, I have to say that the most intense way in which you have a sense of loss and mortality comes from the realization that you are losing your gift and your mind is always filling in the memory gaps and you have a lifetime of knowing that you will find the perfect answer to the question of how you remember the past and instead of the answers you seek being unknown to you, you have invented a particular piece of history that never happened. It hurts and you have to be careful not to make a mistake and writing down important things is something that I started doing in my 40s. For all of my education, I remembered everything and never relied on notes. I finished a bachelor's degree and I never had a notebook. Just a calender. Fun fact: calendars are like an table of contents that point me to information. Another fun fact: I don't make a clear distinction between me and other people speaking, and have an easy time extracting and storing meaning from conversation or lecture or videos with info.
That's fascinating. It must be so frustrating to exist in a world where everyone you talk to is constantly hallucinating alternate versions of the past, and you're living the real version of it.
For me, anyway, it's really more subtle than that: aside from records, photos, or notes, there's no way I can check my own memory, and it's definitely not perfect - it's just better than anyone else I have known. So there's an element of "Well I know you don't remember it, but do I remember it right?" - and at some point you just have to shrug and move on.
Reminding other people of things isn't as bad as the true confabulists though, you're right in that regard - it's not even intentional, your brain just fills in the gaps, I know, but it still feels like being gaslit a little bit.
> Aside from ruining intimate, family, professional, and casual relationships by trivially quoting and correcting hypocrisy verbatim, and having an encyclopedia of cringe that keeps me from sleeping in peace and being a wreck when I get to address a crowd or do anything else that can make me the center of attention
The thing that helped me cope and move on with my life was realizing that nobody lives in the past like this with me. They forget and move on, but I'm the only one keeping that little bubble of reality alive inside of me. It's like being the last player in a video game dungeon -- when you exit the game, the dungeon despawns.
It turns out our day-to-day realities with other people are extremely mutable. The vast majority of humanity does not cling to an excruciatingly objective past reality, it's much fuzzier for them. In a way, you can sort of just pretend you belong and join them in that weird fuzzy changeable world they live in. The rules are made up, and the points don't matter, to quote from the popular American/British gameshow "Whose Line is it Anyway?".
Good luck with it, I've had that too and am doing everything I can to mitigate it. Getting the help of a doctor, however, that seems to be a tad more difficult…
Noting that the parent comment states that they can't remember autobiographical memories from the same day, which sounds closer to SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) than Aphantasia, though research shows that there's often an overlap of the two conditions.
For me, I'm pretty sure it came from childhood trauma. Perhaps there's a biological component, as well -- my mother has extreme memory traits/talents too, but hers are not applicable to personal autobiographical memories. She ended up with more of a photographic memory, but only for books, reading, and school. She also suffered a lot of childhood trauma, which confounds my data points here, I know.
It certainly could be an evolutionary trait, that gets activated in the modern era because of stress. Pure speculation on my part here, though. I would love to read an actual study with real data about these phenomena.
What are the implications with respect to amount of information storage capacity in a typical human brain?
If this type of impressive autobiographical recall is both semantic and sensory-perceptual then this must be many terabytes of data packed away safely in synapses.
I’m was pretty sure I could be socked away a a virtual system given a few gigabytes. Now I am not so sure.
Not being able to recall long term memories does not mean that those memory traces/engrams are not embedded somewhere permanently in synaptic circuits and being used for processing in ways other than “mere” recall.
I tried for a long time to have a “better” memory but have eventually come to terms than mine is, at least empirically, worse than most, regarding personal experiences. My behavior has changed as a result. As one example, I collect few pictures. The reason is that they can be a source of frustration to see scenes and people you have no recollection of but are apparently part of. e.g., I spent 12 days in London with a friend a number of years ago but have no memory of the trip. The piles of photos of me there are the only clue. And we apparently did a lot of things with others on that trip, but who are they?
This can be even more upsetting to my wife when she’ll be discussing some special event, or something with the kids, and I’m like, “sorry, I don’t have anything to add bc I don’t remember it at all.” Hell, I barely remember our wedding.
The upside is that I’m one of the most “live in the present” people you’ll meet, without a lot of comparison to how things used to be, this is so much worse, etc. And those cringey things, and painful things, … they fade remarkable quickly. After some mortifying foot-in-mouth event I tell myself, “the edge will be off this by tomorrow, and you’ll probably forget it completely by next week”, and things are better!
You’ve described my experience pretty accurately. At some point I also realized that I have Aphantasia, and I’ve wondered how much of a role this plays.
When I do recall something, it’s never visual, and this lack of fidelity seems to play a big part in the richness of the memory. It also seems to allow painful memories to fade more quickly, and I’ve long suspected this is related to CPTSD but in any case, it seems like a blessing and a curse.
I’m the opposite when it comes to photos though. I took up photography and journal about moments I want to remember. I do remember feeling unnerved by photos I don’t remember early on, but with time, this changed into something closer to periodic reminders that I’ve lived some great moments, even if those moments don’t make it into my everyday consciousness.
Huh, I have the same thing. My wife also gets upset about it sometimes too, and occasionally angry - but I can't help it! There are events that I simply have no recollection of at all. Sometimes, if I'm promoted with photos and anecdotes, I think I remember it just a little... but it's so tenuous that I'm not sure if I'm just convincing myself.
I have a generally good memory, but a whole lot of stuff happened at the wedding, and it was a long day and a late night. I remember bits and pieces here and there, but I remember a lot more about the planning and preparation than of the event itself.
yeah my autobiographical memory is like this, but I still remember bugs in software I fixed 20 years ago. I did feel bad about not remembering these things as I thought it was me not paying enough attention to my life, but recently realised that's not really true - was helpful to read that it's a recognised thing (and particularly affects autobiographical memory).
A bit sad, but as you say, I think I live in the moment and I'm generally quite happy. I don't remember many of those cringey and painful things (whereas my partner has well above-average autobiographical memory and is always replacing those cringey moments in her head). I still take photos and enjoy looking at them, to see all the fun stuff I've done :)
Do you feel like it only affects your personal memories or also your memory about facts? Like did you find studying for school hard or was that unaffected?
Not OP, but at least for me remembering random facts is much easier than remembering what happens in my own personal life. So I never found memory to be an issue when studying.
I find studying and remembering technical information pretty straightforward, and I’d say I’m actually good at it if I think about my work life. Synthesizing lots of disparate (sometimes old) data is something folks say I do well.
When I introspect about this I feel like because these things are discrete, they’re easier to place into a category, or relate to some other fact. But experiences are a mass of sensory and emotional “data” that doesn’t cleanly get associated. Or that’s at least how it feels.
Somewhat related is how the whole “memory palace” techniques fail completely for me. I can barely come up with the outlandish visuals, and even if I do, I don’t remember what they are, so it’s a useless system for me.
I have something similar, albeit maybe not quite as bad as you. Most of my far past is just vague sweeping notions or basic facts of what happened, and a still mental image here and there, and whatever I recorded in my journals and old chat logs and forum posts when I reread them.
Which is what I'd recommend to you, if you'd like to have some of that memory. I go through phases where I'm a lot better about journaling my life as it's happening, and I tend to remember those more easily (or go 'oh yeah!' when I reread them). But I also like taking pictures to help me remember, which it sounds like you explicitly don't.
I've been using the vacation we just got back from yesterday to get back into the habit of writing a journal, and I still need to write up the last few days, and will need to soon because it will fade fast.
I thought that other people had much better memories than I did, because they always were able to tell such great stories. But I rarely tell my own stories, meanwhile some of these people that seem to have great stories I hang out with them and realize they're telling the same stories over and over again, to just about everyone they meet. I suspect the telling of those stories so many times is helping keep those memories alive. If you don't share them somewhere (at least to a journal), the memories wither and die.
Unless you're someone with a photographic memory, of course.
>From Wikipedia's article on Eidetic memory's prevalence:
According to Herman Goldstine, the mathematician John von Neumann was able to recall from memory every book he had ever read. [15]
Referring to Page 167 of Goldstine's The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann
As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover he could do it years later without hesitation.
He then goes on with a story about him challenging von Neumann to tell how a particular book's first chapter started with and JVN being able to recite it flawlessly.
The same section of the Wikipedia article starts with the following sentence
Eidetic memory is typically found only in young children, as it is virtually nonexistent in adults
Now , extraordinary does little favor in describing von Neumann's mental capabilities and scientific contributions but I think Goldstine's claims are bold even for someone like him. There are many more anecdotes about his abilities and, indeed, there are people who have savant skills, however even the ones who have had those skills "over-developed" performed significantly below average in other cognitive tasks. That makes the story about Von Neumann even less plausible, considering he was a polymath.
Finding a source disputing Goldstine's claims about von Neumann is obviously not the answer one should be looking for however it would be interesting to discuss, from a neuroscientific point of view, if it's really probable that the human brain can store such large amounts of information.
This leads me to believe that IQ is the key variable here. Not all super-smart people have good memories but almost all people with superior memories have very high IQs.
That makes the story about Von Neumann even less plausible, considering he was a polymath.
Interesting reading some of the comments, I wrote about this thing here (if you'll allow the shameless plug to my personal blog). Think I landed roughly where most of the commenters seem to
> It is, she says, like living with a split screen: on the left side is the present, on the right is a constantly rolling reel of memories, each one sparked by the appearance of present-day stimuli. With so many memories always at the ready, Price says, it can be maddening: virtually anything she sees or hears can be a potential trigger.
Hey this is me. Any particular smell, certain ways light illuminate a surface or environment, the way my arm accidentally scrapes something, the way a person speaks, even certain sounds in traffic, will launch me back into a random memory reel. I have an impossible time being "present" because half of me is walking through some memory of the past with great detail. It's like nostalgia on steroids.
I used to lament having a bad memory until one day I realized: forgetting is a feature, not a bug.
I’ve meet people with great memories. They can have a tendency to become bitter that the world keeps making the same mistakes or the conclusion they drew 30 years ago was correct and paned out exactly as they predicted.
90 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadTotal recall: the people who never forget - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30391218 - Feb 2022 (2 comments)
Signed, never quite grasp the repost guidelines.
Are reposts ok?
If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
Please don't delete and repost the same story. Deletion is for things that shouldn't have been submitted in the first place.
Let me take another run at it.
You flagged this post (Total Recall: the people who never forget) as a repeat or repost. But the FAQ for reposts allows for reposts that didn't get a lot of attention and/or are older than a year. The duplicate older post you quote didn't get a lot of attention and is older than a year.
So wondering why you flagged it as a repost?
Listing "related" links is just because readers enjoy looking at old comments on the same topic. It's there to enhance the site for curious readers and there's no implicit reproach for the repost—on the contrary!
Does that help?
[1] https://www.podgist.com/wtf-marc-maron/episode-1058-marilu-h...
No relation with this particular condition though.
(There was a time maybe 10 years ago when people tried to do something called "new games journalism" basically imitating him, and it was mostly just embarrassing for everyone involved, because normal people can't construct a review of something entirely out of personal anecdotes.)
Before my own ADHD diagnosis and treatment my hyperfocus used to kick in at the most random times and it often lead me to spend far too much time on tangential or superfluous tasks or topics. My medication allows me to channel the hyperfocus into more productive directions, but it still happens when it happens.
It's a lot like the myth of Cassandra -- doomed to be able to foretell the future, but nobody believed her. Doomed to remember the past, but nobody ever believes you. Everyone is 100% committed to their own version of the past that lives in their head.
What's the advantage?
This is a misunderstanding of the situation. Even if there's a record of the old conversation, the boss wants something else now, and you're judged on doing what the boss wants, regardless of if that's consistent. It isn't great if you have an inconsistent boss, but a paper trail wouldn't help much.
Gambling with cards is an obvious field. I've also worked with programmers who seemed to remember every bit of code they'd come across and that was a huge advantage (although it's a bit disconcerting when someone remembers your code better than you do).
financial goals would not rank high. If I could remember every single thing I see, I would rather become a lawyer or a doctor where I would be able to have a much higher advantage over others and that would automatically solve any financial problems. If I had a superpower, I would use it to help people as a career path because gambling would get boring real soon as the money aspect of it would just disappear in a week or so (assuming any place allows you in twice).
This is like the one where people who win the lottery become happy for a very short time but very soon after that they either go back their baseline happiness or worse, become depressed.
Running a (perhaps specialized) bookstore seems more fun.
This is an interesting framing of the question. As someone with a bad memory, I definitely like the idea that it's not entirely a weakness.
Nothing else really matters, not even winning. As long as you don't steal from your clients.
Someone who can perfectly recall a whole medical book does not make him/her a great doctor. Same for lawyers or any other "bookworm" professions.
But to answer your question, I would think a politician. You will look smart and in debates you can always recall your opponents voting history, statements,...
The same would apply to being a journalist. Being a Jake Tapper or similar who remembers everything someone ever said could make you an incredible interviewer.
I am a bit surprised not finding any reference to Lauria's book.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-mystery-of-s...
https://archive.org/details/LuriaTheMindOfAMnemonist
I'm a programmer instead. School sucks when people don't understand why you don't need to study, and try to make you do it anyway. I remember essentially every line of code I've ever worked on, though, which can be an asset or a challenge depending - JScript version five is still knocking around in my brain somewhere, confusing my usage of modern Javascript.
Yet, after som prodding questions directed them to find a certain source file, an "if" at around line so-or-so in a 10k line (spaghetti, in my opinion) source file, make a single change, recompile and test. Of course, it worked.
That anecdote changed my understanding of his code. To me, it was badly written, unstructured and so on. (And it was.) But what use is structure and order if you can keep all of it in your head at the same time?
I lose track after a weekend, I need the order.
One way I've used my ability in the past is that, for example, I can just read libraries or documentation and remember them, possibly better than the author does. I've done that for several major and minor versions of Rails, all historical now, but it gave me a significant edge at the time.
On the other hand, as I mentioned, that also means there's a disturbing amount of obsolete information muddying the waters - another commenter here mentioned that he has a hard time distinguishing between his recollections of his own voice vs other people's, in his memories, and that is much how it operates for me - Was that documentation valid for Postgres 7.6, 9.6 or 14.6?
In my view, it would have been better to just spend time to refactor, until anybody in the team would be able to understand it.
That episode reinforced the belief in me that KISS is the best approach in writing code. I try not to write "smart" code but simple, easy to understand, so I can go on vacation or change projects without being constantly dragged into the same codebase.
The problem is with these programmers is that they can very easily work with big, complex spaghetti code bases, so they will rarely take the time to organize their code base in a modular way. Because they can easily fit the whole project in their memory, they don't see the value in make a project modular so you only have to think about a small part of it.
One of the most satisfying feelings in the world is when someone has a Weird Error and you can point them to the exact spot in some complicated framework code that's responsible for the trouble they're having.
This is very interesting. This seems like a learnable ability of sorts? The text states that while she had good memory she actively tried to build memories of her world before the family moved. After that episode she was like this.
Reminding other people of things isn't as bad as the true confabulists though, you're right in that regard - it's not even intentional, your brain just fills in the gaps, I know, but it still feels like being gaslit a little bit.
The thing that helped me cope and move on with my life was realizing that nobody lives in the past like this with me. They forget and move on, but I'm the only one keeping that little bubble of reality alive inside of me. It's like being the last player in a video game dungeon -- when you exit the game, the dungeon despawns.
It turns out our day-to-day realities with other people are extremely mutable. The vast majority of humanity does not cling to an excruciatingly objective past reality, it's much fuzzier for them. In a way, you can sort of just pretend you belong and join them in that weird fuzzy changeable world they live in. The rules are made up, and the points don't matter, to quote from the popular American/British gameshow "Whose Line is it Anyway?".
Do average people recall the details from each of the 500 meetings they had last year?
It certainly could be an evolutionary trait, that gets activated in the modern era because of stress. Pure speculation on my part here, though. I would love to read an actual study with real data about these phenomena.
If this type of impressive autobiographical recall is both semantic and sensory-perceptual then this must be many terabytes of data packed away safely in synapses.
I’m was pretty sure I could be socked away a a virtual system given a few gigabytes. Now I am not so sure.
Not being able to recall long term memories does not mean that those memory traces/engrams are not embedded somewhere permanently in synaptic circuits and being used for processing in ways other than “mere” recall.
86 billion neurons. 100 trillion synapses.
This can be even more upsetting to my wife when she’ll be discussing some special event, or something with the kids, and I’m like, “sorry, I don’t have anything to add bc I don’t remember it at all.” Hell, I barely remember our wedding.
The upside is that I’m one of the most “live in the present” people you’ll meet, without a lot of comparison to how things used to be, this is so much worse, etc. And those cringey things, and painful things, … they fade remarkable quickly. After some mortifying foot-in-mouth event I tell myself, “the edge will be off this by tomorrow, and you’ll probably forget it completely by next week”, and things are better!
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181112-severely-deficie...
When I do recall something, it’s never visual, and this lack of fidelity seems to play a big part in the richness of the memory. It also seems to allow painful memories to fade more quickly, and I’ve long suspected this is related to CPTSD but in any case, it seems like a blessing and a curse.
I’m the opposite when it comes to photos though. I took up photography and journal about moments I want to remember. I do remember feeling unnerved by photos I don’t remember early on, but with time, this changed into something closer to periodic reminders that I’ve lived some great moments, even if those moments don’t make it into my everyday consciousness.
I have a generally good memory, but a whole lot of stuff happened at the wedding, and it was a long day and a late night. I remember bits and pieces here and there, but I remember a lot more about the planning and preparation than of the event itself.
A bit sad, but as you say, I think I live in the moment and I'm generally quite happy. I don't remember many of those cringey and painful things (whereas my partner has well above-average autobiographical memory and is always replacing those cringey moments in her head). I still take photos and enjoy looking at them, to see all the fun stuff I've done :)
When I introspect about this I feel like because these things are discrete, they’re easier to place into a category, or relate to some other fact. But experiences are a mass of sensory and emotional “data” that doesn’t cleanly get associated. Or that’s at least how it feels.
Somewhat related is how the whole “memory palace” techniques fail completely for me. I can barely come up with the outlandish visuals, and even if I do, I don’t remember what they are, so it’s a useless system for me.
Which is what I'd recommend to you, if you'd like to have some of that memory. I go through phases where I'm a lot better about journaling my life as it's happening, and I tend to remember those more easily (or go 'oh yeah!' when I reread them). But I also like taking pictures to help me remember, which it sounds like you explicitly don't.
I've been using the vacation we just got back from yesterday to get back into the habit of writing a journal, and I still need to write up the last few days, and will need to soon because it will fade fast.
I thought that other people had much better memories than I did, because they always were able to tell such great stories. But I rarely tell my own stories, meanwhile some of these people that seem to have great stories I hang out with them and realize they're telling the same stories over and over again, to just about everyone they meet. I suspect the telling of those stories so many times is helping keep those memories alive. If you don't share them somewhere (at least to a journal), the memories wither and die.
Unless you're someone with a photographic memory, of course.
>From Wikipedia's article on Eidetic memory's prevalence:
According to Herman Goldstine, the mathematician John von Neumann was able to recall from memory every book he had ever read. [15]
Referring to Page 167 of Goldstine's The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann
As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover he could do it years later without hesitation.
He then goes on with a story about him challenging von Neumann to tell how a particular book's first chapter started with and JVN being able to recite it flawlessly.
The same section of the Wikipedia article starts with the following sentence
Eidetic memory is typically found only in young children, as it is virtually nonexistent in adults
Now , extraordinary does little favor in describing von Neumann's mental capabilities and scientific contributions but I think Goldstine's claims are bold even for someone like him. There are many more anecdotes about his abilities and, indeed, there are people who have savant skills, however even the ones who have had those skills "over-developed" performed significantly below average in other cognitive tasks. That makes the story about Von Neumann even less plausible, considering he was a polymath.
Finding a source disputing Goldstine's claims about von Neumann is obviously not the answer one should be looking for however it would be interesting to discuss, from a neuroscientific point of view, if it's really probable that the human brain can store such large amounts of information.
That makes the story about Von Neumann even less plausible, considering he was a polymath.
it is corroborated by other people who knew him
https://www.wahid.one/blog/be-kind-dont-rewind
Hey this is me. Any particular smell, certain ways light illuminate a surface or environment, the way my arm accidentally scrapes something, the way a person speaks, even certain sounds in traffic, will launch me back into a random memory reel. I have an impossible time being "present" because half of me is walking through some memory of the past with great detail. It's like nostalgia on steroids.
I’ve meet people with great memories. They can have a tendency to become bitter that the world keeps making the same mistakes or the conclusion they drew 30 years ago was correct and paned out exactly as they predicted.
Me, I already blissfully forgot.