When I wish to capture everything I can recall about an event, I do what I call a "brain-dump". Turn on a webcam, and spew. I'd call it trace-like, except for

When I wish to capture everything I can recall about an event, I do what I call a "brain-dump". Turn on a webcam, and spew. I'd call it trace-like, except for having to manage attention and coverage. A memory fragment pops up, and you describe its attributes. Along with extra characterizations like "low confidence" and "feels synthetic". Grab a next fragment and repeat. But with multiple fragments at hand, which one to do first? You may not be able to find the deferred ones again. And for each topic/period, there's diminishing returns, so at what point to you move to the next topic. And for recent events, or memorable longer ones like travel vacations, there are a lot of fragments to wade through. You don't remember a conversation, you remember flashes of visuals and sounds and variously fuzzy "something vaguely like X was said". So locally its trance-like focus, but globally its interview management and triage. Anyway, point is, my experience is the fragments are small and scattered and disorganized. And you can feel them rotting as you handle them. You basically get one pass or few at each fragment. Then they're smoothed over trash. Yesterday's commute? Um, "touched a cold door handle". "Might have been vertical". "That's what I've got". Pausing on the handle might or might not clarify the vertical. And you can probe with "was it a push? was it a pull?". Might get "maybe held the door open for someone? but that feels a bit synthetic". The cold handle starts out with the feel of a crisp, unhandled fragment. Recognizably different then the probes and the maybes. But that difference decays with handling. Revisit it a couple of times, and there's less and less you can say. It all feels suspect. "Whatever I said earlier, because now I have absolutely no idea what's real". Eyewitness testimony seems largely farce. And most memories with temporal order or a storyline seem likely to be synthetic.