4 ms·

Possibly something better discussed with a psychologist, but I’ll throw it out there. Often I wonder if “memory” is a skill that I never properly learned. It s

by zaroth 8y ago

Possibly something better discussed with a psychologist, but I’ll throw it out there. Often I wonder if “memory” is a skill that I never properly learned. It seems for me that simply remembering an arbitrary past event in any significant detail isn’t really possible. Only if it’s a story I’ve retold on several occasions (and likely by now as much fiction as non) am I able to retain a firm grasp on a particular past event. Forgetting names or faces? They slip away almost instantly, and holding onto them is like trying to carry water across a room in my hands. Childhood is more like an abstract notion. If asked to write about it, certainly I remember basic facts but they are as much deduced as they are seen in my minds eye. A few moments here and there—again, probably stories that I retold at some point—but mostly anything firmly in long term memory isn’t really accessible in “true color” like it seems most people can have it. I presume there’s an anatomical explanation that could become apparent upon autopsy, although nothing so remarkable as to alert on a full body MRI. Then again, I can remember code that I wrote 15 years ago. Not exactly line for line, but when I’ve had the occasion to revisit old code, it’s as if I never left it. Again it seems to come down to creation versus observation. Observations which aren’t actively re-encoded just end up in /dev/null to a great extent for me. My wife says I’m blissfully ignorant, and it certainly seems to have served me quite well as a coping mechanism. Hard to carry a grudge when it just doesn’t occur to you how angry you were about something last month. I’m not even sure it’s something I’d want to “fix” even if I could, except perhaps the names and faces thing.

markn951 8y ago
Weirdly enough I’m almost exactly the same way, and you’ve described it much more eloquently than I’ve been able to in the past. Maybe there’s more to it than just your brain being some sort of one-off anomaly.
beamatronic 8y ago
>> Forgetting names or faces? They slip away almost instantly, and holding onto them is like trying to carry water across a room in my hands. This!!! But if I read the name I’ll remember the exact spelling forever.
sdrothrock 8y ago
I've noticed this in myself as well, especially with changes in context. When I lived in my hometown (until I was 16), memories were always vibrant -- I suppose kept alive by constant association. After I moved away to college, I gradually started forgetting things from my hometown, even things as recent as my high school years. After graduating from college, I moved to the countryside in Japan. I found that I started forgetting things about my college years -- even people I hung out with fairly regularly. As for things from my high school or junior high years? Forget about it. Six years ago I moved to Tokyo; the context change has apparently been enough that I'm forgetting a lot of things about my time in the countryside. I've always attributed it to a combination of a lack of importance (that is, I consciously or subconsciously decide certain people just aren't important enough to commit to memory) and a lack of associative cueing. Out of all the people I knew in college, I only talk to two -- and them rarely. I don't talk to anyone from high school or before then at all.
shadowoflight 8y ago
I'm exactly the same way, and as a person in his mid-twenties, it's terrible. I sometimes feel like I have incredibly-early-onset Alzheimer's or something when I can't remember the term for something interesting I read about a few months ago, and apparently it's pretty bizarre that I remember almost nothing from my childhood before my mid-teens. Not to mention, it's very difficult to convince people you're not an antisocial jerk when you forget the names of people who have already told you their name more than once. I've always wondered if this memory issue is at least partially genetic, though, because my two brothers and my father all have the same issue remembering names and other trivial facts. We all will also forget things that our wives have told us, not because we weren't paying attention at the time, but because our subconscious minds just decided that particular piece of information wasn't worth storing. I really wish I could just run CCleaner on my brain or something...
pulkitsh1234 8y ago
Wow, I can totally relate to that ! Especially the part of carrying grudges. It has happened numerous times where I just forget what I was unhappy/sad about, or a particular thing a person said to me, which was clearly offensive. I find myself hanging out with them, months later. And then if I recall that old event, I think, well f*ck, I should not be talking to this person. Forgetting names, is especially hard with relatives. As you might know, Indian families are quite big and tightly knit. It is really embarrassing to see me parents (or my brother) remember each of the ~50-60 of relatives and family friends. While I am just standing their and calling every one Uncle/Aunt, instead of their proper "relation name" (look at https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Hindi/Family_relations https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Hindi/Family_relations) But, as the parent comment mentioned, I rarely forget about a thing which I had worked on or built (though not on a scale of 15 years !! yet..), but atleast 2-3 years. I sometimes have very specific memory, like, I can say "yeah, go to this file and you will find this function, which was written in this file earlier, it was written by that guy who left the company 2 years ago...insert-other-useless-stuff.." Which might create a impression, that I have a good "memory". As, a matter of fact, even mental arithmetic, is kind of hard to do. It seems that most people have lots of answers preprocessed and stored in their brains. I clearly remember, when I was in highschool. I used to actually calculate things, for instance, If I want to calculate '9 + 3', I would count 3 times from 9 to 12. And I thought, being fast in arithmetic is doing this counting thing way faster. Slowly, this was turned into a rule that, it you add X to 9, the answer will be 1(X-1). And then very slowly, I am kind of building up on these rules for doing faster "maths". But, I see people all around who have all of these basic operations (taking certain %, adding, subtracting) basically memorized, or they have incredibly fast processing speeds. And here I am not talking about some math involving big numbers, but just number we encounter in our day to day lives. Maybe the arithmetic thing, might not be related to my memory issues, but just lack of practice. But, still I feel there is something definitely out of place. It could be that, my memory issues stems from the concept of living in the "now". I rarely ever look back into memories. I am constantly looking to do the next thing to "do", instead of sitting back and talking a look of what has happened in the past. Even, when I am sitting back and "relaxing", I think about what I am doing currently, "Ok, I am sitting on a bench, looking a trees, that thing looks interesting ... .. ". Very rarely, I look back and think about some particular, day, event, or person. For instance, If we want to an adventure park today. In next couple of days, I will rarely think about it. Yes, I will look at the photos and all other social media stuff. But, it would be a very superficial glance. And I am pretty sure that I will forget about specific details, or some other interesting thing about the adventure park after a couple of years. Which I am pretty sure, a normal person, like my girlfriend, will definitely remember.

by zaroth 8y ago

markn951 8y ago

Weirdly enough I’m almost exactly the same way, and you’ve described it much more eloquently than I’ve been able to in the past. Maybe there’s more to it than just your brain being some sort of one-off anomaly.

beamatronic 8y ago

>> Forgetting names or faces? They slip away almost instantly, and holding onto them is like trying to carry water across a room in my hands. This!!! But if I read the name I’ll remember the exact spelling forever.

sdrothrock 8y ago

I've noticed this in myself as well, especially with changes in context. When I lived in my hometown (until I was 16), memories were always vibrant -- I suppose kept alive by constant association. After I moved away to college, I gradually started forgetting things from my hometown, even things as recent as my high school years. After graduating from college, I moved to the countryside in Japan. I found that I started forgetting things about my college years -- even people I hung out with fairly regularly. As for things from my high school or junior high years? Forget about it. Six years ago I moved to Tokyo; the context change has apparently been enough that I'm forgetting a lot of things about my time in the countryside. I've always attributed it to a combination of a lack of importance (that is, I consciously or subconsciously decide certain people just aren't important enough to commit to memory) and a lack of associative cueing. Out of all the people I knew in college, I only talk to two -- and them rarely. I don't talk to anyone from high school or before then at all.

shadowoflight 8y ago

I'm exactly the same way, and as a person in his mid-twenties, it's terrible. I sometimes feel like I have incredibly-early-onset Alzheimer's or something when I can't remember the term for something interesting I read about a few months ago, and apparently it's pretty bizarre that I remember almost nothing from my childhood before my mid-teens. Not to mention, it's very difficult to convince people you're not an antisocial jerk when you forget the names of people who have already told you their name more than once. I've always wondered if this memory issue is at least partially genetic, though, because my two brothers and my father all have the same issue remembering names and other trivial facts. We all will also forget things that our wives have told us, not because we weren't paying attention at the time, but because our subconscious minds just decided that particular piece of information wasn't worth storing. I really wish I could just run CCleaner on my brain or something...

pulkitsh1234 8y ago

Wow, I can totally relate to that ! Especially the part of carrying grudges. It has happened numerous times where I just forget what I was unhappy/sad about, or a particular thing a person said to me, which was clearly offensive. I find myself hanging out with them, months later. And then if I recall that old event, I think, well f*ck, I should not be talking to this person. Forgetting names, is especially hard with relatives. As you might know, Indian families are quite big and tightly knit. It is really embarrassing to see me parents (or my brother) remember each of the ~50-60 of relatives and family friends. While I am just standing their and calling every one Uncle/Aunt, instead of their proper "relation name" (look at https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Hindi/Family_relations https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Hindi/Family_relations) But, as the parent comment mentioned, I rarely forget about a thing which I had worked on or built (though not on a scale of 15 years !! yet..), but atleast 2-3 years. I sometimes have very specific memory, like, I can say "yeah, go to this file and you will find this function, which was written in this file earlier, it was written by that guy who left the company 2 years ago...insert-other-useless-stuff.." Which might create a impression, that I have a good "memory". As, a matter of fact, even mental arithmetic, is kind of hard to do. It seems that most people have lots of answers preprocessed and stored in their brains. I clearly remember, when I was in highschool. I used to actually calculate things, for instance, If I want to calculate '9 + 3', I would count 3 times from 9 to 12. And I thought, being fast in arithmetic is doing this counting thing way faster. Slowly, this was turned into a rule that, it you add X to 9, the answer will be 1(X-1). And then very slowly, I am kind of building up on these rules for doing faster "maths". But, I see people all around who have all of these basic operations (taking certain %, adding, subtracting) basically memorized, or they have incredibly fast processing speeds. And here I am not talking about some math involving big numbers, but just number we encounter in our day to day lives. Maybe the arithmetic thing, might not be related to my memory issues, but just lack of practice. But, still I feel there is something definitely out of place. It could be that, my memory issues stems from the concept of living in the "now". I rarely ever look back into memories. I am constantly looking to do the next thing to "do", instead of sitting back and talking a look of what has happened in the past. Even, when I am sitting back and "relaxing", I think about what I am doing currently, "Ok, I am sitting on a bench, looking a trees, that thing looks interesting ... .. ". Very rarely, I look back and think about some particular, day, event, or person. For instance, If we want to an adventure park today. In next couple of days, I will rarely think about it. Yes, I will look at the photos and all other social media stuff. But, it would be a very superficial glance. And I am pretty sure that I will forget about specific details, or some other interesting thing about the adventure park after a couple of years. Which I am pretty sure, a normal person, like my girlfriend, will definitely remember.