31 ms·

Severely deficient autobiographical memory in healthy adults (2015)

206 points by monort 7y ago

john_minsk 7y ago
I just came back from Milan and while I can recollect certain situations and pictures, by no means I can "play" my memory as if it was happening to me. Real experience has so much details compared to memory that I always tend to doubt that my memories are accurate. On top of that, if you have repetitive schedule I can't imagine you can recreate specifics of particular day. You probably reconstruct the situation filling in your image of familiar places with peculiarities of situation you are trying to remember
tiborsaas 7y ago
This is me all the time when we go out for a few beers :)
JshWright 7y ago
"inability to vividly recollect personally experienced events from a first-person perspective" I don't understand that... There is no perspective to my memories of events, they're just things I know happened. For instance, I went for a run this morning. I know where I went, I know what the weather was like, etc. Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter?
- aesh2Xa1 7y ago
  Can you recollect the scenery? There is a condition where one cannot process memories visually, but can still use other semantics to recollect. It's called aphantasia.
- kibibu 7y ago
  I wonder if this is related to Aphantasia, which popped up a while ago. I struggle to visualize things, and often only remember my experiences if people remind me of them.
  - tomrod 7y ago
    I can see memories, but struggle to remember words I heard. Coping strategies: lots of notes!!!
    - cableshaft 7y ago
      Oh yeah, what people said is so hard for me. I'm terrible about telling personal anecdotes, because I just don't remember what people said, so it just sounds like me describing a series of facts. I get amazed when people like my late grandfather could tell a story about himself 40 years in the past and tell back and forth conversational dialogue that happened. Even if it's not 100% remembered (and I doubt it was) or embellished, or reinforced by telling the same stories over and over again over the years, it still impresses me. I can forget all but the broad strokes of what people said only a week later. The only conversations I "remember" about my past is what I've explicitly put into my poorly kept up journal entries.
- Adverblessly 7y ago
  Apparently, different people have different capabilities of imagination. Not strictly about this, but you might be interested in http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-ca... which briefly mentions this specifically. Relevant quote: "In the first, Francis Galton discovered that some people didn’t have visual imagination. They couldn’t see anything in their “mind’s eye”, they couldn’t generate internal images. None of these people knew there was anything “wrong” with them. They just assumed that everyone who talked about having an imagination was being metaphorical, just using a really florid poetic way of describing that they remembered what something looked like."
  - bonoboTP 7y ago
    I think this is very difficult to convey in words. Sometimes I think I have aphantasia because I definitely cannot "visualize" things in color "HD", anywhere nearly similar to the quality of actual vision. At least not when I'm awake. Rarely, I do have dreams (lucid or not) that have the exact same visual quality as usual awake vision. On the other hand, I also cannot empathize with the parent comment that is surprised about first-person memories. My memories are sort of first person and evoke a feeling of the spatial and semantic layout of the scene. Like I remember and can "feel" that Joe was sitting to the left of me, even if I don't see his face in high-definition or maybe cannot even remember if he had glasses on or what clothes he was wearing. Sure, I could also transform it and imagine the situation from a different vantage point (still not really a visual rendering), but by default I recall it from first-person view. I believe that people do metaphorically exaggerate the quality of their visual memories. I recall some experiments that reveal that when these people are poked about specific details of their visualizations they do realize that those parts just were "undefined" and were not actually seeing a "rendered image".
    - pharke 7y ago
      That's interesting, my default view in memories is usually third person, often from above and to the side or some other perspective view. I have to concentrate on recalling detail in order to view my memories from a first person perspective. The third person recollection always seems to be more about the spatial relationships between people and things and is certainly not photographic, more like a conceptual understanding with images. Almost a diorama or a scene acted out on a stage. Weirdly this also shows up in my dreams although I do dream in the first person frequently.
- dmd 7y ago
  Not everyone can do this, but many people (like me) certainly can play an event back like it were a film. I don't find that kind of memory as useful as an actual encoded set of facts, though, and it tends to fade after a few years.
  - reportingsjr 7y ago
    Wow, this is astounding to me! I always assumed people could replay events they had lived, just like watching a video. On top of this I can see and move around in the landscape around me in these memories.
    - atemerev 7y ago
      What I “see” is a brief flash of an afterimage, something like when you see for a brief second when you close your eyes. This is the limit of my visual capacity to remember. I always assumed everybody is like that. :)
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - copperx 7y ago
      I can "replay" events, but honestly I'm not sure I'm recalling or reconstructing an event; that is, I'm not sure if the images are memories or I'm creating them on the fly, as I can come up with "movies" in my head very easily, actors, sfx, and all.
      - coldtea 7y ago
        There's not much difference with regards to the article, where the problem is the inability to come up with "movies", not whether they are 100% accurate on some source material...
      - lonelappde 7y ago
        Recall is reconstruction. The act of remembering something can change the way the memory is recalled next time. You can erase or modify someone's memory by engaging in appropriate chemical or behavioral interventions while they recall the memory.
- Iv 7y ago
  I do first-person recollection when I try to find an object I forgot. "I was having my wallet at the restaurant, I remember looking for coins in it."
- mikelevins 7y ago
  It's not a matter of "supposed to", but yes, that's part of the capability that is being discussed. There seem to be a couple of different dimensions of variation in how human memory and imagination work. One is what is discussed here: the ability to "vividly" reconstruct remembered events "from a first-person perspective". Apparently, some people can do it, and others cannot. Presumably, there's a range of abilities in between. At one end of the spectrum are people with hyperthymesia, who appear to be able to instantly reconstruct every tiny detail, including visual details from a first-person perspective, of everything they've ever experienced. At the other end are people like those discussed in this article. Another dimension is how vividly and comprehensively people can construct, manipulate, and experience sensory models in their imaginations. Again, the spectrum seems to run from aphantasia at one end (that's the inability to construct mental imagery at all) to someone like Stephen Wiltshire, who appears to have an eidetic visual memory that enables him to draw large, detailed landscapes with roughly photographic accuracy after briefly seeing a scene a single time. People with aphantasia generally seem to assume that when others describe mental imagery, they are being metaphorical; that they don't mean that they actually experience mental imagery in a literal sense. Contrariwise, I do actually experience mental imagery in a literal sense. In my late teens I became fascinated with a series of exercises devised by Aleister Crowley, in which you practice constructing increasingly elaborate assemblies of colorful 3D shapes moving in different ways. The goal was to see how many shapes you could manage at once and keep all of the shapes, colors, textures, and movement patterns stable for as long as possible. I assume an aphantastic person would think Crowley was joking or bullshitting, until they learned that some people can indeed construct and manipulate detailed mental images. Further complicating the subject, we also know from experiments in psychology of perception that the brain tends to edit memories, altering their content over time. I'd be interested to know how this tendency interacts with the variables mentioned above. I'm somewhere in the middle on both axes discussed above. I experience memories in the first person, and I remember and dream in color. When navigating, I rely on a 3D model of where I am and where I'm going, and if asked to go somewhere I haven't been before, I want to see a map that I can use to refresh and supplement that mental model. By contrast, my mother navigates procedurally. She wants a sequence of operations to perform: "turn right here; go a certain distance looking for such and such a building,..." and so on. I _can_ navigate that way, but I find it much more difficult and error-prone than just constructing the 3D model. From what my mother says, I'm not sure she can construct a model like that at all. Signs of the difference show up in, for example, the kind of information each of us wants when being directed to a new place. She wants detailed step-by-step instructions; I want coordinates in space and some identifying information (like the street address) to confirm when I've arrived at the right place. She will follow directions to the letter. I'll just pick a route that points in the right direction and improvise until I'm close enough to look for the confirming data.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  >Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter? Apparently many people can. I mostly can't. Interestingly, I learned this while reading a comic where a plot point was certain memories being visualized in black-and-white versus color. The fact that the author took it as given that you could visualize memories in such detail that color could be discerned was mind blowing. I wonder how many other things we take as given based on our own mental experiences but which aren't close to universal.
  - ALittleLight 7y ago
    I learned of my own aphantasia while watching an episode of House with my roommate. In the show they had a machine which let them view a rough picture of what a subject was thinking of. I observed to my roommate that this was an especially dumb plot point as people don't actually think in images but only in words. My roommate was quite confused and claimed that he did think in visuals and we had an interesting conversation and Google search thereafter. I still am slightly torn between thinking that there is some disconnect in explanation versus believing that some or even most people can actually visualize things in their mind. When I think of a "square", for example, I have access to all the facts I know of squares (polygon with four equal length edges) and I could draw a square or trace one in the air with my finger, so I obviously know what one looks like, but I have no visual experience of a square and it's difficult to imagine that other people do. One reason it's difficult to imagine other people have the visual imagination they think they do is because I so rarely see people just sitting and imagining things for long stretches - which I assume would be borderline irresistible if you had the kind of fantasy machine to show you whatever you wanted. Perhaps people do this in private and don't talk about it much?
    - mistersys 7y ago
      When I imagine a yellow square, for example, I definitely visualize it. I can re-shape it, combine it with other shapes, rotate it, and visualize it moving. But it's not like it's replacing my vision, it's more of a secondary display that you can only see individual thoughts for a split second. If I close my eyes, I can do this better, and I actually have spent hours visualizing places I've been, or creating new ones. When I visualize my old homes and cities I've lived, it's like I have super speed and I can dash anywhere, but it's like a video with a very low frame rate, I see individual pictures and they combine with my spatial awareness to give my the feeling of moving. The frames are also very "low resolution", but it doesn't feel fuzzy but more like the frames are so quick that you can't pick out many details. In terms of words, I'm often thinking about memories I see on the "memory film", but the pictures themselves aren't words at all, my internal dialog vs. my visualization are 2 separate processes.
- umvi 7y ago
  I can. Perhaps you have Aphantasia[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
- jandrewrogers 7y ago
  I am similar, most experiences are reduced to a set of facts in a pretty short period of time. I realized early on that this is not the way most people remember and the facts that I do remember tend to be more reliable than most people with vivid memories, which is useful. Developmentally, I have always wondered if the fact that I had a voracious appetite for reading books, spending most of my time doing that from a very young age through early adulthood, is either correlated or causative -- to this day my cognition is very text optimized. Anecdotally, there seems to be quite a bit of cognitive diversity in terms of how the brain processes reality. For example, I have extremely good spatial memory and ability to fluidly manipulate complex spaces, real or synthetic, in my head. When I was a young I assumed everyone had this ability and it took until well into adulthood for me to realize that I was a far outlier in this regard and most people simply lacked any similar facility. I lean on this all the time to achieve complex things in my life, which has real advantages in certain contexts, but people clearly get on in life without it and frequently have compensatory skills. You have to wonder the extent to which the distribution of these cognitive artifacts influences performance and interest in various occupations, which leverage or rely on these cognitive functions to varying degrees.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Facts are digital, narrative experiences are analog. Facts are high precision but very expensive, while narrative memory packs far far information but is less accurate (error prone) and precise (memories change with each recall).
  - meowface 7y ago
    It would be especially interesting if we could retrofit some of these abilities into existing neural architectures with the help of technology. For example, one could imagine an implant or indirectly connected device which increases your "L1 cache size" (working memory capacity), or provides supplementary "GPUs" to offload spatial reasoning. They could change the way the brain itself works, or perhaps just act as external modules with fast data lanes which your brain eventually starts to treat as extensions of itself, like it can with prosthetic limbs (or even imaginary "virtual" limbs, like with a mirror box). It may not actually ever be possible to do it without direct, messy biological/genetic engineering, but if it is possible, I think it would have an incredible impact.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter? Yes, especially since unlike an "imaginary first-person shooter" this was real (with the added real-world sensory input this implies) and actually happened to you... It's like asking "Am I supposed to see a real world landscape in color, like some sort of imaginary landscape painting?" -- when paintings get their colors from our real world experience of them (modern artistic license aside)...
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    A computer screen is real. The images are symbolic of non real things, but the images are real. And especially to the point, since you are (controversially) claiming that raw sensory input is the core of memory, not interpretation of it, it's incoherent to claim that a visual artwork is less memorable than whatever the art represents.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >A computer screen is real Which is neither here, nor there. >The images are symbolic of non real things, but the images are real. They are still not tied to touch, smell, sense of being in place, temperature, wind, and several other things. In fact they can actively fight your environmental cues. E.g. you can watch a man drink coffee in the African heat on your screen while sitting in a room with no smell of coffee at all while freezing cold. The real world intermix of sensory inputs tied to each environment work together and help make the scene, and eventually the memory, even more concrete. >it's incoherent to claim that a visual artwork is less memorable than whatever the art represents. Would you remember more being in a sea with huge waves rocking you, or having seen some artwork of such a scene? Do you remember better a car accident you had, or pictures of random car accidents presented to you?
  - meowface 7y ago
    Think about an actual first-person experience you recently had, though. Do you really see a full and clear image, as if you were looking at a true photo or video? If you really try to parse out the small details, can you say exactly what every shade of color was, how the lighting was, where every single thing was located, everything you heard and smelled? I doubt many people have such an extremely vivid memory. I do think my memories of first-person experiences are in the first-person (if I'm understanding it right), but I feel like I just retain the general impression of "scenes", with details for the important things and vague, "smeared" descriptions for everything else. The information is sort of compressed, and more of it can be decompressed if I correlate the events with other things that happened at the time or do other things to jog my memory, but I think it's still a lossy compression. I kind of figured that's what memory is like for most people.
- darkerside 7y ago
  I wonder if there's a connection between memory and creativity here. Perhaps vivid recollections aren't perfect fidelity, it's just that some people devote their creativity to storytelling about their past. Those memories may or may not be accurate, but vividness of memory is used as a proxy for accuracy.
- berberous 7y ago
  Yes. For all of you posting that you lack this capability, what are your dreams like? Do they not have a visual component? When I dream, I see the things that are happening ; recalling memories or daydreaming has a similar visual component.
  - JshWright 7y ago
    I don't recall dreaming much at all. Once every few months, maybe (I'm sure I'm dreaming, I just have no memory of it. When I do have a memory of a dream, it's the same as any other memory (just a thing that I know "happened"). It wouldn't surprise me if there was a visual component to dreaming though, even for those of us that can't generally visualize things. Dreaming is a very different regime for your brain, where it is _actually_ engaging the bits that get engaged when you're awake and doing things, it just suppresses the actual motor output.
  - benrbray 7y ago
    I too have noticed that I rapidly forget experiences I had even just a few days ago. Personally, I only have maybe one or two dreams per year (that I can remember). I have a hunch that a lot of my own memory issues are related to lack of quality sleep as a student. I tend to dream more when life is less stressful.
  - NateEag 7y ago
    I am strongly aphantasiac but do on rare occasions get momentary flashes of visual imagery, so I'm not all the way on the end of the spectrum (though my mind was still blown when I realized many people think primarily in visuals - cannot fathom what that would be like). I rarely remember dreams, and when I do they fade quickly. They are visual, however, usually first-person though not always. Other sensations are sometimes strong, too - I've had one or two nightmares involving physical trauma, physical shock, and excruciating pain.
- yariik 7y ago
  Welcome to the SDAM club friend. It was very difficult for me after I found that I have that, hope it won't be like that for you, or better, that you don't actually have it.
roenxi 7y ago
Presumably 'deficient' here is a term of art rather than something pejorative. Given how poorly people perform at recollecting personally experienced events - as evidenced by fascinating phenomena like false memories - it seems highly likely that the memories are not stored in any particularly robust way. It may well be normal to access memories similarly to watching a film but there is no reason to believe that is efficient. It is probably a crutch like sounding words out mentally when reading. The fast way is not going to be the visual way, in the same way that fast reading is not done verbally. I have a well developed minds eye, but it normally sees the world more like a cartoon than a vivid image. Works great for a lot of practical tasks though. There will be an absurd amount of variation out there.
- boomboomsubban 7y ago
  >Presumably 'deficient' here is a term of art rather than something pejorative. "Deficient" means lacking, there is no presumption that lacking is a negative thing. These three individuals seem to be living normal, productive lives while being deficient.
  - nabla9 7y ago
    Few hours ago there was link to article about quantum supremacy claims and one person commented how supremacy might be problematic word. > The usage of the word “supremacy” is probably the primary thing that rubs people the wrong way. When I first heard of it myself, it did feel a little strange. What is going on?
    - boomboomsubban 7y ago
      Words have multiple meanings, that can often be similar and context matters a lot. The press often uses this fact to sensationalize stories, while a scientific community may have a very specific definition in mind when using those words.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
mhb 7y ago
Flip side: Total recall: the people who never forget https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/08/total-recall-the-people-who-never-forget https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/08/total-recall...
callesgg 7y ago
People thinking they can view movies or don't view movies in their mind seams a bit strange to me. The mind works like the mind works. You can describe it in different ways. If you describe your memories like they are movies often enough you will start to think of them as movies. But that is not cause they are like movies that is simply cause you believe they are like movies. A movie is a movie, a memory is a memory, a picture is a picture, visualisations in the mind are just that visualisations in the mind noting more nothing less. You can describe things more or less accurately with metaphors, but that does not make the thing in to the metaphor you use to describe it.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  I'd guess from your comment that you don't experience visualisations or memories as movies - but others, like myself, do so. This isn't a postmodern "I can imagine it like a story, or movie, or song" the memory literally appears as a movie.
  - callesgg 7y ago
    If you experience your memories as a movie it can't have subjective emotions cause those are not in movies. With that in mind you might be able to see the perspective that I have here. You are not experiencing a movie in your head. You just call it a movie cause that is something familiar that you feel is similar. A movie is a movie, a memory is a memory. Things are what they are. One might call things other things but that does not make them in to that other thing no mater how similar or dissimilar they might or might not be.
    - NateEag 7y ago
      Have you seen Pixar's movie "Inside Out"? If not, this is irrelevant, but if you have, you will likely recall that the film's core narrative is about memories. All those memories are depicted as audiovisual records of events, often (literally) colored by an emotional overlay. I think they represented them that way because most or all of the core project team shared that experience of memory.
kache_ 7y ago
Personally, I have terrible autobiographical memory. I have no concept of the sequence of events as I recall them. For example, I know my father flew in to meet my fiance at the time, but I'm not sure what season it was, and for that matter I'm not even sure what year it was. I have to be constantly reminded by my wife about my important life events. I never thought I had a poor "memory" until my wife started to bring it up. Curiously, this (self perceived) ailment has not hindered my ability to do well in academia and work. Once I learn a fact, I'll remember it forever - random details from senior chemistry class are still fresh in my mind. I believe it has something to do with my inability to record the sequence of memories, rather than my ability to recall them. Edit: Hopefully SDAM gets further investigation. If people are wondering what I've learned to do to cope with this deficiency, I've got some recommendations - Learn to build habits - it's difficult to remember promises that you make to yourself and to others; but habits will stick forever. - Keep a calendar - for everything. - Take physical pictures of excursions and life events, and date them
- ma2rten 7y ago
  That sounds normal to me. Maybe I also have a terrible autobiographical memory. But maybe your wife just has an exceptionally good memory?
  - shantly 7y ago
    It took me until my mid 20s to realize something was wrong with me. I have a few impressions here and there from my past but can only roughly order any of it and mostly it's just gone, by a day or two later. Probably why my most dreaded assignment every single year in elementary school was "write about what you did over the break" or "write about a fun time that [something from your past]". I'd struggle with those for way longer than was intended. Not kidding, hardest schoolwork I had K-5. Occasionally things like that would still come up in later grades but by then I'd figured out I could just make up most of it and no-one would care, which solved the problem.
    - cma 7y ago
      You do seem to have a pretty good memory of those assignments from school though, especially if it goes back to kindergarten.
iandanforth 7y ago
I'd love to have these tests done. I have a friend from college who serves as my memory of my college experience. She can recall all manner of events and sequences of events from over a decade ago that I can't even vaguely recall. I experience memories of the long past as postcards. A few disconnected images or feelings without sequence or much context. I've always been impressed when people can remember details of times long past and I've observed almost everyone is better at it than I am.
slx26 7y ago
I've always had an extremely bad memory, paired with behaviors that probably don't help at all. I have always thought (non-scientific, highly subjective text ahead) that a big part of the problem (the behavioral side) is that I never talk about the events of my life with others. I'm highly asocial, and even when I end up explaining something, I hate to repeat the same stories twice. I use alarms and calendars for everything. I've come to think that a big problem for my memory is precisely the fact that I never reinforce previous memories, I never link or associate them to new memories (for example, of myself reviving the memories when explaining them to other people). So, there's no repetition, and they kinda fade away sooner than later. The more disconnected the memories remain, the harder it becomes to recall them.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  >I have always thought (non-scientific, highly subjective text ahead) that a big part of the problem (the behavioral side) is that I never talk about the events of my life with others. I've had the same hunch. I think some memories need repeating so that you can continue remembering them. Most of the memories that I have from my early childhood are ones that I think about once in a while. I had three serious falls with a skateboard before the age of 7, but I only remember the worst of the falls. It's the one I always thought of when I was reminded of those falls (broke a tooth, so any time I look in the mirror I might be reminded of it). At this point I only remember that I did fall before the worst one and I remember the extent of my injuries, but I don't even remember the specific place of it.
  - gist 7y ago
    > I think some memories need repeating so that you can continue remembering them. Most of the memories that I have from my early childhood are ones that I think about once in a while. I think this is exactly true. And for example if someone else is involved in the memory and you relate it to them they wonder 'how did you remember that it happened X years ago??'. But as you say it's that every now and then (at least with me) you have thought about it and reinforced the memory. The other person has not typically. Which is why they are surprised that you remember the event. So yes you 'remind' yourself I think this is true from what I experience as well.
EGreg 7y ago
As I worked more and more, in isolation especially, time seemed to fly faster and events seemed less salient. I remember things but not as vividly as when I was 15. I hope this isn’t a normal thing that has to do with individual years being less fractionally important with age, but just the brain adapting to loneliness.
- rpiguy 7y ago
  The perception of time passing faster with age is well known phenomenon. An important secondary character in the novel Catch-22 is obsessed with this. I used to think I was just impatient as a kid when ten minutes felt like forever. Now having passed 40 I can say that I was actually experiencing time very differently.
pjungwir 7y ago
I probably have some mild aphantasia, because my imagination doesn't usually include vivid pictures. I'm also pretty bad at graphic design and home decorating. On the other hand I do see things in dreams. And all my life even non-spatial things, like mathematical/logical/grammatical relationships, have felt like they had a spatial arrangement to them. And maybe this is something else, but I remember it wasn't until college that my own reasoning really started to feel "verbal". Once I was reading a 20th century philosopher who was criticizing Locke and others of his time for describing knowledge or ideas as mental imagery, saying that of course it's not like we really see pictures in our heads. I wish I could remember who this was. I want to say Saussure or Deleuze. I was personally more sympathetic to Locke, but I could see this writer's point (or not, heh). It's funny to think that aphantasia has influenced philosophy. I'm also curious what relation aphantasia has to chess-playing ability. I'm a pretty good chess player (for someone who doesn't take it seriously), but I can't see the board in my head at all. Grandmasters can play whole games blindfolded, and Magnus Carlsen has a YouTube video playing ten opponents at a time while blindfolded. I have to try really hard just to "see" a 3x3 position. I guess aphantasia makes it hard to mentally play a few moves and then stop and assess whether the new position is good for white or black, or even just notice basic tactics in it.
- mmazing 7y ago
  I think I'm in the same boat as you. I've discussed this with my spouse and we've determined that my mind's eye is pretty impaired. It's there, but just barely. I totally agree with the "spatial arrangement" of math/logic etc, I'm a software engineer and arranging and abstracting things into their logical parts internally comes as easily as looking at component parts laid out on a table to me (although it's not really visual). In regards to chess (I'm pretty decent at chess) I think it's like this, if you wrote a chess program, you wouldn't write it to visualize the representation of the board, you would set up variables to track state, etc. I think my "internal representations" of abstractions are just that, variables that my mind is tracking and understanding the relationships between, as easily as any other sense.
  - p1anecrazy 7y ago
KirinDave 7y ago
This acutely describes nearly all of my childhood, up until about age ten. What little I remmeber vividly is only extremely traumatic stuff: being lost at Stanford on a game day, physical abuse by a relative, my doctor trying to explain to me what cancer was, later on a discussion of the surgery I needed, a corporal punishment episode from a teacher when I was in kindergarten. Other than things like that, I can barely remember words associated with my home and schooling and family, let alone images. Until maybe age 10. I wonder if that's a linked phenomenon. Most people I know do not have a gap that large in the memory of their early development.
- zadler 7y ago
  It seems to be quite common.
- rriepe 7y ago
  Trauma and abuse are what cause the memory issues. It's well-known in the cPTSD and narcissism recovery communities.
lonelappde 7y ago
The article seems to lack a clear definition of what "autobiographical memory" means.
- JJMcJ 7y ago
  It is a technical term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_memory Usually journal articles expect a certain common knowledge of their readers.
Vaslo 7y ago
Reminds me of a line from David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” when the character is asked why he doesn’t like video recordings of things in his life- “I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.” I think deep down we are all a little like that.
- antisuji 7y ago
  Which reminds me of Ted Chiang's story "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling"[1] about exactly this tension. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
encoderer 7y ago
For most of my life I thought of myself as smart. In my 30s now I’ve realized I just have an unreasonably good memory, both long term and short term recall. In other areas of intelligence I’m average. I would bet that many of those identifying with this study are excelling in other dimensions of intelligence.
- theonemind 7y ago
  I kind of had the opposite experience. It seemed like I could figure things out quickly, but not especially remember them. Memory definitely helps, and as I got older and my brain doesn't seem to work at the same clock speed, memory helps a lot more and seems easier than figuring things out again all of the time. So, I kind of thought of it like a computer. You can sometimes have a look-up table of pre-computed things, but if you had more processor than memory, you'd go the other direction and re-compute instead of using memory/storage.
- shantly 7y ago
  I remember facts & such well and have incredible spatial reasoning ability & related memory but specifically my autobiographical memory is awful.
danbmil99 7y ago
It would be interesting to analyze these abilities from the viewpoint of evolutionary adaptation. Perhaps from the perspective of a band of proto-humans, it was highly adaptive for some members of the tribe to have strong episodic memories, but not necessary for everyone. Similarly, it was probably highly adaptive for a few members to be gifted with a structured, logical approach to problem-solving. Given the development of language, the whole tribe benefits from the specialized abilities of various members.
- foogoloo 7y ago
  Except there no reason to believe one style of memory is more or less related to being a logical/structured thinker. For example visual thinkers may be better at geometry by flipping and rotating images around in their head. Feynman describes solving logical things by reducing them to simple geometric problems.
jackcnreturns 7y ago
Wow. Another HN post for nerds to self-diagnose their inability to function normally in everyday life. I remember this site used to be about entrepreneurship and founders helping each other bootstrap their startups. The Eternal September continues.
- Judgmentality 7y ago
  People upvote what they find interesting. ‾\_(ツ)_/‾
- deleted 7y ago
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theonemind 7y ago
Unless they can pinpoint some underlying structural deficit in the brain, the title seems to pathologize something rather trivial. I have very low autobiographical memory because I mostly consider it a silly made up story in my head and don't pay much attention to it.
carapace 7y ago
Memory is a relative new thing, eh? Before we started civilization (about 12k years ago) was there much adaptive pressure to have accurate memories of one's personal history? As I wrote the above I remembered that many cultures (like in Australia) have oral histories that go back tens of thousands of years. Hmm...
echelon 7y ago
If SRS software has taught me anything, it's that memory is reenforced when recalled. If you don't have anyone to talk with and share your memories (or perhaps you don't find them important enough to think about), you're going to forget them. I wonder if they found a correlation between introverts and extroverts here. Because I'd almost certainly peg this phenomenon on that.
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oluckyman 7y ago
I'll add my voice to the chorus that says this is a symptom of a more fundamental issue: aphantasia. As a card-carrying aphantasiac, I'm skeptical of the ability of most people to visualize. I recall hearing of an experiment in which people were asked to draw a bicycle from their imagination. The results were laughable, yet, no doubt, the subjects would self report that, sure, they could visualize a bicycle.
hindsightbias 7y ago
Am grateful I have an autobiographical deficit. I can’t imagine being one of those people who remembers every slight or bad experience. Think about those people who are still impacted by something that happened to them in school. Of course, it could be all that skate boarding w/o a helmet.
fizzychicken 7y ago
I feel like I have bits of my memory and perception that are good and bits that are bad. I struggle with the idea of being asked to help with a 'photo-fit', to describe the person's face and reconstruct the features like you would when describing a suspect to a police officer or sketch artist, I simply cannot recall anyone's face. I can describe build, height, hair and colour, but the face itself is blocked in my mind. I cannot recall the majority of events in my life and most that I do recall are very recent or in some way traumatic or unpleasant, even then I only remember a freeze-frame of the scenario and note the whole event. Being able to remember a sequence of events or a long period of time within the same day is limited to a very small number of memories. I cannot remember most of my childhood or anything beyond a few years ago, just tiny snippets here and there. However... I remember nearly everywhere I've ever been, like a version of map software in my brain is keeping a record. I've re-visited places I've only been to once before many years earlier and been able to navigate the entire area without fault. I can remember the configuration of the shopping malls I've been to and I can even recall where nearly all products in the local grocery store or super markets are.... I can picture these things in my mind with real clarity. This ability also means I have fantastic dreams, often in the same places which only exist in my mind. I often remember dreams by where I was or what I was doing at the time based on which location I was in. I dream in first-person while also aware of what the third person sensation/ experience would be like. I can occasionally lucid dream so I know these dreams involve colour. I cannot remember what anything smells, sounds, or tastes like. If someone asked, ‘what does your favourite food taste like?’ I honestly could not describe it, but I can recall the texture of it perfectly. Yet even though my few memories do not include these details, if I smell something during the day I can easily remember what that is…the same applies to hearing a tune or sound or seeing someone’s face in a TV show. The memories are there but the act of actually trying to recall something simply for the purposes of attempting to remember will result in a blank….passively try and remember something by association of some other stimuli then the memory will come back easy. I worry that now my child is turning 3 years old I can only recall a handful of memories from his life so far, will this get worse? If he ever asks me what life was like when he was just a baby….what will I say?

206 points by monort 7y ago

I just came back from Milan and while I can recollect certain situations and pictures, by no means I can "play" my memory as if it was happening to me. Real experience has so much details compared to memory that I always tend to doubt that my memories are accurate. On top of that, if you have repetitive schedule I can't imagine you can recreate specifics of particular day. You probably reconstruct the situation filling in your image of familiar places with peculiarities of situation you are trying to remember

tiborsaas 7y ago

This is me all the time when we go out for a few beers :)

JshWright 7y ago

"inability to vividly recollect personally experienced events from a first-person perspective" I don't understand that... There is no perspective to my memories of events, they're just things I know happened. For instance, I went for a run this morning. I know where I went, I know what the weather was like, etc. Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter?

aesh2Xa1 7y ago
Can you recollect the scenery? There is a condition where one cannot process memories visually, but can still use other semantics to recollect. It's called aphantasia.
kibibu 7y ago
I wonder if this is related to Aphantasia, which popped up a while ago. I struggle to visualize things, and often only remember my experiences if people remind me of them.
- tomrod 7y ago
  I can see memories, but struggle to remember words I heard. Coping strategies: lots of notes!!!
  - cableshaft 7y ago
    Oh yeah, what people said is so hard for me. I'm terrible about telling personal anecdotes, because I just don't remember what people said, so it just sounds like me describing a series of facts. I get amazed when people like my late grandfather could tell a story about himself 40 years in the past and tell back and forth conversational dialogue that happened. Even if it's not 100% remembered (and I doubt it was) or embellished, or reinforced by telling the same stories over and over again over the years, it still impresses me. I can forget all but the broad strokes of what people said only a week later. The only conversations I "remember" about my past is what I've explicitly put into my poorly kept up journal entries.
Adverblessly 7y ago
Apparently, different people have different capabilities of imagination. Not strictly about this, but you might be interested in http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-ca... which briefly mentions this specifically. Relevant quote: "In the first, Francis Galton discovered that some people didn’t have visual imagination. They couldn’t see anything in their “mind’s eye”, they couldn’t generate internal images. None of these people knew there was anything “wrong” with them. They just assumed that everyone who talked about having an imagination was being metaphorical, just using a really florid poetic way of describing that they remembered what something looked like."
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  I think this is very difficult to convey in words. Sometimes I think I have aphantasia because I definitely cannot "visualize" things in color "HD", anywhere nearly similar to the quality of actual vision. At least not when I'm awake. Rarely, I do have dreams (lucid or not) that have the exact same visual quality as usual awake vision. On the other hand, I also cannot empathize with the parent comment that is surprised about first-person memories. My memories are sort of first person and evoke a feeling of the spatial and semantic layout of the scene. Like I remember and can "feel" that Joe was sitting to the left of me, even if I don't see his face in high-definition or maybe cannot even remember if he had glasses on or what clothes he was wearing. Sure, I could also transform it and imagine the situation from a different vantage point (still not really a visual rendering), but by default I recall it from first-person view. I believe that people do metaphorically exaggerate the quality of their visual memories. I recall some experiments that reveal that when these people are poked about specific details of their visualizations they do realize that those parts just were "undefined" and were not actually seeing a "rendered image".
  - pharke 7y ago
    That's interesting, my default view in memories is usually third person, often from above and to the side or some other perspective view. I have to concentrate on recalling detail in order to view my memories from a first person perspective. The third person recollection always seems to be more about the spatial relationships between people and things and is certainly not photographic, more like a conceptual understanding with images. Almost a diorama or a scene acted out on a stage. Weirdly this also shows up in my dreams although I do dream in the first person frequently.
dmd 7y ago
Not everyone can do this, but many people (like me) certainly can play an event back like it were a film. I don't find that kind of memory as useful as an actual encoded set of facts, though, and it tends to fade after a few years.
- reportingsjr 7y ago
  Wow, this is astounding to me! I always assumed people could replay events they had lived, just like watching a video. On top of this I can see and move around in the landscape around me in these memories.
  - atemerev 7y ago
    What I “see” is a brief flash of an afterimage, something like when you see for a brief second when you close your eyes. This is the limit of my visual capacity to remember. I always assumed everybody is like that. :)
    - deleted 7y ago
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  - copperx 7y ago
    I can "replay" events, but honestly I'm not sure I'm recalling or reconstructing an event; that is, I'm not sure if the images are memories or I'm creating them on the fly, as I can come up with "movies" in my head very easily, actors, sfx, and all.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      There's not much difference with regards to the article, where the problem is the inability to come up with "movies", not whether they are 100% accurate on some source material...
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Recall is reconstruction. The act of remembering something can change the way the memory is recalled next time. You can erase or modify someone's memory by engaging in appropriate chemical or behavioral interventions while they recall the memory.
Iv 7y ago
I do first-person recollection when I try to find an object I forgot. "I was having my wallet at the restaurant, I remember looking for coins in it."
mikelevins 7y ago
It's not a matter of "supposed to", but yes, that's part of the capability that is being discussed. There seem to be a couple of different dimensions of variation in how human memory and imagination work. One is what is discussed here: the ability to "vividly" reconstruct remembered events "from a first-person perspective". Apparently, some people can do it, and others cannot. Presumably, there's a range of abilities in between. At one end of the spectrum are people with hyperthymesia, who appear to be able to instantly reconstruct every tiny detail, including visual details from a first-person perspective, of everything they've ever experienced. At the other end are people like those discussed in this article. Another dimension is how vividly and comprehensively people can construct, manipulate, and experience sensory models in their imaginations. Again, the spectrum seems to run from aphantasia at one end (that's the inability to construct mental imagery at all) to someone like Stephen Wiltshire, who appears to have an eidetic visual memory that enables him to draw large, detailed landscapes with roughly photographic accuracy after briefly seeing a scene a single time. People with aphantasia generally seem to assume that when others describe mental imagery, they are being metaphorical; that they don't mean that they actually experience mental imagery in a literal sense. Contrariwise, I do actually experience mental imagery in a literal sense. In my late teens I became fascinated with a series of exercises devised by Aleister Crowley, in which you practice constructing increasingly elaborate assemblies of colorful 3D shapes moving in different ways. The goal was to see how many shapes you could manage at once and keep all of the shapes, colors, textures, and movement patterns stable for as long as possible. I assume an aphantastic person would think Crowley was joking or bullshitting, until they learned that some people can indeed construct and manipulate detailed mental images. Further complicating the subject, we also know from experiments in psychology of perception that the brain tends to edit memories, altering their content over time. I'd be interested to know how this tendency interacts with the variables mentioned above. I'm somewhere in the middle on both axes discussed above. I experience memories in the first person, and I remember and dream in color. When navigating, I rely on a 3D model of where I am and where I'm going, and if asked to go somewhere I haven't been before, I want to see a map that I can use to refresh and supplement that mental model. By contrast, my mother navigates procedurally. She wants a sequence of operations to perform: "turn right here; go a certain distance looking for such and such a building,..." and so on. I _can_ navigate that way, but I find it much more difficult and error-prone than just constructing the 3D model. From what my mother says, I'm not sure she can construct a model like that at all. Signs of the difference show up in, for example, the kind of information each of us wants when being directed to a new place. She wants detailed step-by-step instructions; I want coordinates in space and some identifying information (like the street address) to confirm when I've arrived at the right place. She will follow directions to the letter. I'll just pick a route that points in the right direction and improvise until I'm close enough to look for the confirming data.
marcinzm 7y ago
>Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter? Apparently many people can. I mostly can't. Interestingly, I learned this while reading a comic where a plot point was certain memories being visualized in black-and-white versus color. The fact that the author took it as given that you could visualize memories in such detail that color could be discerned was mind blowing. I wonder how many other things we take as given based on our own mental experiences but which aren't close to universal.
- ALittleLight 7y ago
  I learned of my own aphantasia while watching an episode of House with my roommate. In the show they had a machine which let them view a rough picture of what a subject was thinking of. I observed to my roommate that this was an especially dumb plot point as people don't actually think in images but only in words. My roommate was quite confused and claimed that he did think in visuals and we had an interesting conversation and Google search thereafter. I still am slightly torn between thinking that there is some disconnect in explanation versus believing that some or even most people can actually visualize things in their mind. When I think of a "square", for example, I have access to all the facts I know of squares (polygon with four equal length edges) and I could draw a square or trace one in the air with my finger, so I obviously know what one looks like, but I have no visual experience of a square and it's difficult to imagine that other people do. One reason it's difficult to imagine other people have the visual imagination they think they do is because I so rarely see people just sitting and imagining things for long stretches - which I assume would be borderline irresistible if you had the kind of fantasy machine to show you whatever you wanted. Perhaps people do this in private and don't talk about it much?
  - mistersys 7y ago
    When I imagine a yellow square, for example, I definitely visualize it. I can re-shape it, combine it with other shapes, rotate it, and visualize it moving. But it's not like it's replacing my vision, it's more of a secondary display that you can only see individual thoughts for a split second. If I close my eyes, I can do this better, and I actually have spent hours visualizing places I've been, or creating new ones. When I visualize my old homes and cities I've lived, it's like I have super speed and I can dash anywhere, but it's like a video with a very low frame rate, I see individual pictures and they combine with my spatial awareness to give my the feeling of moving. The frames are also very "low resolution", but it doesn't feel fuzzy but more like the frames are so quick that you can't pick out many details. In terms of words, I'm often thinking about memories I see on the "memory film", but the pictures themselves aren't words at all, my internal dialog vs. my visualization are 2 separate processes.
umvi 7y ago
I can. Perhaps you have Aphantasia[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
jandrewrogers 7y ago
I am similar, most experiences are reduced to a set of facts in a pretty short period of time. I realized early on that this is not the way most people remember and the facts that I do remember tend to be more reliable than most people with vivid memories, which is useful. Developmentally, I have always wondered if the fact that I had a voracious appetite for reading books, spending most of my time doing that from a very young age through early adulthood, is either correlated or causative -- to this day my cognition is very text optimized. Anecdotally, there seems to be quite a bit of cognitive diversity in terms of how the brain processes reality. For example, I have extremely good spatial memory and ability to fluidly manipulate complex spaces, real or synthetic, in my head. When I was a young I assumed everyone had this ability and it took until well into adulthood for me to realize that I was a far outlier in this regard and most people simply lacked any similar facility. I lean on this all the time to achieve complex things in my life, which has real advantages in certain contexts, but people clearly get on in life without it and frequently have compensatory skills. You have to wonder the extent to which the distribution of these cognitive artifacts influences performance and interest in various occupations, which leverage or rely on these cognitive functions to varying degrees.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Facts are digital, narrative experiences are analog. Facts are high precision but very expensive, while narrative memory packs far far information but is less accurate (error prone) and precise (memories change with each recall).
- meowface 7y ago
  It would be especially interesting if we could retrofit some of these abilities into existing neural architectures with the help of technology. For example, one could imagine an implant or indirectly connected device which increases your "L1 cache size" (working memory capacity), or provides supplementary "GPUs" to offload spatial reasoning. They could change the way the brain itself works, or perhaps just act as external modules with fast data lanes which your brain eventually starts to treat as extensions of itself, like it can with prosthetic limbs (or even imaginary "virtual" limbs, like with a mirror box). It may not actually ever be possible to do it without direct, messy biological/genetic engineering, but if it is possible, I think it would have an incredible impact.
coldtea 7y ago
>Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter? Yes, especially since unlike an "imaginary first-person shooter" this was real (with the added real-world sensory input this implies) and actually happened to you... It's like asking "Am I supposed to see a real world landscape in color, like some sort of imaginary landscape painting?" -- when paintings get their colors from our real world experience of them (modern artistic license aside)...
- lonelappde 7y ago
  A computer screen is real. The images are symbolic of non real things, but the images are real. And especially to the point, since you are (controversially) claiming that raw sensory input is the core of memory, not interpretation of it, it's incoherent to claim that a visual artwork is less memorable than whatever the art represents.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >A computer screen is real Which is neither here, nor there. >The images are symbolic of non real things, but the images are real. They are still not tied to touch, smell, sense of being in place, temperature, wind, and several other things. In fact they can actively fight your environmental cues. E.g. you can watch a man drink coffee in the African heat on your screen while sitting in a room with no smell of coffee at all while freezing cold. The real world intermix of sensory inputs tied to each environment work together and help make the scene, and eventually the memory, even more concrete. >it's incoherent to claim that a visual artwork is less memorable than whatever the art represents. Would you remember more being in a sea with huge waves rocking you, or having seen some artwork of such a scene? Do you remember better a car accident you had, or pictures of random car accidents presented to you?
- meowface 7y ago
  Think about an actual first-person experience you recently had, though. Do you really see a full and clear image, as if you were looking at a true photo or video? If you really try to parse out the small details, can you say exactly what every shade of color was, how the lighting was, where every single thing was located, everything you heard and smelled? I doubt many people have such an extremely vivid memory. I do think my memories of first-person experiences are in the first-person (if I'm understanding it right), but I feel like I just retain the general impression of "scenes", with details for the important things and vague, "smeared" descriptions for everything else. The information is sort of compressed, and more of it can be decompressed if I correlate the events with other things that happened at the time or do other things to jog my memory, but I think it's still a lossy compression. I kind of figured that's what memory is like for most people.
darkerside 7y ago
I wonder if there's a connection between memory and creativity here. Perhaps vivid recollections aren't perfect fidelity, it's just that some people devote their creativity to storytelling about their past. Those memories may or may not be accurate, but vividness of memory is used as a proxy for accuracy.
berberous 7y ago
Yes. For all of you posting that you lack this capability, what are your dreams like? Do they not have a visual component? When I dream, I see the things that are happening ; recalling memories or daydreaming has a similar visual component.
- JshWright 7y ago
  I don't recall dreaming much at all. Once every few months, maybe (I'm sure I'm dreaming, I just have no memory of it. When I do have a memory of a dream, it's the same as any other memory (just a thing that I know "happened"). It wouldn't surprise me if there was a visual component to dreaming though, even for those of us that can't generally visualize things. Dreaming is a very different regime for your brain, where it is _actually_ engaging the bits that get engaged when you're awake and doing things, it just suppresses the actual motor output.
- benrbray 7y ago
  I too have noticed that I rapidly forget experiences I had even just a few days ago. Personally, I only have maybe one or two dreams per year (that I can remember). I have a hunch that a lot of my own memory issues are related to lack of quality sleep as a student. I tend to dream more when life is less stressful.
- NateEag 7y ago
  I am strongly aphantasiac but do on rare occasions get momentary flashes of visual imagery, so I'm not all the way on the end of the spectrum (though my mind was still blown when I realized many people think primarily in visuals - cannot fathom what that would be like). I rarely remember dreams, and when I do they fade quickly. They are visual, however, usually first-person though not always. Other sensations are sometimes strong, too - I've had one or two nightmares involving physical trauma, physical shock, and excruciating pain.
yariik 7y ago
Welcome to the SDAM club friend. It was very difficult for me after I found that I have that, hope it won't be like that for you, or better, that you don't actually have it.

roenxi 7y ago

Presumably 'deficient' here is a term of art rather than something pejorative. Given how poorly people perform at recollecting personally experienced events - as evidenced by fascinating phenomena like false memories - it seems highly likely that the memories are not stored in any particularly robust way. It may well be normal to access memories similarly to watching a film but there is no reason to believe that is efficient. It is probably a crutch like sounding words out mentally when reading. The fast way is not going to be the visual way, in the same way that fast reading is not done verbally. I have a well developed minds eye, but it normally sees the world more like a cartoon than a vivid image. Works great for a lot of practical tasks though. There will be an absurd amount of variation out there.

boomboomsubban 7y ago
>Presumably 'deficient' here is a term of art rather than something pejorative. "Deficient" means lacking, there is no presumption that lacking is a negative thing. These three individuals seem to be living normal, productive lives while being deficient.
- nabla9 7y ago
  Few hours ago there was link to article about quantum supremacy claims and one person commented how supremacy might be problematic word. > The usage of the word “supremacy” is probably the primary thing that rubs people the wrong way. When I first heard of it myself, it did feel a little strange. What is going on?
  - boomboomsubban 7y ago
    Words have multiple meanings, that can often be similar and context matters a lot. The press often uses this fact to sensationalize stories, while a scientific community may have a very specific definition in mind when using those words.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

mhb 7y ago

Flip side: Total recall: the people who never forget https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/08/total-recall-the-people-who-never-forget https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/08/total-recall...

callesgg 7y ago

People thinking they can view movies or don't view movies in their mind seams a bit strange to me. The mind works like the mind works. You can describe it in different ways. If you describe your memories like they are movies often enough you will start to think of them as movies. But that is not cause they are like movies that is simply cause you believe they are like movies. A movie is a movie, a memory is a memory, a picture is a picture, visualisations in the mind are just that visualisations in the mind noting more nothing less. You can describe things more or less accurately with metaphors, but that does not make the thing in to the metaphor you use to describe it.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
I'd guess from your comment that you don't experience visualisations or memories as movies - but others, like myself, do so. This isn't a postmodern "I can imagine it like a story, or movie, or song" the memory literally appears as a movie.
- callesgg 7y ago
  If you experience your memories as a movie it can't have subjective emotions cause those are not in movies. With that in mind you might be able to see the perspective that I have here. You are not experiencing a movie in your head. You just call it a movie cause that is something familiar that you feel is similar. A movie is a movie, a memory is a memory. Things are what they are. One might call things other things but that does not make them in to that other thing no mater how similar or dissimilar they might or might not be.
  - NateEag 7y ago
    Have you seen Pixar's movie "Inside Out"? If not, this is irrelevant, but if you have, you will likely recall that the film's core narrative is about memories. All those memories are depicted as audiovisual records of events, often (literally) colored by an emotional overlay. I think they represented them that way because most or all of the core project team shared that experience of memory.

kache_ 7y ago

Personally, I have terrible autobiographical memory. I have no concept of the sequence of events as I recall them. For example, I know my father flew in to meet my fiance at the time, but I'm not sure what season it was, and for that matter I'm not even sure what year it was. I have to be constantly reminded by my wife about my important life events. I never thought I had a poor "memory" until my wife started to bring it up. Curiously, this (self perceived) ailment has not hindered my ability to do well in academia and work. Once I learn a fact, I'll remember it forever - random details from senior chemistry class are still fresh in my mind. I believe it has something to do with my inability to record the sequence of memories, rather than my ability to recall them. Edit: Hopefully SDAM gets further investigation. If people are wondering what I've learned to do to cope with this deficiency, I've got some recommendations - Learn to build habits - it's difficult to remember promises that you make to yourself and to others; but habits will stick forever. - Keep a calendar - for everything. - Take physical pictures of excursions and life events, and date them

ma2rten 7y ago
That sounds normal to me. Maybe I also have a terrible autobiographical memory. But maybe your wife just has an exceptionally good memory?
- shantly 7y ago
  It took me until my mid 20s to realize something was wrong with me. I have a few impressions here and there from my past but can only roughly order any of it and mostly it's just gone, by a day or two later. Probably why my most dreaded assignment every single year in elementary school was "write about what you did over the break" or "write about a fun time that [something from your past]". I'd struggle with those for way longer than was intended. Not kidding, hardest schoolwork I had K-5. Occasionally things like that would still come up in later grades but by then I'd figured out I could just make up most of it and no-one would care, which solved the problem.
  - cma 7y ago
    You do seem to have a pretty good memory of those assignments from school though, especially if it goes back to kindergarten.

iandanforth 7y ago

I'd love to have these tests done. I have a friend from college who serves as my memory of my college experience. She can recall all manner of events and sequences of events from over a decade ago that I can't even vaguely recall. I experience memories of the long past as postcards. A few disconnected images or feelings without sequence or much context. I've always been impressed when people can remember details of times long past and I've observed almost everyone is better at it than I am.

slx26 7y ago

I've always had an extremely bad memory, paired with behaviors that probably don't help at all. I have always thought (non-scientific, highly subjective text ahead) that a big part of the problem (the behavioral side) is that I never talk about the events of my life with others. I'm highly asocial, and even when I end up explaining something, I hate to repeat the same stories twice. I use alarms and calendars for everything. I've come to think that a big problem for my memory is precisely the fact that I never reinforce previous memories, I never link or associate them to new memories (for example, of myself reviving the memories when explaining them to other people). So, there's no repetition, and they kinda fade away sooner than later. The more disconnected the memories remain, the harder it becomes to recall them.

Mirioron 7y ago
>I have always thought (non-scientific, highly subjective text ahead) that a big part of the problem (the behavioral side) is that I never talk about the events of my life with others. I've had the same hunch. I think some memories need repeating so that you can continue remembering them. Most of the memories that I have from my early childhood are ones that I think about once in a while. I had three serious falls with a skateboard before the age of 7, but I only remember the worst of the falls. It's the one I always thought of when I was reminded of those falls (broke a tooth, so any time I look in the mirror I might be reminded of it). At this point I only remember that I did fall before the worst one and I remember the extent of my injuries, but I don't even remember the specific place of it.
- gist 7y ago
  > I think some memories need repeating so that you can continue remembering them. Most of the memories that I have from my early childhood are ones that I think about once in a while. I think this is exactly true. And for example if someone else is involved in the memory and you relate it to them they wonder 'how did you remember that it happened X years ago??'. But as you say it's that every now and then (at least with me) you have thought about it and reinforced the memory. The other person has not typically. Which is why they are surprised that you remember the event. So yes you 'remind' yourself I think this is true from what I experience as well.

EGreg 7y ago

As I worked more and more, in isolation especially, time seemed to fly faster and events seemed less salient. I remember things but not as vividly as when I was 15. I hope this isn’t a normal thing that has to do with individual years being less fractionally important with age, but just the brain adapting to loneliness.

rpiguy 7y ago
The perception of time passing faster with age is well known phenomenon. An important secondary character in the novel Catch-22 is obsessed with this. I used to think I was just impatient as a kid when ten minutes felt like forever. Now having passed 40 I can say that I was actually experiencing time very differently.

pjungwir 7y ago

I probably have some mild aphantasia, because my imagination doesn't usually include vivid pictures. I'm also pretty bad at graphic design and home decorating. On the other hand I do see things in dreams. And all my life even non-spatial things, like mathematical/logical/grammatical relationships, have felt like they had a spatial arrangement to them. And maybe this is something else, but I remember it wasn't until college that my own reasoning really started to feel "verbal". Once I was reading a 20th century philosopher who was criticizing Locke and others of his time for describing knowledge or ideas as mental imagery, saying that of course it's not like we really see pictures in our heads. I wish I could remember who this was. I want to say Saussure or Deleuze. I was personally more sympathetic to Locke, but I could see this writer's point (or not, heh). It's funny to think that aphantasia has influenced philosophy. I'm also curious what relation aphantasia has to chess-playing ability. I'm a pretty good chess player (for someone who doesn't take it seriously), but I can't see the board in my head at all. Grandmasters can play whole games blindfolded, and Magnus Carlsen has a YouTube video playing ten opponents at a time while blindfolded. I have to try really hard just to "see" a 3x3 position. I guess aphantasia makes it hard to mentally play a few moves and then stop and assess whether the new position is good for white or black, or even just notice basic tactics in it.

mmazing 7y ago
I think I'm in the same boat as you. I've discussed this with my spouse and we've determined that my mind's eye is pretty impaired. It's there, but just barely. I totally agree with the "spatial arrangement" of math/logic etc, I'm a software engineer and arranging and abstracting things into their logical parts internally comes as easily as looking at component parts laid out on a table to me (although it's not really visual). In regards to chess (I'm pretty decent at chess) I think it's like this, if you wrote a chess program, you wouldn't write it to visualize the representation of the board, you would set up variables to track state, etc. I think my "internal representations" of abstractions are just that, variables that my mind is tracking and understanding the relationships between, as easily as any other sense.
- p1anecrazy 7y ago

KirinDave 7y ago

This acutely describes nearly all of my childhood, up until about age ten. What little I remmeber vividly is only extremely traumatic stuff: being lost at Stanford on a game day, physical abuse by a relative, my doctor trying to explain to me what cancer was, later on a discussion of the surgery I needed, a corporal punishment episode from a teacher when I was in kindergarten. Other than things like that, I can barely remember words associated with my home and schooling and family, let alone images. Until maybe age 10. I wonder if that's a linked phenomenon. Most people I know do not have a gap that large in the memory of their early development.

zadler 7y ago
It seems to be quite common.
rriepe 7y ago
Trauma and abuse are what cause the memory issues. It's well-known in the cPTSD and narcissism recovery communities.

lonelappde 7y ago

The article seems to lack a clear definition of what "autobiographical memory" means.

JJMcJ 7y ago
It is a technical term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_memory Usually journal articles expect a certain common knowledge of their readers.

Vaslo 7y ago

Reminds me of a line from David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” when the character is asked why he doesn’t like video recordings of things in his life- “I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.” I think deep down we are all a little like that.

antisuji 7y ago
Which reminds me of Ted Chiang's story "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling"[1] about exactly this tension. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...

encoderer 7y ago

For most of my life I thought of myself as smart. In my 30s now I’ve realized I just have an unreasonably good memory, both long term and short term recall. In other areas of intelligence I’m average. I would bet that many of those identifying with this study are excelling in other dimensions of intelligence.

theonemind 7y ago
I kind of had the opposite experience. It seemed like I could figure things out quickly, but not especially remember them. Memory definitely helps, and as I got older and my brain doesn't seem to work at the same clock speed, memory helps a lot more and seems easier than figuring things out again all of the time. So, I kind of thought of it like a computer. You can sometimes have a look-up table of pre-computed things, but if you had more processor than memory, you'd go the other direction and re-compute instead of using memory/storage.
shantly 7y ago
I remember facts & such well and have incredible spatial reasoning ability & related memory but specifically my autobiographical memory is awful.

danbmil99 7y ago

It would be interesting to analyze these abilities from the viewpoint of evolutionary adaptation. Perhaps from the perspective of a band of proto-humans, it was highly adaptive for some members of the tribe to have strong episodic memories, but not necessary for everyone. Similarly, it was probably highly adaptive for a few members to be gifted with a structured, logical approach to problem-solving. Given the development of language, the whole tribe benefits from the specialized abilities of various members.

foogoloo 7y ago
Except there no reason to believe one style of memory is more or less related to being a logical/structured thinker. For example visual thinkers may be better at geometry by flipping and rotating images around in their head. Feynman describes solving logical things by reducing them to simple geometric problems.

jackcnreturns 7y ago

Wow. Another HN post for nerds to self-diagnose their inability to function normally in everyday life. I remember this site used to be about entrepreneurship and founders helping each other bootstrap their startups. The Eternal September continues.

Judgmentality 7y ago
People upvote what they find interesting. ‾\_(ツ)_/‾
deleted 7y ago
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theonemind 7y ago

Unless they can pinpoint some underlying structural deficit in the brain, the title seems to pathologize something rather trivial. I have very low autobiographical memory because I mostly consider it a silly made up story in my head and don't pay much attention to it.

carapace 7y ago

Memory is a relative new thing, eh? Before we started civilization (about 12k years ago) was there much adaptive pressure to have accurate memories of one's personal history? As I wrote the above I remembered that many cultures (like in Australia) have oral histories that go back tens of thousands of years. Hmm...

echelon 7y ago

If SRS software has taught me anything, it's that memory is reenforced when recalled. If you don't have anyone to talk with and share your memories (or perhaps you don't find them important enough to think about), you're going to forget them. I wonder if they found a correlation between introverts and extroverts here. Because I'd almost certainly peg this phenomenon on that.

deleted 7y ago

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oluckyman 7y ago

I'll add my voice to the chorus that says this is a symptom of a more fundamental issue: aphantasia. As a card-carrying aphantasiac, I'm skeptical of the ability of most people to visualize. I recall hearing of an experiment in which people were asked to draw a bicycle from their imagination. The results were laughable, yet, no doubt, the subjects would self report that, sure, they could visualize a bicycle.

hindsightbias 7y ago

Am grateful I have an autobiographical deficit. I can’t imagine being one of those people who remembers every slight or bad experience. Think about those people who are still impacted by something that happened to them in school. Of course, it could be all that skate boarding w/o a helmet.

fizzychicken 7y ago

I feel like I have bits of my memory and perception that are good and bits that are bad. I struggle with the idea of being asked to help with a 'photo-fit', to describe the person's face and reconstruct the features like you would when describing a suspect to a police officer or sketch artist, I simply cannot recall anyone's face. I can describe build, height, hair and colour, but the face itself is blocked in my mind. I cannot recall the majority of events in my life and most that I do recall are very recent or in some way traumatic or unpleasant, even then I only remember a freeze-frame of the scenario and note the whole event. Being able to remember a sequence of events or a long period of time within the same day is limited to a very small number of memories. I cannot remember most of my childhood or anything beyond a few years ago, just tiny snippets here and there. However... I remember nearly everywhere I've ever been, like a version of map software in my brain is keeping a record. I've re-visited places I've only been to once before many years earlier and been able to navigate the entire area without fault. I can remember the configuration of the shopping malls I've been to and I can even recall where nearly all products in the local grocery store or super markets are.... I can picture these things in my mind with real clarity. This ability also means I have fantastic dreams, often in the same places which only exist in my mind. I often remember dreams by where I was or what I was doing at the time based on which location I was in. I dream in first-person while also aware of what the third person sensation/ experience would be like. I can occasionally lucid dream so I know these dreams involve colour. I cannot remember what anything smells, sounds, or tastes like. If someone asked, ‘what does your favourite food taste like?’ I honestly could not describe it, but I can recall the texture of it perfectly. Yet even though my few memories do not include these details, if I smell something during the day I can easily remember what that is…the same applies to hearing a tune or sound or seeing someone’s face in a TV show. The memories are there but the act of actually trying to recall something simply for the purposes of attempting to remember will result in a blank….passively try and remember something by association of some other stimuli then the memory will come back easy. I worry that now my child is turning 3 years old I can only recall a handful of memories from his life so far, will this get worse? If he ever asks me what life was like when he was just a baby….what will I say?