3 ms·

Saved for later reading, this was interesting in the intro though: > For example, when given randomly selected dates or event cues from their past, HSAM indivi

by tra3 4y ago

Saved for later reading, this was interesting in the intro though: > For example, when given randomly selected dates or event cues from their past, HSAM individuals can effortlessly recall many details of what happened, even if trivial (e.g., what they had for dinner) without the use of mnemonic aids. They are neither savants nor calendar counters (although they possess extensive calendar knowledge from their own lifespan) and they are distinct from other types of superior memorizers who possess vast learning and retention of meaningless information This is the opposite group from the study, that is the group that has superior autobiographic memory. I find this incredible because I’d have to work hard to remember what I had for dinner 3 days. I’d normally do it by unspooling my memory to identify what the day was about to try to find some context. This only works up to a couple of days. Maybe a week. But there’s no way I’ll remember anything from 2 weeks or more in the past. Anyway, I thought this was amazing.

rapnie 4y ago
Makes me wonder. If you ever are interrogated by police or in a court room.. "Where were you on the night of 22 January 2020?" and "Can't you also remember that you went to ..?". Now if you were guilty the night may have left quite an impression in memory. Not guilty, and you likely answer to every question "Dunno, your honor", making you look really suspicious in the eyes of onlookers.
- lumost 4y ago
  I suspect that one of the activities a lawyer does in this case is prepping you to answer these questions. Rather than "dunno" the answer could be "It was an unremarkable night, I ate dinner at home, watched netflix, and went to bed". Odds are the browser history/location history on your phone would provide corroboration for the above if needed.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    Along that, you would do your own investigation. Look over texts, emails, calls, credit card charges, and use discovery from the other side like location data, surveillance footage, and etc. This is ALSO why you don’t ever talk to police. You talk to lawyers. If a cop were to ask you the same “where were you at” question, it’s probably better to not answer at all.
- narag 4y ago
  In those cases the assumption is you were made aware of the relevance of that day before, closer to what happened so you could recollect and fix the memories for later questioning. Otherwise that kind of question is ridiculous.
garmain 4y ago
I came to the conclusion that I compress my experiences and rather than "reading them". I process them to subconsciously extract relevant patterns. If I need to remember what I ate on a certain date, I struggle and basically have to unpack the whole shebang. There is a whole set of behavioural patterns I exhibit that all seem to tie into this. For example I have no sense for time on the scale of weeks or longer. On the other hand I seem to remember "narrative background" well. E.g. What someone likes or doesn't like, where they're from etc. I also seem much better than others in remembering whether a topic already came up or not. In terms of MBTI/Jungian Functions: I seem very much lead Ni.
jtbayly 4y ago
My son (not biological) is in the highly superior group. I'm in the severely deficient group. It's an odd experience having him talk in detail about a fairly normal day 11 years ago when he was two, including what we had for dinner. I can't remember what we had for dinner the day before yesterday.
jaggederest 4y ago
I probably qualify for HSAM. I'm often reminding people of how we met, or a relevant conversation or interaction, and I can read them back what we talked about, what we ate, what the weather was like, those kinds of details. It's not as complete as a lot of the examples I've seen, where you can name a date and the person can recall everything, but I definitely haven't met anyone with a better memory, on average, than I have - with the possible exception of my mother, which suggests it's to some degree genetic.
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  I have terrible memory generally but I can recall how I met most of the friends I've made in adulthood, conversations we had etc. the same way you seem to do. This is a mnemonic device though. The person is the device. I see them (or think about, talk to them, etc) and those memories come back kind of like a stream of things related to them.
turns0ut 4y ago
What you had for dinner probably falls under the “meaningless information.” The study seems to call out ability to accurately recite one’s life story, vividly recalling subsets of childhood experiences in details, not knowing they had mac n cheez last Tuesday. I grew up rural and was way less distracted by trendy and/or random people all around energy. I can clearly recite events and back it up with pictures my camera obsessed father took through the 80-90s. My autobiographical awareness seems intact. Mainstream life then and now comes along with pressure to defer expressing ourselves and serve “higher purpose.” It’s not so shocking people do so and then remember nothing; there’s probably not that much to recall if one’s path was constrained to “set aside personal exploration to serve by getting busy work job, do job all week, sit on couch parasocially recharging through others emotional performances on TV.” That’s a pretty fractal cognitive existence. That’s why I am not a fan of lifelong “career” culture. Adam Smith wrote years ago extreme division of labor would make humans incurious and stupider than animals; current political trends seem to back up the idea as everyone clings to keeping their tribal bubble intact rather than explore new models. Don’t smash my cognitive fractal, bro!
- kfarr 4y ago
  Thanks for expressing this. It seems like the share of "meaningless information" significantly increases as I get older. When young, everything is exciting and important. As I get older the patterns are repetitive and even new events are sightly modified renditions of previous events. There doesn't seem as much to store. My only personal exception to the above is having kids, so far this has been a truly new set of experiences, even if exhausting.
fortran77 4y ago
I'm seeing big gaps in my memory now that I'm almost 60. For example, I had no recall of a vacation to London this past December; I believe I went because I was shown photos and I remember the trip I made right after to Belfast, but if I didn't have the reminder, I wouldn't have known that I went there. I'm still working every day writing C++/CUDA/VHDL code, so I suppose I'm a healthy adult.
- vijucat 4y ago
  Love Fortran77, by the way. Learned it entirely from the manual that came with the floppy disk back in the day; and it's amazing to me that manuals were that good. There are some modern R packages such as library(randomForest) which are basically Fortran code written in the 70s and "why fix what isn't broken"!

by tra3 4y ago

rapnie 4y ago

Makes me wonder. If you ever are interrogated by police or in a court room.. "Where were you on the night of 22 January 2020?" and "Can't you also remember that you went to ..?". Now if you were guilty the night may have left quite an impression in memory. Not guilty, and you likely answer to every question "Dunno, your honor", making you look really suspicious in the eyes of onlookers.

lumost 4y ago
I suspect that one of the activities a lawyer does in this case is prepping you to answer these questions. Rather than "dunno" the answer could be "It was an unremarkable night, I ate dinner at home, watched netflix, and went to bed". Odds are the browser history/location history on your phone would provide corroboration for the above if needed.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Along that, you would do your own investigation. Look over texts, emails, calls, credit card charges, and use discovery from the other side like location data, surveillance footage, and etc. This is ALSO why you don’t ever talk to police. You talk to lawyers. If a cop were to ask you the same “where were you at” question, it’s probably better to not answer at all.
narag 4y ago
In those cases the assumption is you were made aware of the relevance of that day before, closer to what happened so you could recollect and fix the memories for later questioning. Otherwise that kind of question is ridiculous.

garmain 4y ago

I came to the conclusion that I compress my experiences and rather than "reading them". I process them to subconsciously extract relevant patterns. If I need to remember what I ate on a certain date, I struggle and basically have to unpack the whole shebang. There is a whole set of behavioural patterns I exhibit that all seem to tie into this. For example I have no sense for time on the scale of weeks or longer. On the other hand I seem to remember "narrative background" well. E.g. What someone likes or doesn't like, where they're from etc. I also seem much better than others in remembering whether a topic already came up or not. In terms of MBTI/Jungian Functions: I seem very much lead Ni.

jtbayly 4y ago

My son (not biological) is in the highly superior group. I'm in the severely deficient group. It's an odd experience having him talk in detail about a fairly normal day 11 years ago when he was two, including what we had for dinner. I can't remember what we had for dinner the day before yesterday.

jaggederest 4y ago

I probably qualify for HSAM. I'm often reminding people of how we met, or a relevant conversation or interaction, and I can read them back what we talked about, what we ate, what the weather was like, those kinds of details. It's not as complete as a lot of the examples I've seen, where you can name a date and the person can recall everything, but I definitely haven't met anyone with a better memory, on average, than I have - with the possible exception of my mother, which suggests it's to some degree genetic.

cassianoleal 4y ago
I have terrible memory generally but I can recall how I met most of the friends I've made in adulthood, conversations we had etc. the same way you seem to do. This is a mnemonic device though. The person is the device. I see them (or think about, talk to them, etc) and those memories come back kind of like a stream of things related to them.

turns0ut 4y ago

What you had for dinner probably falls under the “meaningless information.” The study seems to call out ability to accurately recite one’s life story, vividly recalling subsets of childhood experiences in details, not knowing they had mac n cheez last Tuesday. I grew up rural and was way less distracted by trendy and/or random people all around energy. I can clearly recite events and back it up with pictures my camera obsessed father took through the 80-90s. My autobiographical awareness seems intact. Mainstream life then and now comes along with pressure to defer expressing ourselves and serve “higher purpose.” It’s not so shocking people do so and then remember nothing; there’s probably not that much to recall if one’s path was constrained to “set aside personal exploration to serve by getting busy work job, do job all week, sit on couch parasocially recharging through others emotional performances on TV.” That’s a pretty fractal cognitive existence. That’s why I am not a fan of lifelong “career” culture. Adam Smith wrote years ago extreme division of labor would make humans incurious and stupider than animals; current political trends seem to back up the idea as everyone clings to keeping their tribal bubble intact rather than explore new models. Don’t smash my cognitive fractal, bro!

kfarr 4y ago
Thanks for expressing this. It seems like the share of "meaningless information" significantly increases as I get older. When young, everything is exciting and important. As I get older the patterns are repetitive and even new events are sightly modified renditions of previous events. There doesn't seem as much to store. My only personal exception to the above is having kids, so far this has been a truly new set of experiences, even if exhausting.

fortran77 4y ago

I'm seeing big gaps in my memory now that I'm almost 60. For example, I had no recall of a vacation to London this past December; I believe I went because I was shown photos and I remember the trip I made right after to Belfast, but if I didn't have the reminder, I wouldn't have known that I went there. I'm still working every day writing C++/CUDA/VHDL code, so I suppose I'm a healthy adult.

vijucat 4y ago
Love Fortran77, by the way. Learned it entirely from the manual that came with the floppy disk back in the day; and it's amazing to me that manuals were that good. There are some modern R packages such as library(randomForest) which are basically Fortran code written in the 70s and "why fix what isn't broken"!