I can remember dates oddly well.

However, where the fuck are my keys???

Its a mixed bag.

I don’t remember a lot of specifics from my childhood, but I also wouldn’t say I don’t remember my childhood. I don’t remember the names of all my elementary schools, or exactly where they were, but I can remember most of my friends and what we did together. Like at my first elementary school I can remember that I basically just did normal kid stuff. I know at my second elementary school I got into videogames, because a lot of my friends from that school had gamecubes. But I can only remember a few actual individual times we were playing gamecube, even though we played together several times a week for literally years. I know mario sunshine was my jam but can’t remember any specific days I played it on. I know when I was homeschooled I spent more time on neopets than doing actual school (thanks mom), but I have literally no individual memories of playing neopets.

So like… I do know my own history well enough, but just not specific days unless it was something really noteworthy. I have no idea if thats “normal” or not.

I can remember medical facts really well. I want to get into the medical field in some capacity, because for whatever reason that shits sticks in my head. Special interest I guess? Idk.

Ummm

People tend to look at me funny when I tell them that I don’t remember my childhood all the way up through highschool.

Certain big events in highschool I can remember of course. But for most of it is just vague impressions of “Yeah…I must have done that at some point, but can’t recall specifics”.

For Childhood it gets even more nebulous; again, a few things I clearly remember, and much of the rest of it I can’t decide if I actually remember it, or if I’m “filling in the blanks” from old photographs (the brain is funny that way…implanting a fake memory is pretty easy it turns out)

People have told me that that’s a reaction to childhood trauma, but since I’m kind of stupidly good at holding useless trivia in my brain, I just think I pushed it all out to make room for random facts about ancient history and star trek lore.

Yes, both.

• I’ve always been bad at remembering who I met or what we talk about
• I can doom scroll for hours without recalling anything of note
• when things are hectic the daily details disappears
• ask me a technical question and I’ll vomit entire manuals at you

Hey do you dissociate a lot? My dissociation ruins my memory in a way very similar to yours. This questionnaire can kind of give you a guideline on how much dissociation you may have
http://traumadissociation.com/des

Mostly spatial. I can often find a passage in a book by where it was located on the page (I hate audiobooks and ebooks for this reason). I can’t remember a lot of my experiences later, unless someone can tell me where I was or what I might have been looking at. I’ll probably remember exactly where everyone was standing, but not what any of us said. Sometimes I wonder if I lost my eyesight if I would still be able to make memories at all.

Longish term cannabis dependency chiming in - not great.

I have repeatedly described my memory as ‘an etch a sketch held by a Parkinson’s patient’.

If I need to remember something then it’s terrible. If I never need to remember it then it’s burned into my brain and can be retrieved with zero effort and without even knowing how I learned it. Maybe I’m one of them idiot savants.

If you need someone to remember completely useless trivia like Pokémon type matchups and the years of video game releases, I’m your guy.

If you want me to remember what I ate yesterday, I couldn’t tell you. If you want me to remember what cities I visited on my trip to Europe two years ago, I’d literally have to look at my notes; the specifics of my autobiographical memory, even for major events, quickly dissolve into a blur of impressions and images.

Once my boss, looking for someone to blame for some infraction, asked me “Did you work yesterday?” I couldn’t recall what I’d done the day before, so I started to “umm” while I thought about the schedule and tried to remember if I’d already had my days off that week, but I couldn’t bring it to mind… so I had to admit that I didn’t know. My boss said, disbelieving, “You don’t remember if you worked yesterday!?” I said, “You know, the days all blur together…” and he just shook his head and walked off to bother someone else.

The more unique a bit of knowledge is, plus the more interesting it was at the time, multiplied by how frequently you have thought about it since, is basically the formula for the strength of a memory. So a relatively uninteresting thing, you have done some minor variation of hundreds of times and haven’t really thought about since, is gonna take alot of effort to willfully recall. You would need some sorf of trigger to easily recall it, as triggering a memory is a much more powerful way to recall it.

You are normal, as you get older, even just early adulthood, more and more of your life will feel that way in hindsight. You don’t do as many super memorable things as you used to, and you just have more and more stuff packed into your brain. Makes it harder for individual memories to compete, more and more of them will just fade out as unimportant things you don’t prioritise remembering, or even recording in the first place.

You probably have heard people older than you remark that life goes by faster and faster as we get older, this is mostly the cause of that feeling. Obviously, time is moving the same speed, you are just making fewer important memories worth recalling.

If you went to a concert this week, you would probably have an easier time remembering what day it was, or what the drive to and from it was like. But if the whole week was TV shows, videogames and meals primarily designed to be thrown together for sustenance, none of it will be super memorable.

You can technically put effort into remembering even mundane stuff, just focus on it more as you are doing it, and repeatedly practice recalling it as you go. It might be a fun exercise for a week just to prove you can do it if you want to. But it would be alot of effort to keep up for longer. If you are otherwise happy with how things are going, no real need to change though. And if you do want things to be more memorable, find ways to do more unique things that you have an interest in and that are worth spending time thinking about afterward too.

Edit: me personally, As with most people in this thread, I have a very good long term memory, but a very bad working memory, and almost no willful recall, I generally leave visible reminders or set alarms for stuff I need to remember “tomorrow”. If someone asks me to do something, and I don’t do it within 15 seconds, I won’t recall that I was asked unless something triggers the memory. So I generally do stuff right away, but I am also easily distracted. And I don’t always remember that I need to warn people to re-ask me if it has been a minute or so and I didn’t do it, but I have slowly gotten better as it works into my rote/routine memory to sequentially trigger that response based on the incoming cue. Needs to be more consistent to become rote.

And yeah, Autism for sure, ADHD probable but haven’t checked.

No joke, I opened this thread to comment on it last night and forgot until I saw it in my feed again today.

I started keeping a diary, and I found that helps. Something about writing things down helps encode memories, but then if you do forget you have a reminder.

In particular my gratitude journal is helpful. I often find myself in a state where I can’t think of a single good thing going on in my life. But then going through it I read about how a stray cat came to sit in my lap in the garden, and while I didn’t remember that before I read it the memories come flooding back.

I have very few memories unless something triggers them. I was worried about this so some years ago I started writing down what I did that day, every day, in the hope I would train my memory to remember things.

I make a new text file each day with the date and have about 6 years’ worth of them.

In case you’re wondering, my memory didn’t get any better but at least I can look up what I did if I forget. No joke this comes in handy more than you’d think.

BTW my armchair diagnosis is that my lack of memory is probably ADHD related.

My memory is pretty bad, I’m dyslexic and it affects my short term memory. So I take a lot of notes for things I need to do. If it isn’t written down it didn’t happen, or in my case won’t get done. My long term memory as a consequence is mostly big events and fun/bad stuff though I generally need a prompt to remember specifics. I usually have to check my phone if someone asks what I did last weekend and we are past Monday or Tuesday, I’ve slept since then you see.