What It’s Like to Lose Your Short-Term Memory | Hacker News Reader

What It’s Like to Lose Your Short-Term Memory

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99 pointsiamjeff51 comments

Actually, it's exciting, pretty much like getting a new life after death. This really changes my attitude towards my life.

In the past 8 years, I have 2-4 grand mal epilepsy seizures each year. Happy to be still alive, haha. Every time after a seizure, I lost one small period of memory, about 10-30 minutes, it's amazing somehow, refreshing your brain like reinstalling the macOS and restarting, though it can also cause some depression because of deep fear for uncontrolled and unpredictable seizures.

After I get back my conscious gradually after a seizure, I can hardly call back the scenarios right before my brain blows up, I can only remember roughly what I was doing then, about 5-10 minutes before the seizure, and as babies, the first sight of the world when I get my conscious will leave very strong impression in my memory, extremely clear and cut.

Now I have not had a seizure for about a whole year, in fact, I miss it to some extent:-). On the other hand, I hope I will never have it until death.

You know, humans are always full of contradictions.

This is really interesting! I can imagine it might feel quite different if, rather than having a persistent ability to ever retain short-term memories, you lost a small period every few months.

The author's experience seems quite different from yours, though, and I can imagine she might disagree with your evaluation that "Actually, it's exciting".

Yeah bro, that's right, it's not so exciting for me at all at first, but actually I have to accept all those stuff in my life anyway, I am glad that I finally reach here. Thanks!

I've had a couple of seizures over the last 5 years, and have the same experience you describe. I hate it though, I feel like a child :(. The last time it happened, my wife was around, so I felt somewhat comfortable asking her to walk me through what happened.

Stay safe buddy, and please take your meds!

Oh yeah, thanks, you know exactly what I am talking about, great. I have covered every inch of the floor and desk in my room with soft plastic mats and blankets, also wrapped the angles of all hard articles up with soft and thick clothes. Keeping everything around me soft and safe makes my nerves comfortable and relaxed. Hope you become better too!

This is a fascinating perspective, thank you for sharing.

I had this happen to me when I got into a motorcycle accident.

I know I did things, I have the proof and screenshots of calling people 15 times every 5 minutes. But I can't for the life of me remember it at all. It is... weird gaining consciousness piece by piece. Eventually I remember the blackness washing away with me walking through a door (note, couldn't see it just felt it). And eventually other senses returning to my conscious self.

I'm now of the opinion that without memory, we do not exist as conscious beings.

My first memory post accident as a conscious human, is "hi cat, how are you, were you wanting me to die so you could eat my nose? also who's cat is this and where the hell am I?" Before that colors and sounds and feelings were all... jumbled.

I fell off my skateboard and landed right on my bum. I don't remember much about it, just a profound shock. Like something bad had happened.

I tried to walk home but ended up walking down a curved lane. Part way down the lane there was a gate that I had already walked past, I was confused, but realised that I needed to turn around and just keep walking. Then I'd see the gate and realise that I had got confused and turned around. So I'd walk down the curved lane without turning. But I'd reach the gate again and have to turn around and walk without turning.

My friends found me some hours later. Walking and crying.

My spine had been shoved up into my brain. Something had got jiggled around. I had lost around three years of memories and my short term memory was confused.

It came back. Oh, the wonder at when it came back and I was living in two times at the same time. I was two ages. My younger self could ask my older self about the future, old me would hand memories down to young me. Like TV pictures.

It has always felt like I have a rotten bit or a bruised bit (like an apple) inside my brain. Smells or feelings will trigger mild panic. I dream of that lane. And walking. I can poke at the broken bits of my memory. I don't want to dive into them, but I know enough now to poke around the edges. I can write the story down without feeling too much about it. Like an old hard drive that sort of knows where the bad sectors are.

Brains are weird. Meat that thinks.

In addition to short and long term memory, there is the thought-emotion-action-observation feedback cycle. That you performed purposeful high level actions while being unable to form episodic memories demonstrates that the feedback cycle was still operative and you were experiencing some level of consciousness, though it obviously was not the same level you're used to while being sober and fully awake. The approach of treating consciousness as not binary, but operating within a range, is not new; see the Glasgow Coma Scale[1] and the Erowid experience vaults[2] (though the latter is obviously highly unscientific) for further documentation.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Coma_Scale

[2]https://erowid.org/experiences/

Cool, thanks for the links!

While I won't argue that I wasn't "conscious", I'll argue for all intents and purposes, I wasn't conscious at that time. My buddy said I'd basically completely forget everything after 5 minutes, and we would have the same conversation over and over again.

Its disconcerting to say the least to find out just how fragile consciousness is.

So who's cat was it?

Heh, sorry, was the buddy I called 15 times girlfriends cat.

My mom had a stroke a few years back and somehow she lost the ability to turn short-term memory into long-term memory. She remembered the first part of the day very well but didn't know what was happening to her. Every time I explained, she would remember it for several minutes and then we had to start anew as if her RAM was powered off. Luckily she made a full recovery in a matter of days.

There's actually strong evidence now that both short term and long term episodic memory and encoded at the same time (immediately) by separate systems, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6333/73 It's just that, when things are working right, long term memory only becomes consciously accessible days later.

Perhaps, but it felt like what was missing was somewhere in the middle and that something worked like dumping your RAM onto your hard drive. Dumps kept failing and the brain rebooted. Fascinating now but super scary back then.

Apparently, per WP, "Tarnow shows that the recall probability vs. latency curve is a straight line from 6 to 600 seconds (ten minutes), with the probability of failure to recall only saturating after 600 seconds."[1]

So it seems reasonable that, indeed, the "short-term" store was functioning, but the long-term was failing to encode, and the loss occurred as the "short-term" store faded.

Regardless, I'm glad it was transient.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_memory, which cites http://cogprints.org/4273/1/The_structure_of_short_term_memo...

This seemed unrelated to short term memory but maybe I am misreading.

"There are no images flashing through my head reminding me of the first time I ate a hamburger, or all the barbecues I’ve attended, or the time after marching in the Rose Parade that I ate Burger King because Burger King gave out free burgers to participants at the end of the route. No. There is just blank space. There is chewing. Swallowing. The end of hunger."

I think they may have forgotten how people eat burgers. I don't think anyone has flashbacks of their previous burgers while eating their current one. That sounds really odd in general.

People won't generally have flashbacks to "normal" instances of eating or doing something, but may to something that's particularly emotionally charged. When eating a grilled chicken sandwich with a particular flavor combination, I have strong specific recollections of a first date with a woman who I really wanted it to work out with. But I won't have any sort of recollection (without effort and searching on my part) of other instances of eating grilled chicken sandwiches. Not just with foods, either. Performing certain actions, like swinging a sledge hammer or axe, brings me back to certain specific moments in my life of performing manual labor with people I cared about (really good friends at the time) that I haven't seen or heard from in years (pre-Facebook, several major moves for all of us and we just got disconnected). It doesn't happen every time, but it happens.

People have different levels of internal dialogue, and different experiences of picturing things in their minds.

So someone not experiencing flashbacks might just be that they're not the kind of person who has those flashbacks even with strong triggers.

Aphantsia has been mentioned a few times on HN. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34039054

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894

If you're cooking, Kaizen is the only path.

If you're not cooking, you're probably just too young. I can distinctly remember a couple burgers right before or after "major life events" often when the local population increased or decreased by one. I wouldn't recommend fast food as a significant fraction of a diet, but a good excuse for using the drive thru is returning home from the delivery room or a funeral too tired or not in the mood to cook. Or the last time I saw someone was the party at the park where traditional fare such as grilled burgers was probably served, great uncle Tony's last family reunion picnic was at age 82 and he was doing really good right up to the end.

If you eat junk food every day it makes it less special. I'm sure I drank water the day my father died; of course I drink water every day. I eat a mostly healthy diet most of the time so junk food usually involves something memorable.

I'm also older, so nostalgic about back in the old days when Americans were mostly thin and non-diabetic, back when mom and dad only got us that new "Mcdonalds" stuff for a very special occasion ... Kids these days who are 300 pounds from eating mcdonalds 2 or 3 times daily will never associate fast food with special events the way gen-x and older people associated it. In 1980 McDonalds burger meant you were in the back of the station wagon for 8 hour road trip to visit grandma for surprise birthday or mom didn't feel like cooking dinner after grandpas funeral. In 2010 your average 400 pound american eats fast food every day, supposedly. Just like we're told over and over we all watch 16 hours per day of TV on average, by people who make money selling TV ad time, even when we don't know anyone who watches that much.

Right, the frequency of the correlated events (eating the burger at the family reunion in your case) matters. Taking my physical labor example, I did crossfit for a bit (well, crossfit-lite). They had us swinging a sledgehammer, certainly not something I do every day. So my first few times doing it I had strong recollections of my earlier experiences doing manual labor with friends (scouts and, later, work). But as I continued with the class, those recollections became less frequent because the activity became more common (or the recollections didn't stick because there was no longer a one-off flash of recollection, but a frequent recurring recollection that diluted the impact).

I recently read "I Forgot To Remember" which is about Su Meck, a woman who had a ceiling fan fall on her head, which led to her forgetting the last 22 years of her life. It was a fascinating read, but also pretty heartbreaking.

i am in a bit similar position, phone calendar reminders dating back to 90s ruined my short term memory (by effectively using them fo everything) to that effect that if I plan to open some website I must do it immediately when I hav this thought, otherwise in 15-20s it's gone and I might be pissed I was postponing it for later and started to think about something else, you really don't wanna see my calendar reminders, it would look like someone who should have some proper disability welfare, though thanks to stereotype I can get by with most of the things without actual reminders with daily routine

the worst thing is shower - away from mobile, need to keep repeating keywords of all thoughts like mantra to quickly write them down upon leaving shower

Wait, there are people who remember things from their showers!? If that's normal, then there is something wrong with me, too.

Consider a shower whiteboard?

I have a similar problem. Often when reading my twitter timeline I will think to do some action based on a tweet, then keep scrolling and forget what it was. I would have to scroll back a few tweets to remember what that thought was.

shower whiteboard is interesting idea, though maybe it would be more practical to have waterproof phone or at least Bluetooth headset with some assistant in phone, i don't spend that much time in shower to justify installation of whiteboard and i am also not exactly on brink of revolutionary intervention that my thoughts would be that valuable

as your help with going back, that sadly for me works very rarely anymore, is bigger odds that the thought will suddenly appear later when not thinking about it anymore, though i don't risk any of this and now just immediately follow new thought without postponing, I guess you could say I developed ADD thanks to progress in mobiles technology and internet, if it's possible to develop it, i used to be avid reader of books, but nowadays have problem to focus even on longer article, having child ruined even my movie watching experience, when because if limited time i FFWD scenes without talking and other filler to shorten runtime of movie, this coming from guy who was considering destroying Christmas decoration on public street because it was in my vision field when watching movie going through blinds

My lacking (medium-term?) memory is what motivated me to created this highly efficient personal organizer, which really helps: http://onemodel.org ...though probably not fully for the level of issues described in the article. But it still helps me tremendously.

I feel like I have very bad "mid-term" memory.

I have no problem reading long sentences, and my long-term memory is just fine. But I feel like my brain just forgets things too soon. If I were to speak in front of people about 3 things, by the time I get to the 2nd thing I'd forget what the 3rd is. If I try to learn some non-trivial new concept, like blockchain or coroutine, I understand it just fine, at the time I learn it. But if someone asks me about it after maybe 2 weeks, I'd have no clue and would need to re-learn it.

This also has a pretty big impact on my day-to-day life. I have a very bad sense of direction and suck at navigation, partly because I tend to forget the buildings and landmarks I see. If I take a one-word note in the morning, 30% of time I'll forget what it's about at night.

My mother had an episode of transient global amnesia [1] that lasted for about 12 hours. It was the strangest thing. For those 12 hours, both her short- and long-term memory were almost completely impaired. It was terrifying when we thought it might be a stroke, but once the whole differential diagnose was done and we realized it was probably just TGA, we knew we just had to ride it out.

We spent the few couple hours answering the same round of question for her about once every minute. She'd occasionally get really scared and upset, but then she'd forget what she was upset about! We'd ask her questions and she remembered the most basic autobiographical details (married, 3 kids), but just about nothing else. We'd ask, "where did you go to college?" and she'd say, "I went to....I...don't know!" Obviously, pretty disturbing, but we just had to trust it was temporary.

Eventually, the duration of forgetfulness started extending, and then by night, she said it was like a fog was lifted, and she could remember again.

As described in the Wikipedia page, she hasn't experienced any aftereffects, other than not remembering much of that particular day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_global_amnesia

My mother experienced the exact same issue while I was attending college. It was preceded by an intense migraine the night before (including vomiting). She called me early that morning very confused why she wasn't at school (she was a teacher). She didn't remember the night before, or why she had stayed home, or where my dad was (he had left for work). I was seriously alarmed, but she had no other impairments other than her memory. She was lucid, had clear speech, etc.

I eventually pieced everything together (my dad is a doctor and he diagnosed her over the phone). I then spent the rest of the day on the phone with her, answering the same cycle of questions. I eventually had her start writing those questions and answers down, but she kept losing the paper! Eventually we moved it to the fridge, and a close friend of hers was with her.

Similarly, it lasted about 24 hours, eventually faded, and had no adverse after effects. It truly was like Memento, though. Definitely one of the more surreal medical issues I've been exposed to.

Whats it like? Get some Ambien from the doctor and you'll know.

This is a crazy good article! I've always been fascinated by my recent inability to learn new programming languages and concepts and I believe it could be due to the concept expounded in Lee's article: no short-term memory building, no long-term recall.

I doubt I've suffered minor strokes but I think our lives simulate strokes on the short term memory recall by sheer overwhelming schedules and commitments. Our daily schedules are possibly a simulator of short term memory recall impairment.

That sounds a lot like stress. Maybe you need to take a break or shift down a gear or two?

Thanks friend! Without a doubt.

The guilt though of taking time off is also a paradoxical contributor to existing stress.

I know that feeling. I get stressed thinking about all the work building up in my absence. But in the end I've never regretted saying NO or saying WAIT!

How fragile we humans are! Things we're taking for granted and we're hardly noticing, like short-term memory, turn out to be a gift we should appreciate every day.

If you want to understand what that feels like, you have to smoke a strong joint. A friend almost lost his mind in panic because he worried this effect might persist.

LSD+THC is much worse. It's a common n00b fail. And really not much fun, in my opinion. THC rather pollutes the trip. But at least, you know that it's transient. Sometimes, though, it's helpful to have a friend around, who can remind you that you've just done some drugs.

I never understood people who loved this combination. Horrible mix, brings out the worst of both drugs.

I think this needs a very strong YMMV disclaimer.

Salvia is much more effective and only lasts ten minutes.

And from what I've heard (from friends who've tried it) has a much higher chance of being not fun at all.

Definitely true if you're a control freak. It's an extremely intense experience that requires care and an open mind. Senses go haywire and time warps for a few minutes.

Is it similar to getting heavily drunk and then keeping asking the same question because you can't remember having asked it?

It's exactly like the Christopher Nolan film Memento starring Guy Pearce. ;-)

In Memento, the main character had short term memory, but it would not form new memories. His window of awareness seemed to be on the order of 10 or 15 minutes. The author of the article describes not being able to even read a paragraph because the start was forgotten by the time she reached the end.

I watched Memento for the umpteenth time tonight.

Lenny!

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