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Comment by havernator | Hacker News Reader

Middle aged here. Almost, but not quite, no autobiographical memory. Been that way since I was really young. So that’s fun.

Often I remember that something happened. Order gets wonky, even a week back. Sometimes I can kinda remember an image or a snippet, but not reliably. I gather most people hold on to a lot more than that.

Fine with facts and such. Never a problem in school.

I do have trouble remembering the names of characters and details of incidents in books I read, shows I watch, et c. Not as bad as my autobiographical memory, but not great.

And yeah, it’s frequently annoying for my wife, too.

“Tell me about a time when…” questions in interviews are interesting. I have to prep things from my notes ahead of time or I literally won’t be able to answer them. I’ll not be able to come up with a damn thing. The most stressful questions in elementary school were ones like “what did you do over summer break?”

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Same here. I've always had terrible personal memory since I was young, despite dramatic lifestyle and diet changes over time. Distinctive characters in fiction stick with me, but not order of events: I couldn't tell you anything useful about the plot details of my favorite films and books despite revisiting them many times.

It applies to short-term memory, too. I give myself very specific places to put things, because if I didn't I would lose track of my keys and wallet literally every day.

Weirdly enough, these issues don't seem to apply to logical or spatial memory at all, which is probably the only reason that I'm an effective programmer.

> Distinctive characters in fiction stick with me, but not order of events: I couldn't tell you anything useful about the plot details of my favorite films and books despite revisiting them many times.

I can usually slowly work my way back through a book, maybe with a couple prompts from someone else to help me piece it back together, but only for stuff I’ve read in the past few years. Farther back and it’s gone. Character names rarely stick. I did watch the Star Wars trilogy so much as a kid that I could replay it in my head, every frame, sound effect, and line, every cut perfectly timed. Not anymore, but that part of me’s not totally broken, I guess. I think I’m not far off average on that stuff, maybe a bit below.

> Weirdly enough, these issues don't seem to apply to logical or spatial memory at all, which is probably the only reason that I'm an effective programmer.

Yep, exactly that here, too.

We have really similar stories. I'm 32, never used drugs (since other comments were asking for that). It's really hard to explain to the people why you do not remember something, they will just assume that you do not remember because you don't care.

It's really hard to explain to the people why you do not remember something, they will just assume that you do not remember because you don't care.

The typical mind fallacy should be taught a lot earlier in school.

Can you visualize things in your mind as if they were physically in front of you? People with aphantasia cannot and they often can't remember visual events from the past as a result. Perhaps you have it too.

As someone else with similar issues, I'm pretty deeply aphantasic. The best mental visualization I can manage of even simple imagery (think "a red triangle on a black background") is roughly comparable to a half-transparent blurry watercolor, and I can't clearly picture faces at all (though I don't have any particular trouble with recognizing people when I see them).

Is that really aphantasia? I understood it to be the absolute absence of any mental imagery. Your description actually sounds similar to my own experience. I'm capable of summon up imagery with effort when I need to, but it's never very clear or frequent.

My visualization is somewhere between wireframes and chalkboard diagrams, usually closer to the later. Also have little autobiographical memory. I suspect I’m somewhat on the autism spectrum, but that wasn’t diagnosed much back in the 60’s when I was growing up.

Wait. You're telling me that you're supposed to be able to do so? I thought it was some mind hack that gives you the power to become an artist, not everyday stuff.

Interesting. Do you have dreams? Do you see things in “full 3D” there? When I’m awake I can visualize things but they definitely don’t have the full dream-like quality. I suspect it’s because so much brain “bandwidth” (not the right term) is going towards other stuff.

How can I tell if I am unable to do this? I think maybe I kind of can, but I have to focus really hard and it is a flickering image and I am not sure if I am actually imagining that I am imagining if that makes sense at all. Or the fact that I am not sure is already telling? I don't think I try to imagine anything in my daily regular life though.

Haha, exactly my thought! I can form a mental image (photo) in my mind, but how do I know others can "see" it similarly?

It's not very clear as I can't really see it in front of me, but it's in my head, and there's a different kind of "seeing" happening...

One evening I asked my 5yo daughter that when she imagines something in her head, does she see it almost like in real physical 3d? She said yes. I wouldn't say yes to that question. But again, it's so subjective...

I have terrible autobiographical memory- everything is out of order and I don’t know what happened last year or ten years ago. But at the same time I think mostly in images and visuals. If I want a fork the image of a shiny fork in my hand will flash in my mind but then sometimes I can’t think of the word for it and I’ll just say, I need the um, the ah, the thing, what is it called... while picturing it very clearly in my minds eye.

Yeah, seem to have middling abilities there.

I’m fairly normal in most other ways, mentally, with really high (tested) spatial reasoning, and a good-but-nothing-special (on HN, anyway) tested IQ.

Just badly deficient autobiographical memory.

I didn’t even realize there was anything wrong until my mid 20s. Turns out this is a relatively-recently-discovered disorder of some kind, and on reading accounts by people who have it, I was like “…oh.” Not super well studied, I think in part because it tends (incredibly!) not to actually impair living an OK life. You just don’t really remember it like a normal person does.

> Often I remember that something happened. Order gets wonky, even a week back. Sometimes I can kinda remember an image or a snippet, but not reliably. I gather most people hold on to a lot more than that.

Isn't this memory about your memory itself a pretty detailed autobiographical memory? Or is it that you can remember sort of templates and categories of things that happened but not a specific instance?

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