Comment by mh0pe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mh0pe | Hacker News Reader

I have a near-photographic memory that's been tested as I grew up, and personally, it's a mixed bag.

I have a solid and clear recollection of the good, which is useful from a business management and engineering career perspective. Literature retains on the first pass, which is very useful in operations for manual/business requirements/security framework ingestion, and I don't need to keep a TODO list or agenda (but still do for transparency's sake to my reports and superiors). Having an excess of information readily available gives a lot of opportunity to drive impact, and has allowed me to move vertically in my career very quickly. There's a feedback loop of retaining information, which presents me as more qualified to offer support to my peers, which puts more people in my direction soliciting input and building a positive reputation. With that, I made leadership in my early twenties, and it feels like it took less effort than some others to get here, based on what I've heard from other people.

Unfortunately for me and I'm sure others, I've been through a lot, and all of that retains just as well. It's not an active decision to retain. I'm not going into much detail on those events, but I've encountered about a dozen substantially negative events in my life, and having the information for those who've needed it has been helpful when necessary. It's been empowering to revisit those moments from a different angle as I've worked through those challenges.

All in all, not to be too cliche, but it's both a gift and a curse, but one I'm grateful to have.

I had near-photographic memory through my adolescence. I had a bad mountain biking accident with a brain injury that took that and much of my short term memory function away (the short-term part has largely improved in the following decades).

I see the downsides. Before my accident I had a backlog of resentment events that I revisited internally very frequently. It may be the change in memory or my own maturity and change of perspective with age, but I can no longer remember those things that I held on to and resented so deeply, and I'm grateful for that. I think I still remember the real traumas, but a lot of what I forgot was just piddly stuff where I was lacking empathy for the other side's predicament.

I did have a hard time re-learning how to learn. I lost my stellar memory function in the summer between high school and college, and had never learned to study - I just reflected on what had already been presented instead. I had a very hard time figuring out how to study, and had a thing against taking notes (I felt it was better to be engaged with the lecture than trying to re-read it later). I started taking notes in graduate school because I couldn't keep up with many lectures and needed a way to walk through what had happened later.

I now takes notes obsessively. I keep a paper notebook at hand 100% of the time I'm working and every thought or follow up goes into it. I've developed a shorthand that makes this work seamlessly. Funny enough, I now distrust people that aren't taking notes when we're discussing importing things lol.

That said, I do miss the days of massive recall.

I too have a near photographic memory, and although I can feel it slightly decreasing with age, I experience all of the things you mention above.

One other downside I have had is that it can be enormously frustrating when you can remember conversations perfectly - word for word, exact tones, even the time, day, weather, clothing during the conversation, and you deal with people who say “I never said that”

It’s like actually, you bloody well did and I remember it exactly.

Then if I tell them I have perfect recall, and then say the conversation exactly, you said “x” and I said “y” and you said “z” like that - a verbatim reproduction of the conversation - suddenly Im the bad guy - nobody ever says sorry, they just argue more or debate interpretation.

I’ve been reading Cicros books and that has helped me with delivery and better social integration

But I do feel a definite pang of frustration and a burst of anger when people even forget that I have perfect recall!

Ok rant over

One positive of my memory has been remembering source code, I seem to have an easier job reading an entire codebase and keeping all the classes, interfaces and data structures in my working memory, so I seem to have a much faster ability to get started, and also I seem to be able to handle large refractors easier than other programmers - am I am enormously grateful for this gift, and know it’s largely luck that I have it and I try and help other programmers as much as I can - I’ll offer to do the large refractors or hunt down those weird, difficult bugs.

So yeah, like the poster above says, blessing and curse

When people say 'I never said that,' the reason why they're saying it is usually more important than the statement's veracity.

It’s usually an attempt at deception - malicious intent, ego protection, incompetence hiding, or more rarely pure stupidity or faulty memory.

I also find it’s symptomatic of many other psychological traits - impulsive liars, foggy thinkers, emotional flip-floppers, unwarranted extrapolators.

All code paths lead to the same conclusion for me : remember example type and decrement credibility

What are the titles of the Cicros books you mentioned?

Similar story; was tested in Grade 5. Question: Did anyone else in your family have it? My mother and grandfather did. I had a very weird, one might have said traumatic childhood (kidnapped; lived in truck; orphanage; bizarre family) so I can also so vividly remember these painful times. I thus got really into horror (made a feature film; wrote a book) for catharsis. Each detail in my work - from what I wore, the art in the room, the people I met - writing it out helped soothe? maybe is the word, the images. I also did years of therapy. The hardest part for me has been accepting that others cannot do this. I spent the first half of my life getting enraged at how careless everyone is. Further, raised in the 80s in traditional gender roles aka housekeeper/cleaner, I am tyrannized by disorder/mess/everything where it should be. I now realize that needing lists and forgetting each detail of a special event isn't cruel/selfishness. I am ashamed of how cruel I was to partners due to my solipsism. How has this effected your relationships? I can't say I'm grateful but more I respect what it is and how it can be useful and not detrimental to my relationships and all of our struggle to survive.

I definitely had a similar experience of not realizing my memory and recall was uncommon - and assuming the people in my life didn't care, rather than didn't recall. A number of times in my head the same experience played out:

"Of course I know what you wore on our third date and what you ordered. How couldn't I? It's important! Am I not as important to you as you are to me?"

Only after spending time and putting in the work with a partner who had their own memory issues did I actually bring this up to them and a therapist. I recall a conversation where I told them it was OK that they had forgotten what we ate on our first date or what I was wearing, because I didn't want to be resentful over unimportant things. The therapist asked me if I remembered most of our dates - where we went, what we wore, what we ordered, movies or shows we saw, etc. I remember being confused - of course I did! Who wouldn't?

My therapist explained that this was really uncommon, especially in the scale of years and decades. I had never considered it before that. It changed how I interacted with the world and I wish I had known sooner.

I am curious whether you have ever tried applying EMDR therapy, or something related, to your bad memories. I don’t have a photographic memory but I have a reasonably good one, and I found putting in the effort to just sort of … strip away the negative valence of bad memories to be a worthwhile project.

What does near-photographic mean? Can you replicate a page of text after looking at it for one second? Can you do the same with a language you don't know?

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