I feel like I have this. Can’t remember anything from the past, but my spouse remembers exactly every tiny detail from years ago.
I can remember old Win32 C APIs and details like DDX that I haven't used in 20 years, but I frequently make gaffes with my wife, not remembering things that are important to her.
I can remember the paper, pages and formatting of old Sam's and Wrox technical manuals, I can visually recall the exact shade of blue of the old DOS Borland C compiler, and the look and feeling of the pages in favorite books I read as a teenager.
But my wedding is just a series of fragmented images all mixed up with outher things.
I remember the night my wife and I met only in "narrative form".
She, on the other hand, can remember events like that in crystal detail, she can describe everyone that was there, what they were wearing, etc...
I read this study with a sense of comfort, nice to know it's not just me.
Based on some of the comments here, I think it would be interesting to see if this sort of thing is a trend with different sexes.
And no need to ask me the name of my best friends/girl friends etc during my teenagehood -earlier, just blank.
Yes, I am actually pretty good at other brain stuff. Software and design and such. Good at concentration.
And there's that "absent minded professor" archetype to consider.
On the third hand, working outside in this heat can bake the brains right out of your head.
Low stress, mental load low and mostly oriented towards people, and good diet and exercise and I’ll be able to remember almost every moment and recall and integrate it into a coherent narrative quite easily.
Mental load high and focused on abstract deep concepts? Higher anxiety? Less exercise and not as good nutrition?
Where am I, and who are you?
Yea it's called being a man. Biologically speaking men statistically have far fewer connections between the two halves of their brain. Your wife basically has a gigabit link between her two halves while you're on 56k, which contributes to the intensity of her integrated story-telling experience. On one hand this often gives women better recall, but it also generally enables men to ignore intense experiences better (i.e. easier to block out the cross-chatter) and soldier forward.
> Yes, I am actually pretty good at other brain stuff.
The results establish that male brains are optimized for intrahemispheric and female brains for interhemispheric communication. -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3896179/
I assume I have aphantasia, and I have bad episodic memory -- so to me linking the two makes sense. However, I don't remember (hah!) if the study linked above was able to establish that link as well.
My capability for creating visual scenes is great, I really enjoy books because of the vivid scenes they paint in my mind.
My visual memory of events is often literally fuzzy and in the third person(out of body, spectating myself in the scene).
I’ve often wondered if the two are connected.
That being said, I only have visual aphantasia, so it may be that remembering these peoples' voices or what places smelled and sounded like may be helping those memories.
I dated someone without aphantasia who was amazed at my childhood recall compared to her own. It turned out she later discovered she had SDAM.
My hypothesis is that when people with high mental image visualization recall an event, they are re-experiencing it in a sense, and therefore reinforcing its details (or details as remembered, at least!). A person with aphantasia recalling that event does not re-experience it in a way that triggers this feedback loop, not as efficiently or completely at least.
I have very detailed memory about facts, places that I've been and seen, including spatial models; but how many times I've visited a place, who I was with on which trip, which events occurred on which visit, these details quickly become obscured and lost.
“Cause you don’t care!”