Total recall: the people who never forget (2017)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This can be even more upsetting to my wife when she’ll be discussing some special event, or something with the kids, and I’m like, “sorry, I don’t have anything to add bc I don’t remember it at all.” Hell, I barely remember our wedding.
The upside is that I’m one of the most “live in the present” people you’ll meet, without a lot of comparison to how things used to be, this is so much worse, etc. And those cringey things, and painful things, … they fade remarkable quickly. After some mortifying foot-in-mouth event I tell myself, “the edge will be off this by tomorrow, and you’ll probably forget it completely by next week”, and things are better!
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181112-severely-deficie...
When I do recall something, it’s never visual, and this lack of fidelity seems to play a big part in the richness of the memory. It also seems to allow painful memories to fade more quickly, and I’ve long suspected this is related to CPTSD but in any case, it seems like a blessing and a curse.
I’m the opposite when it comes to photos though. I took up photography and journal about moments I want to remember. I do remember feeling unnerved by photos I don’t remember early on, but with time, this changed into something closer to periodic reminders that I’ve lived some great moments, even if those moments don’t make it into my everyday consciousness.
I have a generally good memory, but a whole lot of stuff happened at the wedding, and it was a long day and a late night. I remember bits and pieces here and there, but I remember a lot more about the planning and preparation than of the event itself.
A bit sad, but as you say, I think I live in the moment and I'm generally quite happy. I don't remember many of those cringey and painful things (whereas my partner has well above-average autobiographical memory and is always replacing those cringey moments in her head). I still take photos and enjoy looking at them, to see all the fun stuff I've done :)
When I introspect about this I feel like because these things are discrete, they’re easier to place into a category, or relate to some other fact. But experiences are a mass of sensory and emotional “data” that doesn’t cleanly get associated. Or that’s at least how it feels.
Somewhat related is how the whole “memory palace” techniques fail completely for me. I can barely come up with the outlandish visuals, and even if I do, I don’t remember what they are, so it’s a useless system for me.
Which is what I'd recommend to you, if you'd like to have some of that memory. I go through phases where I'm a lot better about journaling my life as it's happening, and I tend to remember those more easily (or go 'oh yeah!' when I reread them). But I also like taking pictures to help me remember, which it sounds like you explicitly don't.
I've been using the vacation we just got back from yesterday to get back into the habit of writing a journal, and I still need to write up the last few days, and will need to soon because it will fade fast.
I thought that other people had much better memories than I did, because they always were able to tell such great stories. But I rarely tell my own stories, meanwhile some of these people that seem to have great stories I hang out with them and realize they're telling the same stories over and over again, to just about everyone they meet. I suspect the telling of those stories so many times is helping keep those memories alive. If you don't share them somewhere (at least to a journal), the memories wither and die.
Unless you're someone with a photographic memory, of course.
This is very interesting. This seems like a learnable ability of sorts? The text states that while she had good memory she actively tried to build memories of her world before the family moved. After that episode she was like this.
[1] https://www.podgist.com/wtf-marc-maron/episode-1058-marilu-h...
No relation with this particular condition though.
Total recall: the people who never forget - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30391218 - Feb 2022 (2 comments)
Signed, never quite grasp the repost guidelines.
Are reposts ok?
If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
Please don't delete and repost the same story. Deletion is for things that shouldn't have been submitted in the first place.
Let me take another run at it.
You flagged this post (Total Recall: the people who never forget) as a repeat or repost. But the FAQ for reposts allows for reposts that didn't get a lot of attention and/or are older than a year. The duplicate older post you quote didn't get a lot of attention and is older than a year.
So wondering why you flagged it as a repost?
Listing "related" links is just because readers enjoy looking at old comments on the same topic. It's there to enhance the site for curious readers and there's no implicit reproach for the repost—on the contrary!
Does that help?
(There was a time maybe 10 years ago when people tried to do something called "new games journalism" basically imitating him, and it was mostly just embarrassing for everyone involved, because normal people can't construct a review of something entirely out of personal anecdotes.)
Before my own ADHD diagnosis and treatment my hyperfocus used to kick in at the most random times and it often lead me to spend far too much time on tangential or superfluous tasks or topics. My medication allows me to channel the hyperfocus into more productive directions, but it still happens when it happens.
It's a lot like the myth of Cassandra -- doomed to be able to foretell the future, but nobody believed her. Doomed to remember the past, but nobody ever believes you. Everyone is 100% committed to their own version of the past that lives in their head.
What's the advantage?
This is a misunderstanding of the situation. Even if there's a record of the old conversation, the boss wants something else now, and you're judged on doing what the boss wants, regardless of if that's consistent. It isn't great if you have an inconsistent boss, but a paper trail wouldn't help much.
Hey this is me. Any particular smell, certain ways light illuminate a surface or environment, the way my arm accidentally scrapes something, the way a person speaks, even certain sounds in traffic, will launch me back into a random memory reel. I have an impossible time being "present" because half of me is walking through some memory of the past with great detail. It's like nostalgia on steroids.
Reminding other people of things isn't as bad as the true confabulists though, you're right in that regard - it's not even intentional, your brain just fills in the gaps, I know, but it still feels like being gaslit a little bit.
The thing that helped me cope and move on with my life was realizing that nobody lives in the past like this with me. They forget and move on, but I'm the only one keeping that little bubble of reality alive inside of me. It's like being the last player in a video game dungeon -- when you exit the game, the dungeon despawns.
It turns out our day-to-day realities with other people are extremely mutable. The vast majority of humanity does not cling to an excruciatingly objective past reality, it's much fuzzier for them. In a way, you can sort of just pretend you belong and join them in that weird fuzzy changeable world they live in. The rules are made up, and the points don't matter, to quote from the popular American/British gameshow "Whose Line is it Anyway?".
Do average people recall the details from each of the 500 meetings they had last year?
Gambling with cards is an obvious field. I've also worked with programmers who seemed to remember every bit of code they'd come across and that was a huge advantage (although it's a bit disconcerting when someone remembers your code better than you do).
financial goals would not rank high. If I could remember every single thing I see, I would rather become a lawyer or a doctor where I would be able to have a much higher advantage over others and that would automatically solve any financial problems. If I had a superpower, I would use it to help people as a career path because gambling would get boring real soon as the money aspect of it would just disappear in a week or so (assuming any place allows you in twice).
This is like the one where people who win the lottery become happy for a very short time but very soon after that they either go back their baseline happiness or worse, become depressed.
Running a (perhaps specialized) bookstore seems more fun.
This is an interesting framing of the question. As someone with a bad memory, I definitely like the idea that it's not entirely a weakness.
Nothing else really matters, not even winning. As long as you don't steal from your clients.
Someone who can perfectly recall a whole medical book does not make him/her a great doctor. Same for lawyers or any other "bookworm" professions.
But to answer your question, I would think a politician. You will look smart and in debates you can always recall your opponents voting history, statements,...
The same would apply to being a journalist. Being a Jake Tapper or similar who remembers everything someone ever said could make you an incredible interviewer.
I am a bit surprised not finding any reference to Lauria's book.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-mystery-of-s...
I'm a programmer instead. School sucks when people don't understand why you don't need to study, and try to make you do it anyway. I remember essentially every line of code I've ever worked on, though, which can be an asset or a challenge depending - JScript version five is still knocking around in my brain somewhere, confusing my usage of modern Javascript.
Yet, after som prodding questions directed them to find a certain source file, an "if" at around line so-or-so in a 10k line (spaghetti, in my opinion) source file, make a single change, recompile and test. Of course, it worked.
That anecdote changed my understanding of his code. To me, it was badly written, unstructured and so on. (And it was.) But what use is structure and order if you can keep all of it in your head at the same time?
I lose track after a weekend, I need the order.
One way I've used my ability in the past is that, for example, I can just read libraries or documentation and remember them, possibly better than the author does. I've done that for several major and minor versions of Rails, all historical now, but it gave me a significant edge at the time.
On the other hand, as I mentioned, that also means there's a disturbing amount of obsolete information muddying the waters - another commenter here mentioned that he has a hard time distinguishing between his recollections of his own voice vs other people's, in his memories, and that is much how it operates for me - Was that documentation valid for Postgres 7.6, 9.6 or 14.6?
In my view, it would have been better to just spend time to refactor, until anybody in the team would be able to understand it.
That episode reinforced the belief in me that KISS is the best approach in writing code. I try not to write "smart" code but simple, easy to understand, so I can go on vacation or change projects without being constantly dragged into the same codebase.
The problem is with these programmers is that they can very easily work with big, complex spaghetti code bases, so they will rarely take the time to organize their code base in a modular way. Because they can easily fit the whole project in their memory, they don't see the value in make a project modular so you only have to think about a small part of it.
One of the most satisfying feelings in the world is when someone has a Weird Error and you can point them to the exact spot in some complicated framework code that's responsible for the trouble they're having.
>From Wikipedia's article on Eidetic memory's prevalence:
According to Herman Goldstine, the mathematician John von Neumann was able to recall from memory every book he had ever read. [15]
Referring to Page 167 of Goldstine's The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann
As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover he could do it years later without hesitation.
He then goes on with a story about him challenging von Neumann to tell how a particular book's first chapter started with and JVN being able to recite it flawlessly.
The same section of the Wikipedia article starts with the following sentence
Eidetic memory is typically found only in young children, as it is virtually nonexistent in adults
Now , extraordinary does little favor in describing von Neumann's mental capabilities and scientific contributions but I think Goldstine's claims are bold even for someone like him. There are many more anecdotes about his abilities and, indeed, there are people who have savant skills, however even the ones who have had those skills "over-developed" performed significantly below average in other cognitive tasks. That makes the story about Von Neumann even less plausible, considering he was a polymath.
Finding a source disputing Goldstine's claims about von Neumann is obviously not the answer one should be looking for however it would be interesting to discuss, from a neuroscientific point of view, if it's really probable that the human brain can store such large amounts of information.
That makes the story about Von Neumann even less plausible, considering he was a polymath.
it is corroborated by other people who knew him
If this type of impressive autobiographical recall is both semantic and sensory-perceptual then this must be many terabytes of data packed away safely in synapses.
I’m was pretty sure I could be socked away a a virtual system given a few gigabytes. Now I am not so sure.
Not being able to recall long term memories does not mean that those memory traces/engrams are not embedded somewhere permanently in synaptic circuits and being used for processing in ways other than “mere” recall.
86 billion neurons. 100 trillion synapses.
I’ve meet people with great memories. They can have a tendency to become bitter that the world keeps making the same mistakes or the conclusion they drew 30 years ago was correct and paned out exactly as they predicted.
Me, I already blissfully forgot.
It certainly could be an evolutionary trait, that gets activated in the modern era because of stress. Pure speculation on my part here, though. I would love to read an actual study with real data about these phenomena.