I thought everyone was like this? No one has a perfect memory. I’m sure it’s a very small slice of people who have their memories filed in a database like lookup system? Some memories stick, most don’t?
This is part of the classic debate around aphantasia – both sides assume the other side is speaking more metaphorically, while they're speaking literally. E.g., "Surely he doesn't mean he literally can't visualize things, he just means it's not as sharp for him." or "Surely they don't literally mean they can see it, they're just imagining the list of details/attributes and pretending to see it."
What I'm trying to say is that from his perspective, how he imagines people with more "normal" memory recall things, might be a bit exaggerated. He doesn't know what he's missing exactly so he might imagine it to be better than it really is. I'm not trying to say that everyone else is like me or that he's like me. Like if he can't imagine an apple in his mind at all and he hears other people can, he may imagine it's as clear as staring at an apple in real life or a picture of an apple on a computer screen, while the reality is somewhere in the middle. I do believe his claims about himself, but his claims about me or people like me don't seem entirely accurate.
I have these jarring social experiences where I encounter people who readily recognize me, refer to me by name, etc., and I have no idea who they are. Usually (although not always) they look vaguely familiar, so that I know I must have known them at some point, but they have essentially been erased from my mind. I cope with this by greeting them warmly and just faking it.
I am also absolutely terrible at remembering personal details from other people's lives, although I have great recall of scientific facts, figures and dates.
In general I feel like my past is about about three or four years long. I'm in my mid-forties and everything from before the pandemic feels like it happened a century ago. But I have no gauge on whether that is normal.
For me it also feels like pre-pandemic years were a lifetime ago, that life events around 2018/19 happened to someone else. But I don't think I have SDAM as I do have good recall for personal experiences, though it feels like it's getting weaker as I get older and the frequency of novel experiences wanes.
The other confounding factor is I moved to the opposite side of the world after completing my education, which meant a lot of those really foundational memories didn't get reinforced as much as they did for my peers. Because they got to hang out frequently and relive those tales together, while I felt them slipping away like sand from my fingers.
This is tricky, because the first couple people I think of are people who sort of "exist" in some sense online. Maybe I haven't seen them physically in 5-10 years, but I see their handle on a friends list or maybe I've messaged them in that time. I can remember things from back when I did see them in person, but perhaps their presence in some form since then has kept things more active. (Maybe they're more friends than acquaintances, admittedly it's hard for me to draw a line there without a clear definition)
I'm leaning toward "yes", though. I can remember old people who I fixed computers for once or twice and never really talked to again otherwise. They weren't related to me or anything, it was purely business, but I can remember things like them offering me a drink or asking certain questions or that they pronounced a word in an unusual way.
I believe this is the stuff people with aphantasia struggle with.
While its ok to have fictional memories for fun, I think this is disastrous for legal reasons.
Plus I do think memory recall is strong for a lot of people. Wanting retribution for harm done long back, or even life long trauma for bad things that happen to people early life is real.
I would describe this in terms of telling stories from childhood. Many people I know can spin a narrative around significant events from their childhood, as if they're living it again as they tell it. This is something media has taught me is the normal way of experiencing a memory. But for me, it's just a list of facts. I can tell you various bits about the time I got punched in the face as a child (second grade, his name, my telling him to "make me" before he did it, every teacher not believing I could have been partially at fault), but those are simply fact lookups in list form. Part of that is aphantasia sure, but the other part is the lack of an emotional memory. I don't remember how any of that made me feel, I can just assume based on context. If I felt anything other than what would have made the most sense in context, it's logged as a fact about the incident.
Sadly, that means I have very little actual memory of my childhood. It's mostly a list of incidents and some data points about the incidents. I don't have emotional core memories of my grandparents, just some events associated with them that I know happened, but can't relive.
Despite aphantasia, my autobiographical memory is a weird mixture of gaps and some very solid vignettes/moments where I remember a lot of detail. It's never a long-running scene. Many of these memories are pinned at some traumatic or surprising moment, but some seem to be much more mundane and yet somehow were recorded as if they were pivotal.
I have a pretty high ACE score. Ironically, some of my pivotal memories are meta-moments when I had a sudden veil lift from previously repressed memories. I'm remembering not the original traumatic moments, but the moment of realization that my memory had these decade-plus gaps or eras to it.
So we know that at least the people who claim to see nothing act differently. Could it just be that people who act differently describe the sensation differently, you might ask?
No, because there are actual cases of acquired aphantasia after neurological damage. These people used to belong to the group that claimed to be able to imagine visual images, got sick, then sought medical help when they could no longer visualize. For me, at least, that's pretty cut and dry evidence that it's not just differing descriptions of the same (or similar) sensations.
There is no possible way that anyone could honestly describe this experience as "I don't visualize," any more than someone with working ears could describe their experience as "I don't hear anything."