I’d say… wait, what was the question?

If you need someone to remember completely useless trivia like Pokémon type matchups and the years of video game releases, I’m your guy.

If you want me to remember what I ate yesterday, I couldn’t tell you. If you want me to remember what cities I visited on my trip to Europe two years ago, I’d literally have to look at my notes; the specifics of my autobiographical memory, even for major events, quickly dissolve into a blur of impressions and images.

Once my boss, looking for someone to blame for some infraction, asked me “Did you work yesterday?” I couldn’t recall what I’d done the day before, so I started to “umm” while I thought about the schedule and tried to remember if I’d already had my days off that week, but I couldn’t bring it to mind… so I had to admit that I didn’t know. My boss said, disbelieving, “You don’t remember if you worked yesterday!?” I said, “You know, the days all blur together…” and he just shook his head and walked off to bother someone else.

I have very few memories unless something triggers them. I was worried about this so some years ago I started writing down what I did that day, every day, in the hope I would train my memory to remember things.

I make a new text file each day with the date and have about 6 years’ worth of them.

In case you’re wondering, my memory didn’t get any better but at least I can look up what I did if I forget. No joke this comes in handy more than you’d think.

BTW my armchair diagnosis is that my lack of memory is probably ADHD related.

I’m probably wrong but:

Check your house for Carbon Monoxide.

Memory is associative. I have a really, really good memory, but it’s mostly because I know how to exploit that associativity.

If you asked me what I did for the last two weeks, I’d have to find “anchor” memories to relate to other memories. E.g., I remember a conversation at work on Friday, which I know was the result of a thing I did earlier that day, which I had talked about doing on Thursday, etc. I can reconstruct things, but part of that is “digging” through memories to find anchor points.

Every time I eat, I forget what I last shit. Every time I shit, I forget what I last ate. It’s a very simple system called FIFO (First In First Out). Very low memory requirements…

I tend to remember what I need when I need it, to the point where it’s creeped out my friends.

In high school I was talking to my friend and over the phone I hear his dad asking where his favorite cup is and I remember that 2 weeks prior when I was over I briefly saw it in the top left cabinet over their stove, so I told him.

It was still there.

Kind of bit me in the butt though because his dad became uncomfortable and didn’t let him invite me over anymore, lol.

I have the most minmaxed memory of anyone I know.

I can’t remember faces. Names. Barely remember people. Events? Psssh. My coats go missing. Jackets, hats, scarves, you bet I need to attach stuff to myself and keep a gruesomely detailed calendar.

But in school, I could remember concepts really well. Not individual facts, mind you, but concepts. So I had to learn in this sort of concept-first way to “guess” what the individual facts were. I don’t remember the name of the dinner I ate last night but I knew stats geometrically/sum-ly enough to re-guess the formulas I needed to know. History classes definitely got weird with this minmax though.

Tbf I think this style is actually an emerging phenomenon. Salman Khan spoke of an “inventing math” type of learning, and 3 Blue 1 Brown and that one MIT prof forgot his name made a brilliant repetoire for geometrically/conceptually training linear algebra. Makes me wonder what pedagogy will be like in two or four decades. Hopeful c:

Stress can wreck memory.

I am not great with faces, apparently, because people recognize me but I don’t recognize them, a lot. Like, no shit the FedEx guy bringing stuff to my work recognized me from grade school. Some people are REALLY good at recognizing people.

In general I’d say I am much better at figuring things out, than remembering them, and it has ever been so. Even in school I passed algebra by remembering the quadratic formula and just figuring out the rest of it each time. I don’t do things the same way every time. When I try to do things by rote, without thinking I fuck them up.

If it’s bothering you, try mindfulness - throughout the day take a breath, relax and become more aware of what you are doing and hearing and seeing and feeling. Get in the habit of paying close attention.

But I do think it’s normal to sort of discard a lot and only remember a little.

The more unique a bit of knowledge is, plus the more interesting it was at the time, multiplied by how frequently you have thought about it since, is basically the formula for the strength of a memory. So a relatively uninteresting thing, you have done some minor variation of hundreds of times and haven’t really thought about since, is gonna take alot of effort to willfully recall. You would need some sorf of trigger to easily recall it, as triggering a memory is a much more powerful way to recall it.

You are normal, as you get older, even just early adulthood, more and more of your life will feel that way in hindsight. You don’t do as many super memorable things as you used to, and you just have more and more stuff packed into your brain. Makes it harder for individual memories to compete, more and more of them will just fade out as unimportant things you don’t prioritise remembering, or even recording in the first place.

You probably have heard people older than you remark that life goes by faster and faster as we get older, this is mostly the cause of that feeling. Obviously, time is moving the same speed, you are just making fewer important memories worth recalling.

If you went to a concert this week, you would probably have an easier time remembering what day it was, or what the drive to and from it was like. But if the whole week was TV shows, videogames and meals primarily designed to be thrown together for sustenance, none of it will be super memorable.

You can technically put effort into remembering even mundane stuff, just focus on it more as you are doing it, and repeatedly practice recalling it as you go. It might be a fun exercise for a week just to prove you can do it if you want to. But it would be alot of effort to keep up for longer. If you are otherwise happy with how things are going, no real need to change though. And if you do want things to be more memorable, find ways to do more unique things that you have an interest in and that are worth spending time thinking about afterward too.

Edit: me personally, As with most people in this thread, I have a very good long term memory, but a very bad working memory, and almost no willful recall, I generally leave visible reminders or set alarms for stuff I need to remember “tomorrow”. If someone asks me to do something, and I don’t do it within 15 seconds, I won’t recall that I was asked unless something triggers the memory. So I generally do stuff right away, but I am also easily distracted. And I don’t always remember that I need to warn people to re-ask me if it has been a minute or so and I didn’t do it, but I have slowly gotten better as it works into my rote/routine memory to sequentially trigger that response based on the incoming cue. Needs to be more consistent to become rote.

And yeah, Autism for sure, ADHD probable but haven’t checked.

I remember a lot of stuff but tying it to a specific day can be hard sometimes. Something I thought happened yesterday mightve happened like 3 days ago and a week out I’m pretty unsure unless it happened on a holiday or rent day or something. I can remember major events and random things from a long time ago though. Earliest memory I can muster up is crawling on some red carpet in my grandparents trailer. They moved out of that place when I was 1 year old

I feel like I know the answer to something, and it’s usually right, but I don’t have a recollection exactly of how I know it.

If you asked me about last Wednesday or the one before, I could probably tell you eventually. You might get a lot of detail about the rest of the week along the way, because I’d have to piece together what I did and which day Wednesday was.

It would be about the same if you asked me about the current weather moments after I walked inside. I might be able to tell you, but I’m going to have to build the memories on the spot.

People tend to look at me funny when I tell them that I don’t remember my childhood all the way up through highschool.

Certain big events in highschool I can remember of course. But for most of it is just vague impressions of “Yeah…I must have done that at some point, but can’t recall specifics”.

For Childhood it gets even more nebulous; again, a few things I clearly remember, and much of the rest of it I can’t decide if I actually remember it, or if I’m “filling in the blanks” from old photographs (the brain is funny that way…implanting a fake memory is pretty easy it turns out)

People have told me that that’s a reaction to childhood trauma, but since I’m kind of stupidly good at holding useless trivia in my brain, I just think I pushed it all out to make room for random facts about ancient history and star trek lore.

Longish term cannabis dependency chiming in - not great.