Poor autobiographical memory

Post Reply New Topic

Poor autobiographical memory . I find it hard to recall things in much depth/detail . To use an analogy; if my memories were a pie there would be very little filling.

They say it's connected to aphantasia or at least a subset of people with it.

I have aphantasia too. I posted the question on the Aphantasia (Non-Imager / Mental Blindness) Awareness Group on Facebook , and so far quite a few people are saying theirs is also poor.

I am extremely concerned about my memory. My whole life feels like a complete blur. Could this be a consequence of having chemotherapy when I had cancer as a child?

Pardon the slight contradiction in my last sentence.

I remember my late father's cars and their registration numbers more than I remember him.

Much of my life is a blur. I can remember plenty of individual details, but nothing that ties them together.

Years ago, I was one of the higher ups at a certain high tech company and was generally seen as the one most likely to replace the president of the company when he retired.

I neither expected nor wanted that to happen.

We'd have frequent meetings whenever the president of the company returned from a business trip. In the meetings, the president of the company would recount the details of the trip in great detail including entire conversations. I knew that I could never do that. I could pick up the two or three high points, but that was it.

In an account of a meeting that he could spend half an hour on providing the details, my best summary would have been over in a minute. If someone asked a specific question about what was said in a meeting, I would have no problem answering it, but I generally couldn't put it in any particular order.

It's like there is a bunch of individual data points, but nothing tying them together into a cohesive whole. And without those ties between the data points, when I think of one, there is nothing to make me think about what happened immediately before or after.

JakeASD, look up "chemo brain." There is definitely a relationship between chemotherapy and memory loss.

I too have memory problems. They have gotten progressively worse, though I suspect at least some of that is due to medication.

Most of my childhood is also a blur, though there are certain memories that stand out, even from the very early years. Honestly most of my childhood was pretty miserable so that may be a measure of self-defense.

People with poor verbal function tend to have more memory problems because language and memory are very closely linked.

I don't know what my excuse is these days, other than medication. I have very high verbal function but I have reached the point where I forget why I walked into a room multiple times per day or forget what I was saying halfway into a sentence. Sometimes I forget things that are very, very important with dire consequences. And yet I can remember useless academic trivia that I never even knew I knew (Jeopardy, anyone)?

It's frustrating to say the least.

My memory is below average. When I had my neuropsychological evaluation, my evaluator was surprised by how poor it was considering my above average intelligence. I think my ADHD has something to do with that. I’m so scattered that it’s hard for me to focus on a memory long enough for it to make it into my long term memory.

Very interesting topic here. When I think back to my childhood up to being on my own, I've always been astonished that I feel like a can recall so few memories from my childhood. I recall certain milestone memories and when I really think about it for a long time, additional memories do come up, but overall for me too, I feel like I have retained few memories of my childhood. It's not like I've recently forgotten them, I never retained much of them, period.

I wonder if part of it was being in my own world as a kid largely shutting out the temporal world and not being engaged in it and partly as a defense mechanism.

I tend to develop methods for compensating for any weakness. Generally I make list. Whenever I go shopping I always have a list with me. I also write down details as quickly as possible without letting time go by. Because the details fade quickly. I kept journals at work with quite a bit of detail. Sometimes one phone call might transcribe into 6 or 7 pages of notes in my work journal.

But then my mind is like a library card index. I just tend to remember just some key point about any event. And some of these memories go back to when I was very young (2 years 3 months of age) over 67 years ago.

I have a very good autobiographical memory. I don't remember the exact dates of when things happened, but I can remember the year of when things happened and in what season of the year it happened.

I can remember nearly all my birthdays from my 10th birthday right to my 28th birthday (there's one or two brithdays under the age of 10 that I can also remember, and maybe one or two birthdays in my teens or early twenties that I can't quite remember). I can also remember lots of Christmasses and summers too.

Remembering my life is probably the only thing I'm good at remembering.

My autobiographical memory has always been terrible. I think aphantasia might have some part to play, but I think there might be a couple of other factors too...

Firstly, I have quite severe alexithymia; so when an event happens to me, it can take quite some time before its emotional impact hits me and even longer for me to make sense of what the feelings are. When I recall autobiographical memories, they seem very abstract, almost as if they were things which I'd just been told about or read. They usually contain very little emotion, so I wonder whether that is because of the separation in time between the event and the emotion, so that they don't get recorded as a single, unified memory of the event.

Secondly, my sense of time is atrocious at all scales, from judging how long I've waited for a bus to having any idea when any particular event took place in my life. Even putting autobiographical memories into the correct order requires a lot of working out, and this often leads me to get confused about who else might recall the same event or the order of cause and effect when remembering things.

Huh. I also have difficulty keeping track of time and judging how much of it has passed.

I am late everywhere I go even when I swear a solemn oath to myself that I'm going to make it this time... yeah, right.

Combine that with having to remember that I was supposed to go somewhere in the first place (and why), and I am often doomed before I even start.