Lack of Memory

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I remember things that interest me / spark emotion. In the evening, I can only remember what happened at school if it was more interesting / emotional than usual. I do however have a terrible short-term memory - lol, I was asked on a Sunday to remind somebody that they'd swapped their flute lesson ... I remembered the following Monday (ie 8 days later) that I was supposed to tell them, and I only remembered that because we were talking about passing on messages to remind people of things.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Neant, but I'd like to clarify this:

You weren't just asking about memory per se, right? You were asking about memories and emotion, what memories feel like, right? Our Aspie existence can feel kind of pointless and empty if we don't have a past infused with emotion, and from what I gather, most of us don't.

There are Aspies with photographic memories, and others who don't remember much at all. It seems to be a normal human spectrum.

But when you get into the emotional part of it, there's a big shift. We remember intellectual occurrances, but we lack the emotional signature that goes along with this.

WOW!

I was talking with my Optometrist, and I told him about this discussion. He related something amazing that is very relevant:

As danlo pointed out earlier, the amygdala is the part of the brain that has to do with storing memories, and it also has to do with emotions, and the emotional signatures of the memory.

Well, when NTs get damage to the amygdala, they become very dangerous to their families. Why? Because they remember their mom's face and recognize her as mom, but the amygdala is broken, so they don't get the warm, fuzzy 'mom' feeling when they see her.

So, their intuition tells them that this "mom" is an imposter. They are so sure she's not their real mother that they'll kill the imposter, even though they recognize her completely.

When the emotional signature is gone from the memory, they will do insane things.

His hypothesis was that Aspies may never have this emotional signature to memories in the first place. We are not dangerous, because we don't have our intuition telling us we should be feeling paranoid about it, since we've never felt the "warm, fuzzy" feeling of an emotional signature.

Does this sound right to y'all? Could it be that there is a whole emotional signature to people, places, and things that we never experience?

Pretty much. The only reliable long-term memory for me is sensory. I tend to have quite detailed sensory memories, especially spatial, of rooms, environments, textures, smells, routes, directions etc. (although not visual memories, not in detail anyway - I have been taking Wellbutrin for a month now and am only just beginning to realise what 'normal', depth-perception vision must be like. Normally the world is a blur and an assortment of shapes and fragments for me).

But linear, factual or time-line time memories? Hardly there unless it is triggered properly (sometimes I remember whole loads of information about something or someone if something I hear or see reminds me). I am lucky if I remember what I had for dinner the night before (unless I am in a phase where I always eat the same thing).

I have a time slot of about a week that is at least remotely 'there' for me, everything that I don't have to do every week is almost impossible to get done or to remember (such as household chores that I don't do weekly).

No, I am relatively lacking in memories of events at all because they existence provokes little meaning in me. If an event does have emotional significance to me, I do remember it, complete with emotional content.

So when you say you recall the emotional content, do you reexperience the emotional content, or do you simply recall that it occurred?

The reason I ask is that I think we may lack some or all of the interplay of the emotions and memory that NTs exhibit. I've been quizzing some to find out more, and the answers I get from them about emotion and memory are foreign to me.

It's hard to for me to describe to you the impression I'm getting of how this interplay works, though. It's kind of like a Hawaiian islander coming back to Hawaii after a visit to the north pole, and trying to describe snow to his friends...

But I'm wondering whether this doesn't cause some of the emptiness we feel in our day to day life. There's no accumulation of emotional history.

Could be wrong, too. Love to know what you think.

I find I can remember visual scenes very quickly but somewhat unrelated to their emotional context. But when I start reminiscing on the same scene longer and recalling more minute details, sort of "walking through it", the same or similar emotion is called up.

For me, it just takes longer to wake up my amygdala via more detail.

Yes, when I recall a memory with strong emotional content attached to it, it does recreate that emotion to some extent. The thing is most of my memories don't have strong emotional content because I never experienced any strong emotions during the event in the first place. This is because my existence has few significant events in it.

The best example of emotional content in memories is the memories I have of a girl I was in love with. Thinking about her even a little still invokes strong emotions.

I really don't think Asperger's syndrome has to do with lack of emotional memory. Some aspies might not have strong emotional recall; others might. It might even be the same way with NTs. I think schizophrenic people and people with certain personality disorders are especially versed at dissociating their intellectual recollection from their emotional recollection.

i always have to retrace my steps to find something, but i can remember stuff from my childhood, vagely

Good thread, I realte to it alot.

I've been trying to go back and see how AS fits in my past, specifically grade school and Jr. high....but there is very little there to recall.
There's also a specific turning point event that I keep going back to. It involved a letter that I wrote. I've been try to remember exactly what I wrote, but I can't.

I was getting kida worried and neurotic about it. Glad I'm not alone.

Most of what I remember is audio. But when recalling events alone in audio, I attach a recollected visual to it.