Familiar situations tend to appear novel.

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I don't really like Ani DiFranco, but I do strongly identify with this particular set of lyrics, from the song "Little Plastic Castles":

they say goldfish have no memory
i guess their lives are much like mine
the little plastic castle
is a surprise every time

I've been thinking about this a lot lately... The fact that a large number of familiar and routine social situations that I encounter (family, work, etc.) appear to be novel to me, as if I'd never experienced them before. I forget all the details and social nuances that I "should know", because I've been in the exact same situation before, with the exact same people. Yet I approach it with same sense of uncertainty and cluelessness that I would if it was all brand-new.

My brain seems to omit a lot of the peripheral social information from my memory, so that what I'm left with is procedural and environmental sensory input. I end up with nothing of substance to draw upon when it comes to similar social situations. It's like I'm reaching for a book from a familiar and comfortable bookshelf, but there's nothing there to grab onto.

Is this purely a memory issue, or is there perhaps a connection with AS?
What do you think?

I understand.

Some of it is to do with not being able to generalise to take into account slight variations in situations (no situation is exactly the same). The rules are not explicit and also vary between slightly different contexts.

Some of it might be related to working memory deficits and/or a number of other variables.

Yes, very good point. It seems like I can't internalize rules for social situations. Frameworks like these don't "stick" very well. If I manage to retain a set of rules, then I adhere to them too specifically, not taking into account the subtle variations inherent in social interactions.

I think my brain wants total predictability, and finds the fluid and unpredictable nature of the world to be a bit overwhelming. I end up perceiving it as always-new.

For instance, I just went out to the hardware store. I've been there dozens of times. I can remember the layout of the place, and where things are located, but everything just has a feeling of being unfamiliar. Even the mundane stuff that I look at every time I go. It seems strange, as if I'd rarely seen it before.

It often seems as if I am continually having to form concepts for ordinary things that I should already have a concrete concept for. Here's a metaphor: Let's say that my mind is a wall made up concept-bricks... Well, the bricks keep randomly falling out, so I often have to go back and replace them. The result is a wall that is always sort-of-new. I think this translates into how I see the world.

That familiar lack of familiarity topic

Yes

It would make sense if social situations, due to their complexity, are where it's found to be most noticeable. I would sometimes wish that many situations could be made more ceremonial, with very clear and explicit rules.

Difficulty integrating and generalising information and being able to form concepts are very much part of autism/AS, so this might be at the root of it.

The brick wall metaphor makes sense. I have an example I think applies. When someone was teaching me to make porridge, there were several steps involved to make it come out right. Over the course of weeks, I would be supervised and directed every day so I could learn to make it myself. What happened was that I could not remember all the steps from one day to the next, would forget steps I had learnt, and could not grasp the concept of guessing rather than measuring the volume of fluid that needed to be added. This seems to be a relevant example because I was unable to form a concept or integrate the information; therefore the task felt like the first attempt every day.