Is your memory so bad...?

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I mean, I am sleep-deprived, but I washed a plate multiple times at first, before opening this can, but before that I also touched the plate once more... I intended to wash it again before filling it, but I think I forgot...

No, my memory as always been good, to damn near impeccable.

Never been that bad.

Maybe if I never slept for a week straight, emotionally damaged, utterly exhausted and at least moderately malnourished or starved.



Mine got bad enough around the second year in a full time job.
Combination of accumulated stress, hormonal dysregulation, burnout, chronic stress and poor sleep.
Just enough to seem like I developed APD, dealing with overwhelm for 8-10 hours a day with lingering effects and the chronic sensation of jetlagging that I forgot what healthy felt like...

Because all I felt was that unignorable background noise from my body with my head felt like swimming in sludge, not much about my surroundings, spent the rest with coping and ignoring what it is -- instead of what needs to be done or what am I doing outside said symptoms.

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I used to have a lot more trouble with memory when I was at school. Probably because they were expecting me to remember an awful lot of stuff that I had no interest in. And because I didn't understand much of it, and it's always harder to learn things you don't understand. And the stress of realising that I was falling behind in my learning wouldn't have helped. My thinking also became rather confused and during a chain of thoughts I'd often have forgotten the first thought before I got to the end of the chain.

There was no such problem once I was focussing on things I was interested in and understood.

Later on in life, I noticed I was doing that thing where I'd go into another room to get something and by the time I'd got there I'd forgotten what I was supposed to get. But I found out that if I relaxed and thought for a few moments, the memory would often come back. And it was also helpful to get into the habit of first focussing carefully and vividly on what I had to remember, and refraining from allowing too many other thoughts into my mind before I'd accomplished the mission. I think what had been happening before was that I'd just think very fleetingly that I wanted to get this or that, and then on the way to get it I'd get very focussed on one or two very unrelated thoughts. And if I couldn't immediately remember whatever it was, I'd tend to give up and assume the memory was irrevocably lost.

I suspect the memory of whether or not a dish had been wiped wouldn't be an easy one. It's rather a fleeting detail unless you deliberately focus on it, and your mind probably felt it had better things to do, and wasn't expecting it to be important. I had similar problems when I was obsessionally cleaning things during the height of the Covid scare. Sometimes I couldn't remember whether I'd already cleaned this or that, probably because the whole process bored me, being so simple and non-profound, though the overarching purpose - staying alive - wasn't exactly boring. I also often find that when I'm doing something simple more than once, I quickly lose track of how many times I've done it and quite what the order was in which I'd been working.

I think there are some things that are just hard to remember. I can't play those card games in which I'm supposed to remember which cards have already been played. There's something about the nature of the material, I'm not quite sure what. Something to do with one card being much the same as any other card to me. I guess it might be the same with the plate-cleaning - maybe the elements are so similar that they tend to get blurred in the mind.

When my memory problems were threatening my schoolwork I read a book about how to improve memory. It said that we remember things best when we focus vividly on them, that it was easier to remember pictures than numbers or cold, abstract facts, and that repetition was important to memorising things. It suggested exercises such as turning the material into vivid images, and a trick or two to convert numbers into pictures. It also said that if there's a way to avoid having to remember it, such as writing a list, then do that, and that numbers are better written down and read back than memorised. The book was probably marginally helpful but it didn't solve the problems of not understanding the work, the boredom, or the sheer volume I was supposed to learn.

Often these days I can't remember what day of the week it is. But that's because now I'm retired it doesn't often matter. When I was working I was naturally much more aware how long I had to go before the weekend, or how much of the weekend I had left.

My memory is fairly awful. I can be thinking about something planning to do it then utterly forget what I was about to do!

I don’t think my working memory is all that great. I read that it is a possible symptom of ASD.

Having a stressful sleep deprived job makes it more apparent but it seems to be apparent in other pursuits as well like organized sports. I can’t follow some games and keep score. I can’t play cards. I wouldn’t be able to keep track of the ball in basketball. I read clumsiness is a symptom as well. I can do some sports.

If it is something I am interested in that is not in constant flux I don’t think it exists. In nature related things like not getting lost I am fine and do well.

I stink at words to a song but can read a book and remember what was said to the point of making good grades. It is more like being distracted like an absent minded professor to me.

I am not diagnosed. It is one of the reasons I think I could be on the spectrum.

Yes. I have to say, it is. And it is getting worse.

It depends, sometimes my memory is incredible, I can remember facts, places and the registrations plates on my dad and mums cars. But in the last year I'm having troubles remembering lots of things, including my birthday which is just crazy but true. I can't remember it at all. I don't remember names sometimes. I remember very little of what happened last week and it's like that all the time. I get gaps and it's so blooming annoying.

Yes unfortunately and it’s usually short term things I have a lot of trouble with.

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Blint.

Short term memory non-existent,
long term memory full of holes!

My long-term memory is extraordinarily, but my short-term memory is terrible. I can remember a whole page from a book I read 40 years ago, but I'll lose something that was in my hand just a minute ago.