Lack of Memory

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Does anyone else have a deficit of memories? I have little sense of my past other than from a purely intellectual point of view. By this, I mean I can read something and recall that I did in fact attend a class on a certain date because that's what I do by routine. On the other hand, my feeling of past time is almost nonexistent. What happened yesterday might as well have happened last week or even a year or two ago. The reason is a lack of memories.

I find my existence dull to the point where very little is stored in memory, and so I can often only make vague recollections of events. In a highly risky situation, one might recall an event in vivid detail. I suppose there is a continuum between such lively recall and no memory. Mine tends towards the low end because there is little vividness in my existence as I experience it.

Does anyone else share this lack of memory?

My entire high-school experience seems to be compressed into a week's worth of memory-space.

Yes. I try to think of things that I could do differently, to make things more memorable, but it doesn't really work out. My main concern about this is that I want to avoid, or at least slow down, the continuous increase in the perceived rate of time as age increases. Few memories = few time references = years seem to fly by.

I know exactly what you mean, Neant. There is no vivid remembering of anything that happened in the past. All I remember is facts or ideas. I don't really remember anything in the past, except for a few specific events. Its like remembering remembering a memory, and that's all you remember.
I wonder Neant, do you find little vividness because you don't feel much emotion, and what happens to you has a detached quality about it? As if it were happening to someone else. I find that's what my experience is like. I don't actively DO anything, my entire existence revolves around automatic responses to cause and effect. I'm not interested in what happens around or to me. Its just boring, monotonous. Breath is just a clock, counting the progress of time.
Have you ever watched the movie called Equilibrium? Good movie, stars Christian Bale. Its about a civilization that outlaws emotion, and have invented an emotion suppressing drug. They're all living monotonous lives doing the same thing every day, and they all conform. Looking at it from the outside, you think, how can they live like that, it would be sooooo boring. Then you look at yourself, well, I look at me, and it is boring. Life really is empty. Why would you want to have perfect memory of a monotonous, boring, empty past? The parts of my past that I remember most, are the times when I'm aware and actively conscious of what's happening. Times when I'm feeling generally fear or sadness, have more vividity.
So really, at least this is my hypothesis, emotion is vital to memory. Interest and attention play an important role in how well you can actively remember the past. When time is just a boring endless thing, and you're not interested in things, you don't bother to record where those memories are stored as well as you do otherwise. The hippocampus and amygdala are important in recording where in the brain the memories are stored. They're like a superlarge *.fat file. And they also activate when you experience emotion. Is it linked? More than likely.

Whoa. This is scary. And here I was thinking this was only me! Isn't that the great thing about this site?

Danlo, I think you've hit the nail on the head. I seem to remember reading that emtoions link up memories in chains. There's a signature, so to speak.

Could it be that this is why I don't particularly like vacations? NTs I know are always going on trips to someplace and taking a load of pictures and talking about all the memories they are building. I go, "What?" Why would you want to do that?"

Same thing with high school proms, etc.

I can remember things, and if I give a da*n, I can remember them pretty well. (Ancient Greek, for example...) But I don't think I--and apparently WE--have the emotional thread running through them that makes them fun to go back through.

I can't think of anything that it gives me joy to remember, even things that I did that gave me pleasure at the time.

Neant, I think you might really have something here.

Oddly, I was talking about this with my counsellor recently. I would have said that I have almost no long term recollection at all, but it turns out that is not entirely correct. While I don't remember many specific events in the far past, I can have fairly staggering recall of locations back to when I was only a few years old.

This is a bit like having a built-in virtual-reality model, where I can move the view point around to look from different angles. It is like a model in that I can almost as easily choose viewpoints that would have been physically inaccessible, indicating some kind of imaginative extension (ie this is a model based on memory, rather than a memory itself). I can see the scenes as if they are full colour moving video, and I can recall the touch and smell of plants and soil for example as an integral part of the recollection. Some of my earliest memories of events involve this kind of imagination.

It is impossible to verify the accuracy of some of these recollections, and they may be wildly wrong for all I know. But the impression of recollection is very vivid, like almost being there.

In contrast, I have immense difficulty remembering what people looked like at that time, or even who the relevant people would have been.

I don't have a problem with longer term memory- I remember most "emotional" events fairly well in fact. My short term memory however is terrible; I am always misplacing things, though it's rare for me to actually lose anything. Usually it will be something like putting a pencil on my ear, and forgetting a minute later what I did with it.

Great minds think alike, groovydruid.
I'm amazed I still remember those facts about the amygdala and hippocampus. I still remember how the Ebola virus kills people and reproduces. But I can't remember but a handful of memories in the past 17 years, and before that nothing. I can't remember people, but I can remember places and facts and figures. Books I read years ago, but not people I knew for years. Its amazing (and amazingly frustrating). I even seem to be forgetting my family.
Why are we alive, when we're so dead inside? There's no zest, no passion, no emotion. No past, no dreams of the future. No connections to people, just objects of disgust. Just dead boring existence, and the few things that attract our interest, and make us a little less bored for a while. Ah well, its a semblance of life, at least.

I have a weird memory... I can remember that Alistair in prep teased me and said I was eating a poo sandwhich, I can remember that the underpants I wet in grade 1 were navy blue with tiny white polka dots, I can remember that Julia in grade 2 won the first game of 'Chunky' and won a bag of lollypops, I can remember that in grade 3 Thomas wet himself on the carpet in class, I can remember that in grade 4 Mr. Conner teased me for whistling through a pen lid and I almost burst into tears. My best friend in prep and I swapped keyrings with the first letter of our names on them and my keyring had a tiny little split/piece of glitter in it that I could never get out and was A for Apple Blossom, and that for some reason we used to keep water in old apple juice bottles under some trees (this was when I was 6- years old).

But do you think I can tell you what I had for dinner last night, what my essay is about?

That is so much like me, but I have quite violent and raging emotions about things all the time and most of the stuff I can not remember is the bits that would be interesting.
To commit any thought I have to memory I have to construct a conversation about it ether out lowed or in my head I also have on Consept of the passing of time (I really think that time is maid up by strange people trying to confuse me)

I don't dissociate; I don't feel my existence is happening to someone else. Yes, my existence isn't very emotionally stimulating for the grand majority of time. I would have to say my existence isn't very emotionally stimulating because it's very monotonous and I have few opportunities to do things that are pleasant. I'm trapped on campus, having to live in a dorm room environment with roommates who think it's cold when I think it's hot (among other sensory differences). My classes, of course, hold no interest for me. I don't have meaningful social interactions.

So you don't think that your life is emotionally stimulating, not that you have trouble feeling emotion? I didn't mean actually dissociative. Just that it fails to incite any feelings, doesn't perturb you or worry you. Like the way something happens to another person, and you're not really bothered/interested or care about what happens. Like a large-scale "Don't care/Whatever/Sure/*shrug*" that applies to, well, everything.

No, actually I find I remember a great deal. Sometimes too much. But it's all mostly visual memory.

I think its a question of generality vs specificity in memory that makes it so hard. . .people tend to associate rather than remember out of the blue.

Asking to remember as much of high school is a lot more difficult than remembering your 11th grade science teacher. I could write more about my science teacher in 11th grade than my general experience of HS.

Yes. Ditto.

I can feel more emotionally under the right circumstances, but my existence has a sparse number of those, especially in the past several years.

I'm not really too interested about what's currently going on in my existence because I find it largely irrelevant to my desires.