Where did I go???

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Well, yesterday I was celebrating x-mas with family at grandmother's house.
Over the river and through the woods, no less.

5 adults, a few kids. Nothing big. It was a comfortable, familiar gathering.

We were opening presents and I looked around and noticed that one of the presents I had brought to give an uncle was not there. After scanning the room, I asked the friend I had come with if she knew where it was. Looking very confused and rather worried, she said "uh... he already opened it, thanked you, and you acknowledged it, and chatted about it for a minute."

I felt a chill come over me, as I realized that I had absolutely no recollection of this event which had apparently happened mere minutes before. Terrible fantasies of losing my mind raced through my head, and then I looked around, to find the aforementioned present as stated: sitting opened next to its recipient.

Where had I gone? I was awake, seemingly engaged with what was going on around me, and yet here was an episode that had gone unaccounted for. I was not consciously there, even as I interacted with people, talked and moved around.

I have a theory about this, but I'm not certain. I know that I experience social anxiety, and I sometimes "tune out" when I am in group setting. However, this usually only means having to ask someone to repeat themselves, because I had not fully heard what they said. I can't think of a time when my mind just ceased to exist for several minutes, while my body continued on like normal.

What happened? Do you have any ideas? Has this happened to you before?
Thanks for your help with this strangeness.

It's happened to me... I'm usually able to jog a recollection of the event though via talking with other people involved and/or mentally tracing through events before and after the gap. Kind of like scrolling through a track on a DVD. Apparently people with AS have notoriously poor working memory (short term stuff), which is why a lot of us have to make lists to manage our day. My working memory is apparently pretty poor. There was a recent thread on here about memory and someone else posted a link to a traditional memory game and I wasn't the worst compared to others in the thread, but I certainly didn't wiz through it the way others have. My girlfriend Tiffany did markedly better than I did... And then I did it again to see if maybe it would get better with practice, but it actually got worse.

Question #1: Had you had even one drink of alcohol? Maybe you were a bit more drunk that you thought? Although memory loss like that doesn't sound right. *shrug*
Question #2: Did you ask your friend what she thought you were doing during this time? Did you talk? Were there any reactions from you? Were you looking around the room?

Unfortunately there is some correlation to the spectrum and seizures, and a seizure can be you just standing there with little outward sign while having a seizure, and no recollection following the episode. Definitely time to talk to your Dr. methinks.

Nope. Didn't drink at all. Nonfactor.


She told me explicitly. She said that I watched the uncle open the gift, responded congenially when he thanked me, and even said a few words afterward about how I knew he would like the gift. I was apparently talking and acting more or less normally. That's the strangest and most confusing part. I could understand if I had been leaned over, semi-conscious, during this period that I don't recollect. But that wasn't the case.

Your theory about seizures is intriguing, if not a bit frightening. I may have to follow up on this more extensively than I thought. Thank you for the information.

That does sound odd. Absence seizures is what I was thinking of. With those you might even actually move "normally" but without particular purpose. The movement could have happened to have been a sort of nondescript movement that didn't seem particularly odd or out of place. But I don't think that jives with talking on subject. It might just be really bad short term memory like ike suggested. *shrug* I don't know how much a seizure can erase memory outside the bounds of the actual seizure. I'd still talk with the doc.

Are you alone a lot? Have you, based on what others have said, noticed chunks of time missing like this before where you couldn't recall it even when reminded of it? I wonder if there is anyway you can start trying to get some help checking for this occurring?

Yeah, if you're concerned about it and still not jogging, I would talk to your Dr. about it. Not being a Dr. I can't honestly say if that's not even a relatively normal event. I've read some of the research into memory that talks about not gaps in memory specifically, but false memories. It talks about how, if you've done something a lot, you're more likely to remember having done it even when you haven't.

For example, you've probably washed your hair in the shower a lot throughout the course of your life... but then it would be pretty common for you to be in the shower and to remember having washed your hair, even though you haven't, simply because you've done it so many times in the past that your brain retrieves the "template" for the "washing the hair" memory instead of even bothering trying to store a specific memory for what happened a minute ago.

So I know that there are events for which the brain doesn't seem to even store a memory, I just don't know how likely this is to have been one of them. It doesn't sound like it, partly because in those other cases you actually have a memory, it's just a generalized memory, not a specific memory. But I'm not a neurologist, so I don't know all the pieces.

I have that happen to me. I noticed about 10 years ago when I was obsessed with watching TV the moment a commercial came on I could not for the life of me remember what I had been watching. Yes, it might say a lot about what I had been watching, but it was like I hadn't been watching anything!

I remember 'forgetting' in my past. I was placed in a room by myself in a 4th grade class in school and I was trying to 'fix' the violin bows by tightening them and I tightened them so much it broke the stick of wood on the other side. So I carefully tried to tighten the others, but each of them broke, eventually. I went back to reading my assignment and later admitted back to the class. The next week, when the violin lessons were held by the weekly teacher, one teacher came to me and asked if I had seen the violin bows in that room, and, forgetting completely, I said no. I was questioned very closely about it and . . .still clueless at what they were talking about - because I truly did not remember- they concluded I was not acting like a guilty child and that someone else must have done it.

isn't it interesting that now, 50 years later, I can remember both parts of it?

Merle

I've had some instances like that, like the first part of a memory gets buried so the second part
doesn't make any sense until days or weeks later when the first part of the memory starts to emerge.

But I think Acacia should get her mineral levels checked. Severe anemia can cause lapses in thought process.