36, relatable. My recall and retention both seem to improve with all the basic (yet rarely completely implemented) grandmotherly advice you can imagine: sleep regularly, enjoy as much daylight as possible, exercise daily, eat the rainbow, meditate (ok, grandma never included this one), spend time with people that make you feel good.
Ask HN: Is your memory as bad as mine?
41–50 of 82 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is your memory as bad as mine?
#42Looks like selective memory, football is quite insignificant to your own life, so your memory skips it
Same thing for the name of someone, or other things not crucial even in your job
I think it can be even be a good thing to be able to ignore these "distractive" pieces of informations to better focus on important things
Re: Ask HN: Is your memory as bad as mine?
#43[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Is your memory as bad as mine?
#44OH yeah. Coming up on 40 and I forget so much shit now. I'll forget I watched some movie a year ago, start to re-watch it, and go "wait a minute..." I also make really dumb errors writing that I never, ever used to. Homophone mix-ups and such, even when I know which one's correct, the wrong one goes to my fingers. Omitting words, that kind of thing. Didn't do that ever before 30. I also barely have what they call an…
Really interesting! I'm 32 and I feel like this is the exact same thing that's happening to me. I have struggled with this for a long time, and I've been hyperaware of it, since it partially contributed to my marriage breaking down.
I've gone to therapy after it was suggested that this might be childhood trauma, but the therapist seems to be focusing on different things.
Can I ask what the disorder is (perhaps I'm misunderstanding and called autobiographical memory?), and how you found out that it is one?
Re: Ask HN: Is your memory as bad as mine?
#45I don't know how I get through life, really. I can't recognize faces or names, even to the extent that my mother could walk past and I might not know her.
I'm good on many kinds of facts though and have good analytical skills, and see very deeply into both things and people.
Therefore I use my instant-to-instant consciousness to keep me safe in a world I have to continuously reassess... do goldfish have similar experiences?
Re: Ask HN: Is your memory as bad as mine?
#46Around 35 years old I realized I have a nasty soy sensitivity. And as I have become able to rule it out of my life, my memory is becoming fantastic. It makes me wonder what my life could have been if I knew when I was young, but it's all bonus to me. Sorry to brag but it's one of the best things in my life.
I’d love to know what made you notice this, and able to identify soy as the problem. Presumably it was more than just memory issues that tipped you off?
Re: Ask HN: Is your memory as bad as mine?
#47OH yeah. Coming up on 40 and I forget so much shit now. I'll forget I watched some movie a year ago, start to re-watch it, and go "wait a minute..." I also make really dumb errors writing that I never, ever used to. Homophone mix-ups and such, even when I know which one's correct, the wrong one goes to my fingers. Omitting words, that kind of thing. Didn't do that ever before 30. I also barely have what they call an…
Woahhh cool that there is a word for it! I most definitely have a similar memory (autobiographical)...and am 30! I've been learning how to navigate it - for example "tell me about a time that..." is extremely difficult for me. But if I change the prompt to "think of a time when I was living at my grandparents house in the winter" or similar, I can begin to recall things, specificity is key. I also have difficulty whe…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_memory#Memory...
Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM) is that name for the condition.
Interviews I've read with exemplars who've been the means for researchers discovering that it exists (I think some are in the article's references?) puts them about one notch worse than I am, but most of what they describe rings extremely true.
In particular, remembering that things happened but having very little of what I gather are ordinary memories of the events, not having an idea of where those events fit into any kind of chronology without painstakingly working through some kind of dependency reasoning like "well we got X there and we had that at time Y so it must have been before that..." I'll be like that for stuff that happened last year, or ten years ago, but also last month, or even last week. Ask me when some notable thing I recently did happened and I'm likely not to be able to place it more precisely than "I think it was this quarter, at least? Maybe?" but even that I get wrong pretty often ("um, no, that was Spring of last year") Like I don't get that stuff wrong 100% of the time, but it's definitely most of the time. Maybe 80%, and often comically wrong.
As described by those interviewees, this has surprisingly little effect on, say, work or school life. I remember facts and processes and such just fine. Maybe better than most, even.
Re: Ask HN: Is your memory as bad as mine?
#48I don't know how I get through life, really. I can't recognize faces or names, even to the extent that my mother could walk past and I might not know her. I'm good on many kinds of facts though and have good analytical skills, and see very deeply into both things and people. Therefore I use my instant-to-instant consciousness to keep me safe in a world I have to continuously reassess... do goldfish have similar exper…
I can't recognize faces or names, even to the extent that my mother could walk past and I might not know her.
If you aren't familiar with the term, you might look up faceblindness. There are support groups.
Re: Ask HN: Is your memory as bad as mine?
#49-Ask HN: Is your memory as bad as mine?-
I dont remember
Re: Ask HN: Is your memory as bad as mine?
#50I don't know how I get through life, really. I can't recognize faces or names, even to the extent that my mother could walk past and I might not know her. I'm good on many kinds of facts though and have good analytical skills, and see very deeply into both things and people. Therefore I use my instant-to-instant consciousness to keep me safe in a world I have to continuously reassess... do goldfish have similar exper…
I can't recognize faces or names, even to the extent that my mother could walk past and I might not know her. If you aren't familiar with the term, you might look up faceblindness. There are support groups.
:) thanks :)