Good Memory for the Past

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Isn't the "for the past" in the title somewhat superfluous? After all, one wouldn't have a "Good memory for the future"

Heads up... I just saw this on CBS news tonight and it is quite relevant this post. There will be a story on Sixty Minutes tomorrow night about people who can remember every single day of their lives. I have never heard of this before and this sounds amazing to me.

I have a very good memory. Oddly enough I often can't remember when something happened, only what happened.

Isn't the "for the past" in the title somewhat superfluous? After all, one wouldn't have a "Good memory for the future"

I have a fairly good - but not eidetic - memory. I tend to remember social interactions as they happened, and people would comment on that.

This is frustrating around my mother, who does not have good recollection and tends to revise memories in her favor. Over the course of a year she went from "I forgot to buy that thing you needed" to "I bought it, but you just never found it." The latter of course makes no sense in retrospect because if I couldn't find it, she would have found it for me.

I do have memories going back to my first year. I remember the house my parents lived in after I was born - some of its layout, for example. I remember wandering at three years old and causing a panic. I think I made it across the street before I was caught.

I remember often I'd describe a memory as I remembered it and relatives would tell me it wasn't true. I remember once describing using a specific walker with missing pieces (wooden beads) as an infant and my aunt immediately said it was impossible because of something that turned out to itself not be true.

Over the past several years, my memory is actually not as good as it used to be, although it still seems to be much better than most of the people I'm ever around. The frustrating part is that no one will ever listen to the possibility that their memories are inaccurate, but my memories must always be inaccurate, even though I can often go back and check chat logs or e-mail where I described the situation the day it happened and confirm my recollection. I am not averse to the idea of being wrong, and have corrected myself when I was, but with some people I am never allowed to be right.

I have a downright poor memory. When you all talk about how good your memories are I tend to start doubting my ASD diagnosis. Although in college my math professor mentioned he was trying to memorize a bunch of digits of pi. I decided to show him up and memorized about 30 digits that day. I think it fried my brain. Let's see how much I remember...

3.141592653523 and that's it... My memory is gone.

I have almost no memory of events. Sometimes something will jar a memory but mostly there's just a void. It's like I started existing right now.

It seems that not so many people can "rewind" their memory and process the sensory information later. If I have seen a glimpse of an newspaper or a page of a book, I can later "rewind" and read, what it actually says on the page.

A friend of mine used to do tricks, like hide a clock without mentioning it, and then ask me, what time it was. Or he could move things around, and then ask where an item was. Others really thought I had some kind of supernatural talents

I can barely remember anything from my past But music does seem to connect me with some memories (like when I heard it) and some music brings up emotions... Not much other than that.

And to the OP, I also seem to better remember when I did stuff that was stupid/socially awkward. I sometimes dwell on such things but I try to forget them... IMO, sometimes the past is best left in the past.

To the Future

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I wonder if this is something to do with the idea that our emotional brain is not attached properly to our rational brain. For all events we have emotional and rational responses. The emotional one comes first, then the rational one resolves the emotional aspect of the event.

Perhaps we remember things clearly because our rational brain is still waiting to have the events resolved emotionally and because that cannot happen the memory remains fresh.

This seems to fit for me, but I wonder if others think so too?

I remember everything, including things the other people who participated in this or that event with me should remember but they don't, which makes me the only witness who still remembers. My mother claims that's because I don't have any serious problems and tasks to deal with which lets me concentrate on those trivial memories of trivial things and that if I lived a normal life ordinary folks do, I wouldn't have time to pay attention to them any more. But that's not true - that's just the way I am, regardless of the life I lead.

I remember everything: at what age I started to do something or got the understanding of some issue, the names of cats belonging to my grandparents with whom we lived when I was little, situations when, as a child, I found something interesting (pretty stones, a cactus someone thrown out and left in the street, from which I took it), the day when at the age of 8 I was in a bank where mom took me and where I saw a bald guy who was sleeping in his armchair but he looked to me as if he was dead and I kept staring to check if he was going to move but he didn't and I was too embarassed to ask mom such a silly question whether he was indeed dead to her too, another day, when as a child I saw in the street something that looked like a heart and I thought it was a human one (most likely it was one of a turkey, judging by its size), fragments of conversations, that very small hole in the wall of our bathroom that was there before we got piles and which looked like a small duck, cases of my losing my toys when I was a child (just a few cases, I always took care of my things well) - in short, I have very good memories on the details of my life.