Is a memory like this normal for an aspie?

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If I've been to a place for a while or multiple times I can walk around the place in my mind.

I remember EVERYTHING I find relevant.

@Ebonwinter -- my memory is like that too. There are parts of my hometown that I can walk through my memory. Though sometimes, what I've done is walk through those places in my mind while surfing Google Maps at the same time. It's a bit of an interesting, multidimensional thing.

@Pumibel -- Thank you for posting the link to the female aspie traits list. Very enlightening and informative. I was able to pick out quite a few of the traits that fit me.

Now what I didn't mention in my post yesterday was the auditory aspect. I usually do not remember conversations that well, in so far as details, thought I can give you a generic break down of who said what.

MUSIC...well that's a whole 'nother story. I have music in my head constantly. I've gotten used to this, and being able to forward and reverse through a song.

I have a photo/aural memory thing at times. I can flash on a time/place/event and remember every detail. Sights, sounds, scents, touch of clothing. It's not like that for every moment I've ever had, thank goodness, but when I flash I do remember the most insane little details - what color the salt and pepper dispensers on the table were, what was on the radio, how cloudy or not it was outside, what flowers were blooming, which way the wind was blowing. I can pull a few up at will, from my very earliest days 50+ years ago. I believe that as time has gone on this ability/gift has been muted simply due to the overwhelming amount of info to be stored. Still, if I smell something that reminds me of, say, my grandmother, I can flash back to a Sunday afternoon in 1965 in her kitchen (I can see the calendar on the wall) or some other scenario without really attempting to do so.

So, no, I don't think it's that weird. I have a friend who is not on the spectrum (by any means) who can do something quite similar.

I do also have an internal map thing in my head. Once I've physically been somewhere, I can navigate around there again many years later. Case in point, I moved away from my hometown when I was very young (before school). After an absence of 40 years I returned, and was able to quite easily get around and point out who had lived where, how to get to my siblings' schools, etc. When we would go traveling, when I was a toddler, I could always get us back to where we started when my parents got lost. They'd just ask, "Which way did we go" and I'd point where we'd been. I could backtrack like that through cities or woods, based on the internal map and landmarks.

Yep I have that too, I can go back to places and walk around (if I choose to do that), I can choose what I want to remember and what not, the sh***y thing is that I have such a selective memory that I don't save all things that were hurting (and for me
my life started to only hurt since I was 12) and when I was 19 I got severely abused for three years, I lost 2 1/2 years of that time. Actually I can only remember things in detail if I choose to do that, but most of the times I don't want to.

Everybody is good in some type of memory and bad in others. Autistics tend to be very good in declarative, episodic, and visual memories. They tend to be able to remember exactly what happened to them and when , or specific/trivial facts, or detail visual descriptions of objects.

Episodic memory stores factual knowledge of personal experience in a specific time and place.
Declarative memory is the aspect of human memory that stores facts.

My memory is about average, but my recall is bad. I can remember things alright once there is a good hint, but I can not recall something at will. I need to see something from the past, or remember a particular starting point before I can remember old things.

One should make the difference between recalling and remembering. Recalling means you can bring back elements of the past at will, while remembering simply means that you know you have experienced something before.

Ha, I thought I was the only one having that. It feels like I don't have any memory at all, but I believe it has to do with certain things having to bring it up, than I can think of old memories in clean detail and can walk around in the memory.

I have a scary, detailed memory too - I say scary because people just think I'm odd for remembering such things which go back over 30 years - I can't help it. It saddens me to know that the things which I keep in my memory are things which others have forgotten - why do I have to remember these things, good or bad, why are they "important" to me and nothing to others.

I'm very similar when it comes to unusual memory habits.

I have almost no memory for sounds, and my visual memory is below par. My short-term recall is beyond horrible. Despite all that, I can remember quite a bit. My declarative and conceptual memories are both excellent. I rely on them almost entirely. If I can't draw connections, I'll have no ability to remember something. If I can draw connections, it's going to stay pretty solid in my mind.

That's probably a big part of why my memory is so strong in the long-term, yet so weak in the short-term.

My memory is...just WEIRD. I remember facts just fine, better than fine. I can remember the birthdays of people I knew in elementary school, the face of my kindergarten teacher (I'm in my 40s), the phone numbers of ppl I called when I was a kid, zip codes from everywhere I've lived (which includes Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Texas, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Delaware), obscure medical facts, the words to a popular song from my childhood, stuff like that. But ask me to remember TO DO SOMETHING and my mind is a freaking sieve. I also do better with memory if I can draw some kind of logical connections.

~Kate

As I posted in another thread about Eidetic Memory: