Yes I've had a lot of trouble with working memory. At secondary school it got so bad that I couldn't remember the first part of a sentence by the time I got to the end - even if it was my sentence that I was creating. I suspect that a knock-on effect of that was that I couldn't work out what was wrong with me, because it was actually impairing my thinking. All I could figure, at one time, was that "I forget...." - that's as far as I could fathom it.
Strangely, it's come and gone a lot. I was well able to remember the names of all my classmates right up to the time I left school, but as an adult I have a lot more trouble recalling people's names. Possibly one factor is that when you're young, people's names are often unique, there's often nobody else you know with the same name, but later on you find people with the same names as other people you've known, which somehow interferes with remembering. The whole thing gets kind of arbitrary, like the names of compounds in organic chemistry. If that makes any sense. I also have trouble remembering number strings, for the same reason, it's just the same 10 tired old digits recycled in a different sequence that has no meaning to me. Though it's a common Aspie skill to remember car number plates - go figure! I couldn't remember my own phone number for years.
If I go to another room to get something, I often forget what it was by the time I get there.
I've often hated to have to wait for others to finish what they're saying before I say my piece, and it does seem to be because if I wait and listen to them, my thought will vanish.
I can't follow fast-paced conversation, but I thought that was a focus problem. They say one thing, and I don't notice the next thing they say because I'm still musing over their first point, and I get hung up on it completely if there's anything I don't quite get about it.
I'd be in deep trouble if I had to summarise the plots of the TV dramas I've watched.
What helps? I think some of the tips on that very website are quite good:
https://www.understood.org/en/school-le ... y-boosters
One thing that seemed to help me was to stop smoking cannabis,though I'm not suggesting that you're doing that!
Keeping calm was also helpful. An anxious state can stop my mind from focussing, and when I don't focus on a thing, naturally it won't enter my memory. And often when I've walked into another room to get something and seem to have forgotten what it was I had to get, I've just calmed down and gently tried to recall it, and it's come back to me. I think the information is often in there, it just takes a little while to come back to the surface, perhaps because of the way Aspies think. It's tempting to imagine the memory is gone if it doesn't come straight back instantly.
I also began to recognise when I was about to need my short-term memory for something, and I would simply try to make the item more vivid in my mind for a few moments, which helped.
05 Jul 2015, 4:33 pm
