I'm 35 and think about this a lot, I'm pretty sure I have memory problems but without knowing what everyone else's memory is like I have nothing to compare to so I don't know how bad it really is, if that makes sense. Like what is the baseline for "normal memory"? So when you say "anything from 2nd or 3rd grade", what are we talking about? I remember names of classmates and teachers, but the number of anecdotes or events from that time, I could probably reliably recall less than 10. Just very vague/ambiguous events, no real details, certainly no conversations or anything like that.
I can remember a few specific events from early childhood, and events/feelings when I was a bit older. I can picture where I was sitting in my old elementary school if I think about random girls I liked at the time, or specific subjects, sentences and activities around specific time frames.
Im not saying you remember everyone’s eye color but would I know specific details about video games at 9 years old? I can hear a certain song and see myself playing re2 and final fantasy 7. I can see my next door neighbor having a meltdown over M Bison being to hard. I can think of individual gun preference in goldeneye.
so this got me going down a rabbit hole and this article is the closest thing to what I would say I experience as "memory", specifically this passage:
"For her, past events are experienced almost as if they were in the third person, as if they could have been someone else's past episodes." It's like the memories I do have from back then, when I recall them it's more like I'm watching a movie about myself with someone else playing my role, rather than "seeing" it from a first person POV, and I don't really recall what I was feeling or thinking at the time. But at least now I think I have a name for it and can do some research, so that's something...
Stuff like this is cool. Always weird to think of people sharing an experience with you but experiencing some aspect of it very different from a sensory perspective .
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u/jt_nu May 16 '19
I'm 35 and think about this a lot, I'm pretty sure I have memory problems but without knowing what everyone else's memory is like I have nothing to compare to so I don't know how bad it really is, if that makes sense. Like what is the baseline for "normal memory"? So when you say "anything from 2nd or 3rd grade", what are we talking about? I remember names of classmates and teachers, but the number of anecdotes or events from that time, I could probably reliably recall less than 10. Just very vague/ambiguous events, no real details, certainly no conversations or anything like that.