Longish term cannabis dependency chiming in - not great.

If I need to remember something then it’s terrible. If I never need to remember it then it’s burned into my brain and can be retrieved with zero effort and without even knowing how I learned it. Maybe I’m one of them idiot savants.

I have repeatedly described my memory as ‘an etch a sketch held by a Parkinson’s patient’.

No joke, I opened this thread to comment on it last night and forgot until I saw it in my feed again today.

I started keeping a diary, and I found that helps. Something about writing things down helps encode memories, but then if you do forget you have a reminder.

In particular my gratitude journal is helpful. I often find myself in a state where I can’t think of a single good thing going on in my life. But then going through it I read about how a stray cat came to sit in my lap in the garden, and while I didn’t remember that before I read it the memories come flooding back.

My memory is pretty bad, I’m dyslexic and it affects my short term memory. So I take a lot of notes for things I need to do. If it isn’t written down it didn’t happen, or in my case won’t get done. My long term memory as a consequence is mostly big events and fun/bad stuff though I generally need a prompt to remember specifics. I usually have to check my phone if someone asks what I did last weekend and we are past Monday or Tuesday, I’ve slept since then you see.

If you need someone to remember completely useless trivia like Pokémon type matchups and the years of video game releases, I’m your guy.

If you want me to remember what I ate yesterday, I couldn’t tell you. If you want me to remember what cities I visited on my trip to Europe two years ago, I’d literally have to look at my notes; the specifics of my autobiographical memory, even for major events, quickly dissolve into a blur of impressions and images.

Once my boss, looking for someone to blame for some infraction, asked me “Did you work yesterday?” I couldn’t recall what I’d done the day before, so I started to “umm” while I thought about the schedule and tried to remember if I’d already had my days off that week, but I couldn’t bring it to mind… so I had to admit that I didn’t know. My boss said, disbelieving, “You don’t remember if you worked yesterday!?” I said, “You know, the days all blur together…” and he just shook his head and walked off to bother someone else.

The more unique a bit of knowledge is, plus the more interesting it was at the time, multiplied by how frequently you have thought about it since, is basically the formula for the strength of a memory. So a relatively uninteresting thing, you have done some minor variation of hundreds of times and haven’t really thought about since, is gonna take alot of effort to willfully recall. You would need some sorf of trigger to easily recall it, as triggering a memory is a much more powerful way to recall it.

You are normal, as you get older, even just early adulthood, more and more of your life will feel that way in hindsight. You don’t do as many super memorable things as you used to, and you just have more and more stuff packed into your brain. Makes it harder for individual memories to compete, more and more of them will just fade out as unimportant things you don’t prioritise remembering, or even recording in the first place.

You probably have heard people older than you remark that life goes by faster and faster as we get older, this is mostly the cause of that feeling. Obviously, time is moving the same speed, you are just making fewer important memories worth recalling.

If you went to a concert this week, you would probably have an easier time remembering what day it was, or what the drive to and from it was like. But if the whole week was TV shows, videogames and meals primarily designed to be thrown together for sustenance, none of it will be super memorable.

You can technically put effort into remembering even mundane stuff, just focus on it more as you are doing it, and repeatedly practice recalling it as you go. It might be a fun exercise for a week just to prove you can do it if you want to. But it would be alot of effort to keep up for longer. If you are otherwise happy with how things are going, no real need to change though. And if you do want things to be more memorable, find ways to do more unique things that you have an interest in and that are worth spending time thinking about afterward too.

Edit: me personally, As with most people in this thread, I have a very good long term memory, but a very bad working memory, and almost no willful recall, I generally leave visible reminders or set alarms for stuff I need to remember “tomorrow”. If someone asks me to do something, and I don’t do it within 15 seconds, I won’t recall that I was asked unless something triggers the memory. So I generally do stuff right away, but I am also easily distracted. And I don’t always remember that I need to warn people to re-ask me if it has been a minute or so and I didn’t do it, but I have slowly gotten better as it works into my rote/routine memory to sequentially trigger that response based on the incoming cue. Needs to be more consistent to become rote.

And yeah, Autism for sure, ADHD probable but haven’t checked.

I have the most minmaxed memory of anyone I know.

I can’t remember faces. Names. Barely remember people. Events? Psssh. My coats go missing. Jackets, hats, scarves, you bet I need to attach stuff to myself and keep a gruesomely detailed calendar.

But in school, I could remember concepts really well. Not individual facts, mind you, but concepts. So I had to learn in this sort of concept-first way to “guess” what the individual facts were. I don’t remember the name of the dinner I ate last night but I knew stats geometrically/sum-ly enough to re-guess the formulas I needed to know. History classes definitely got weird with this minmax though.

Tbf I think this style is actually an emerging phenomenon. Salman Khan spoke of an “inventing math” type of learning, and 3 Blue 1 Brown and that one MIT prof forgot his name made a brilliant repetoire for geometrically/conceptually training linear algebra. Makes me wonder what pedagogy will be like in two or four decades. Hopeful c:

I have very few memories unless something triggers them. I was worried about this so some years ago I started writing down what I did that day, every day, in the hope I would train my memory to remember things.

I make a new text file each day with the date and have about 6 years’ worth of them.

In case you’re wondering, my memory didn’t get any better but at least I can look up what I did if I forget. No joke this comes in handy more than you’d think.

BTW my armchair diagnosis is that my lack of memory is probably ADHD related.

I remember extremely accurately almost every significant detail from my life from a very early child. Everything thats ever happened to me of significance I remember in almost completely as if it just happened. I can’t remember every conversation word for word, but I can remember their general gist and key snippits of the conversation. Even the super emotional high energy ones don’t blur much.

I can keep track of every single one of my possessions and know exactly where they are. I spent much of my life learning and internalizing large amounts of knowledge with relative ease. Why yes I do have a STEM background how did you guess?

It gets incredibly exhausting keeping track of so many minute details, knowing so many general concepts and facts spread across most aspects of human knowledge. Having decades worth of old memories resurface every day as if they had just happened with the same emotional weight.

My ability to remember reserves a lot of space in my neural network. My mind feels taxed and spent in a way thats hard to explain. Every step of my existance from childhood to now a constant feeling of ever present continuity. I can ‘feel’ how the present iteration of my experience is intrinsically connected to everything I experienced the moment before.

Cannabis helps greatly with forgetting and getting into a meditative mode of being in the moment. Its so good to just be, pure meditative blissful vibing with here and now.

I’m probably wrong but:

Check your house for Carbon Monoxide.

Every time I eat, I forget what I last shit. Every time I shit, I forget what I last ate. It’s a very simple system called FIFO (First In First Out). Very low memory requirements…

I suspect I have SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory) syndrome, it could be you do too?

Not nearly as good as it used to be that’s for sure

I remember a lot of stuff but tying it to a specific day can be hard sometimes. Something I thought happened yesterday mightve happened like 3 days ago and a week out I’m pretty unsure unless it happened on a holiday or rent day or something. I can remember major events and random things from a long time ago though. Earliest memory I can muster up is crawling on some red carpet in my grandparents trailer. They moved out of that place when I was 1 year old