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You Must Remember This
On the nature of autobiographical memory [via]
posted by ellieBOA on Jun 07, 2026 at 12:52 PM
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I have a memory much like Jonathan's, but it is highly autobiographical and tied to the emotions I was feeling at the time, and I have found to my chagrin that if an episode or part of an episode didn't have much to do with me, for good or ill, then I don't recall it very well at all. This has caused problems for me in past relationships.
posted by infinitewindow at 3:47 PM
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I love this post. Odd that brothers could be so dissimilar in this unusual way.
posted by jognito at 4:14 PM
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Yes! Semantic memory and aphantasia go hand in hand.
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:19 PM
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I've always had very bad autobiographical memory. Perhaps not to the SDAM extreme, but almost nothing. My wife has excellent autobiographical memory and used to ask me all kinds of questions about my childhood or college or whatever and I could never answer because I honestly don't remember, and am continually surprised that she does. It's also always been weird to me reading MeFi comments that go into great detail about childhood experiences and the like. On the other hand my ability to mentally envision things is quite good, though I've never taken any formal tests for it so perhaps I'm just fooling myself.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:33 PM
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Since I've been living with my mom, she constantly, constantly, constantly keeps saying, remember this, remember this? She constantly describes the locations of places, businesses that went out of business 30 years ago, and every vacation she has ever been on. She remembers all of it vividly. Whereas I do not remember where anything is located, cannot remember the names of streets, and barely remember going on vacations in the first place. It's gotten to the point where I just say yes to every time she asks even though I don't remember, because otherwise she'll keep trying to jog my memory and that goes on forever and doesn't jog.
Meanwhile, she still can't remember to this day facts like the fact that I don't wake up hungry for a breakfast in the morning. And don't care if I have a breakfast. And that I don't like bananas. She will not remember facts like this for anything. Daily stuff, where she lost her keys, anything on a regular basis, God only knows if she will recall it.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:21 PM
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Excellent memory, like most people but mom was rehiding the syrup for week when I was two. I also sat by the stocking the next morning age 2.6 yrs, I didn't get the memo. A picture exists for that. No memory of it. The cross, so to say, between episodic and autobiographical was an old family tradition of going to North Carolina.
I was 2 and half when Pooh bear made me cry at Disneyland, there's a picture but I have the under current of memory changing as we drove to California that summer gone for 2 months. I have no solid memory and car even broke down in death valley. When we got to hollywood, Rickey Arnaz was stopped at our light and waved to me. id remember some of that.
Episodic memory and Autobiographical memory begins with the red clay.
We don't have that in michigan. I was 3 years, 2 months and I remember arrival and "were here", everyone's getting out and slow rolling and i saw a tower 60 yard away and made the beeline,
climbed 30 stairs, looked around and there's my dad talking me down like Roy DeSoto.
Down i come, mom takes a pic and I go see the red clay, a wall of it.
I remember beer and cards.
In my teens, pics were shown and I said, i remember that...your to young...but the fire tower...that's from a picture, the red clay wall and log cabin, you played cards and drank beer from cans.
How did you know it was beer.
posted by clavdivs at 8:43 PM
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Marilu Henner famously has the kind of memory where she can recall everything that ever happened to her in extraordinary detail (at this point she might be more famous for that than she is for Taxi) but she seems to regard it in much more positive terms than this article writer. Like, she talks about how she vividly remembers the deaths of her parents, but she also remembers them being alive so clearly that it's as if she saw them yesterday.
I remember some article or podcast years ago (I can't recall what it was, ironically enough) where they tried to investigate how Henner's memory works, and they ultimately concluded that she's just thinking about herself so much that she never forgets anything. They made it sound really narcissistic, like, it's not that your memory is so good, it's just that you're incredibly self-obsessed. It struck me as both unkind and possibly backwards: is it really that she thinks about herself so much that it gives her total recall of everything, or does having total recall of everything inevitably mean that she's constantly thinking about the details of her own life? I remember them talking about this idea with her and her seeming kind of taken aback, and saying, "So, I guess it's like I have OCD for my whole life."
My memory is poor where anything actually useful is concerned, but I can vividly recall stuff like the layout of a store that was torn down in the early 90s. The painful experiences tend to stick with me a lot more than the good stuff, much to my chagrin. I'm guessing Henner must be the naturally optimistic type, because I already sit around hating myself for dopey things I did when I was 16 and I don't think my life would be improved if I remembered more of that crap.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 8:59 PM
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This was fascinating; thank you for sharing it.
The author seems 100% confident in the accuracy and reliability of his vivid autobiographical memories, and I don't doubt that they are exceptional. But... I wish that in addition to the savants and HSAM cases he had talked about the plasticity of autobiographical memory: the way we replace directly recalled details with inference and reconstruction over time, the way our stories change to meet the ego needs of the present, the way a photograph that cues a memory can become the memory itself.
posted by sy at 3:34 AM
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This is a fascinating article and actually it brings up a thought I've had about how things work in my house. My memory for facts and events is largely visual -- I remember things I've read by their position on the page, I remember places I've been by the shape of the space -- but I strongly suspect it's not like that for my wife. When I put something away, I put it back in exactly the same spot that I found it. It's important to me for things to continue to be where they were because that's how I remember -- by picturing the location in my mind. She puts things back all willy-nilly because her concept is "this is a thing that goes in the refrigerator" and not "this is a thing that is on the second shelf of the refrigerator in the back, next to the jar of Better than Bouillon." Like I will eventually find a thing that's in the wrong place, but it drives me bananas.
I have a better-than-average memory overall, I think, but certain types of things just don't stick with me. One of my most glaring deficiencies is media I've consumed. I can finish a book and be entirely unable to describe anything that happened or name any of the characters. Even reading or watching something multiple times doesn't help in that regard. It's like my brain refuses to encode anything that hasn't actually happened. "Remember that episode where..." No, actually I do not. I mean I can tell you where I was when I watched it and maybe how it made me feel, but otherwise? Absolutely not.
It's incomprehensible to me that people remember all kinds of details about shows and movies and books and, honestly, always makes me feel really dumb when I know I enjoyed something but don't have a single thing to say about it. Like I can tell you what the movie theater looked like or whether there was an unusual word on a verso or recto page or near the top or bottom, but I cannot discuss with you any of the plot points because they have made no impression on me unless I have made a really significant effort.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:48 AM
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The author seems 100% confident in the accuracy and reliability of his vivid autobiographical memories, and I don't doubt that they are exceptional. But... I wish that in addition to the savants and HSAM cases he had talked about the plasticity of autobiographical memory: the way we replace directly recalled details with inference and reconstruction over time, the way our stories change to meet the ego needs of the present, the way a photograph that cues a memory can become the memory itself.
I have a very strong autobiographical memory, and recognized myself in the person quoted in the story who described it as being overwhelming and even unpleasant at times. I also recognized myself in the author's story about wanting to move a book, in a memoir, from one room of the house to another, and finding that he couldn't do it.
But I'm also interested in the way memory can't be trusted. Last fall, I went through a lot of old boxes and found journals dating back 40 years. I didn't read anything deeply, just glanced into things, and I found a record of an important conversation I had with someone back in 1999, which I have always rememberd.
The thing is, I vividly remember the conversation taking place with Deb, someone who has remained in my life and continued to be important. According to the contemporary account, it was actually with Becky, who moved away not long after that, whom I lost contact with, and whom I hadn't thought of in many years. At some point, I substituted Deb for Becky in my memory because Deb is more salient to me, and because the tenor of the conversation fit the relationship I have with Deb and her role in my life.
You've gotta wonder how much more of this kind of thing has happened to me.
posted by Well I never at 6:51 AM
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I made a new friend a few years ago who has very little autobiographical memory, and it's such a shame because he has led such an interesting life. He was once a New Orleans debutante, in the white dress and curtsying all the way to the floor and all of that. And that is literally everything he has to say about it, even though I, of course, want to hear the whole story.
He was once someone's live-in houseboy. He has exchanged sex for money. And that's all you're going to get out of him about those experiences. It's all he has of them.
posted by Well I never at 6:54 AM
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With respect to the accuracy (as opposed to truthiness) of TFA author's memory, note that he does make mention of the effects of "rehearsing" memories.
I think he knows plasticity, but that's not what he wants to pursue here.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:55 AM
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