[istorical]

Hi there, just commenting to say that I have been struggling with this the past few years and I have never seen someone describe how I felt so accurately. I'm about 30 but I remember starting to feel this way around the time I was in college, part of me is scared I damaged myself with binge drinking / pseudo-alcoholism in my early 20s. But I was always a cram-for-tests-then-forget-literally-all-of-it person in highschool and college, so maybe not.

I've been wondering if I am too 'in the moment' and don't do enough self-examination of the past. It seems some people get stuck replaying conversations or events over and over and thinking about them, whereas I do that almost not at all. I wonder if that rumination / self-examination is a core part of the memory forming process. I also wonder if aphantasia is related as I lean towards the non-visual end of the spectrum, or sort of a quiet / subdued inner monologue as I am the type that prefers to speak aloud to myself to think things through rather than silently ponder, not to say that I can't think silently. I also wonder if there's some need for idle time in the brain, and if our constant stimulation via content in the form of news, reddit, youtube, podcasts, etc. is deleterious to memory formation because my brain doesn't get any boredom or downtime. Perhaps that downtime is necessary for memory formation. I also wonder if my daily coffee habit might worsen it, or my once or twice a week moderate alcohol intake. Those are two things I should probably give up but it's really hard. I've also considered getting rid of my smartphone or going to a dumbphone to see if my brain uses the periods of boredom to do something useful and my memory improves. But that's such a hard decision to pull the trigger on as a digital addict.

Have you made any efforts to combat this by doing introspection or making daily attempts to recall or remember or store information? I haven't actually taken any steps to address this condition but it's been feeling more urgent and deserving of intervention. Have been considering a daily journaling habit to see if writing down biographical events will help cement them in my memory (and to have the artifact to go back and get info from). I also wonder if memory is a muscle and when one doesn't exercise 'remembering' their autobiographical information if that muscle weakens, and then perhaps the memory-write step also decays as well due to disuse/lack of need.

For the most debilitating part of this is having to relearn something that a coworker told me or explained a week or a month or six months ago, which I find embarrassing or insulting to them, and then the other thing is not being able to remember who I told what information to or I'll remember a personal detail or story someone told me on a date but then not be sure what individual told me the detail or story. Like 'is this the girl who told me her father died when she was young or was that my friend or another person I went on a date with last week'. It makes me feel like they will think I don't care about them when I can't remember important things they shared like being abused or something about their family. I've started taking notes on new people I meet and adding hobbies we have in common, things I like about them, etc.

edit: one other thing I thought of, it may be worth getting a sleep study done. could be a deficit of some part of the sleep cycle.

And another thing is, I wonder if this is hereditary as I remember as a child my father would forget what foods I liked and disliked and I'd have to always remind him and I felt so confused and like he had no memory, and my grandma would behave similarly. There'd be moments where I felt like they were really stupid, but now I look back and feel like maybe they had the same experience I do. Or there'd be situations that I look at now and think 'he couldn't remember whether something was true about me or true about my brother, but he remembered that one of us did / said / had that property'.

[servytor]

I am glad to have found someone suffering from the same issue. I have been stuck like this since the beginning of high school I think.

I live in the moment in the worst way possible as well. I am not looking looking at myself critically either. I do believe active rumination of conversations, events and what you learn is incredibly important, but for me I cannot do it whatsoever. Recalling a conversation in detail is almost impossible, it is like my brain is there to just hear specific things I can act on, such as "Jira ticket". I suffer from aphantasia as well as you. I think media, entertainment and browsing the internet has become a substitute for thinking, as it is certainly true for me. I do not listen or read critically. To me, that means constantly asking yourself what that person is really trying to say, what are they trying to lead you to believe, what assumptions are they making, and most importantly why they are saying it. I understand critical thinking and listening can be done, but I am just so passive in my thinking. I am definitely a digital addict as well, and I find myself going to ycombinator and reddit without any conscious thoughts, it is just a motorized habit.

I have not thought of doing daily attempts at introspection. I remember reading about how for some people their nightly habit was getting in bed and replaying the days events, and I had never thought of that until I read it. Usually I just zone out as much as possible trying to fall asleep immediately. I am a strong believer as you are that the brain is a muscle, and that what you do not practice you do not better in, at least when it comes to recollecting. I remember reading about how people revisited memories that made them happy, and I never do that. It makes me feel terrible to think how I could have been focusing on good memories, instead of seeming to have some primordial fear of ever accessing my autobiographical memory.

I know what you mean when it comes to remembering things people tell you. Someone I know used to say that if you forget it means you do not care, and it just made me feel horrible all the time. I have forgotten about many important things that I care about, and it pains me deeply.

I hope you find out your own solution to the issue.

[sjg007]

Go to a doctor and get a memory test done, they know a lot about this stuff. Also you might consider getting tested for ADHD. Also you might have in general high stress levels. Stress inhibits memory formation. A neuropsychological assessment would not be a bad idea.

I can't recall specific conversations either. The brain long term is also designed to forget things that don't make an impact. So one way to make things stick is to add an emotional component (but not too much). A lot of people for a long time remember exactly where they were on 9-11 or some significant event. But also remember that memory is fungible and what people think happened maybe did not. I thought I failed AP calculus and in fact the opposite was true.

You are not wrong about information overload though. I imagine a lot of folks distract themselves from something and then forget to go back to it. Some of that is normal aging. Again since you mentioned high school, get assessed for ADHD. I have to write things down because I will forget them. I have to use a calendar w/ reminders because I will forget about meetings all the time. When I was younger I had no problems.

Introspection is a skill people need to learn. It is related to planning and organization.. so executive function (again ADHD). But you are also demonstrating introspection by examining your own memory.

Also alcohol and substance abuse impairs memory but to the other poster, if you've stopped drinking you will find your memory largely returns. There is probably a cliff in terms of neuronal death but your not likely there due to the fact that you can participate on Hacker News and are otherwise functional.

[exikyut]

> I have been stuck like this since the beginning of high school I think.

There's an oft-repeated notion in the autism-spectrum community that around the puberty period (13-15 perhaps) a bunch of otherwise normal shifts that the brain goes through kinda tweak out a bit because of the autism and the mass-defragmentation process can sometimes end up culling important bits and pieces that are generally Important™. It seems that sometimes this can be unconscious stuff sadly (I generally hold that my memory got a lot worse around that period, which I incidentally don't remember too well too).

Also, just as a... thought experiment, and just for reference, there's a very important focus distinction that I personally only really twigged to the existence of (let alone importance of) quite recently, that being the difference between active/concerted focus and relaxed focus. The former is front-and-center cause-and-effect, while the latter is more "in the zone" and meditative. I've realized that the brain shifts between both models subconsciously for example as part of daydreaming, but that consciously identifying those splits can be as useful as they are tricky. For example, for me, reasoning about something just a step or two beyond my current frame of reference requires using relaxed focus, as the thing I'm thinking about will just fizzle out and I'll find myself thinking about something else. In the same vein I find that focusing on the idea that I'll be able to concertedly do something, and see it through, beyond first-order acute focus, also requires reasoning about the capabilities and capacities of relaxed focus.

I hilariously got my current mental model of relaxed focus from a ferret training book :D I happened to leaf through a few years ago. It explained that when training a ferret it can be useful to put a leash on it and use the leash to anchor it to your lap, not allowing it to jump down and explore. Only once it has accepted the situation it's in will it kick into idle gear (relaxed focus) and, ferrets being ferrets, it'll most likely curl up and promptly fall asleep.

My point here is primarily to illustrate the direct link between relaxed focus and introspection, and to point out that if you're using "this is everything" acute focus the entire time for all the things that you may have trained your brain out of leveraging relaxed focus. It's also very possible that internal imbalances and/or chronic disorientation from perpetual micro-reorientation (from ADHD / autism) might (I personally found this was the case) perpetuate a state of mind that doesn't settle enough to access this sort of thinking pattern.