I have HSAM, highly superior autobiographical memory.
I am technically the thing the authors of the paper are trying to create; the human-alien hybrid.
One of the things I did most when I was a child was emphasize the importance of good sleep and dreaming.
As a result, I dream every night. Vividly. Lucidly. I also can remember essentially everything that has ever happened to me, or around me, like a video camera set to record on an infinite hard drive.
That being said, I don’t believe my brain is special. I don’t think this is a genetic quirk, or a fluke - a ghost in the programming.
I think everyone has the ability to form their brains into something like this, starting from early childhood, but simultaneously, I don’t think modern industrial civilization would survive this.
Humanity has a distinct advantage of knowing and being cognizant of its death at all times, and mercifully, forgets about this until their final years.
Giving everyone this ability would make society smarter, but I suspect they would respond to it by dulling their senses – self-medicating with marijuana and alcohol to cope with the gaping maw of wasting their fully lucid, fully hyperburning stardust on making some rich fuck richer.
Hypothetically, if you were asked to describe what garments a person was wearing when they crossed your path, would you be able to recall that? Or, would it be necessary that you were actively paying attention at that time in order to recall such information?
Yeah; it depends on the day. I’d say the recall is limited to my 140° of forward field of view, and really minor details get deleted, blurred or smeared.
I live in a major city, and pass literally, not figuratively thousands of people every day, so my memory is crammed full of ostensibly millions of people at this point. I don’t remember all of their outfits, but I can visualize a memory of say, riding on the subway, and remember almost every person and where they were sitting, and a rough approximation of what they were wearing.
A more unusual outfit would be more memorable, for instance, I had a friend who got a well-paying job, we met up at a convention, and he wore a purple shirt with a mosaic pattern on it. That was in 2015, but I can remember his exact appearance, haircut, the day of, and the shirt because of how unusual and uncommon purple Oxford/business shirts are.
I want to say my memory accuracy is around 88% on aggregate, with the highest quality memories being 96% accurate. Every time I touch a memory, I risk modifying it, so I whiteglove everything, and make sure to not overwrite any information. This is especially hard when reading childhood data because it was literally encoded by a consciousness that was still learning the English language, for ex.
In other words, what I’m trying to say is, my memory is reliable up until there is a lot of crowding. Extremely rich scenes or thousands of people together simultaneously makes it a lot harder, and while the recall is there, up to 10% of the data might be lost.
That sounds like how I believed my memory worked, I used to think it was extraordinarily exact and I was some kind of savant.
But out of curiosity, I set up a test where I recorded a boardgame session with my friends. After we finished playing, we sat and wrote down our memories of that time with as much detail as possible, in a different room and with no input from others, and then watched the recording.
I was broadly correct in my recollections and able to correctly paraphrase others, but whenever I went into detail my recollections were incorrect more often than not.
Turns out, I was gifted at bullshitting myself, lol. My friends and I had a great time executing that little test, we laughed a lot and learned about each other.
Have you ever conducted a test on yourself like the one I conducted?
Yeah; I’ve run similar tests and my working memory is exactly average, which is where my belief that the ability to store long term memories permanently is available to everyone.
For extra long memory validations, I’ve got photographs, and I also leave “memory checkpoints” in the real world, like landmarks in the slipstream of time, or physical objects in vaults that I can reference.
They’re important for the continuity of self, but also to have empirical anchors of “real” objects:
I have friends from elementary school who I routinely will try to find and ask them about stuff from third grade.
The vast majority of them have no idea who I am – I ran this experiment a few more times with people from middle school and high school, and then college.
I have determined that the average long-term memory for human being is 7 years.
After 7 years you basically get deleted from their memory and while you can prompt their long-term memory it’s a bit almost like memory implantation you’re giving them information about something which may or may not be true.
E.g: “Remember that hot air balloon ride we went on when we were six?”
“Haha, yeah I remember.”
“Really? Because that’s some bullshit I just made up there’s no hot air balloons in the city.”
My brother has a pretty amazing memory for events when we were growing up, but he also wrote in a calendar every night, synopsizing the day’s events. And he enjoyed reading those calendars regularly. Now, at almost 70 years old, he can still remember details of vacations we took when we were young, and I’m certain it’s because of that journalling he did.
TLDR: I agree with you
I have HSAM, highly superior autobiographical memory.
I am technically the thing the authors of the paper are trying to create; the human-alien hybrid.
One of the things I did most when I was a child was emphasize the importance of good sleep and dreaming.
As a result, I dream every night. Vividly. Lucidly. I also can remember essentially everything that has ever happened to me, or around me, like a video camera set to record on an infinite hard drive.
That being said, I don’t believe my brain is special. I don’t think this is a genetic quirk, or a fluke - a ghost in the programming.
I think everyone has the ability to form their brains into something like this, starting from early childhood, but simultaneously, I don’t think modern industrial civilization would survive this.
Humanity has a distinct advantage of knowing and being cognizant of its death at all times, and mercifully, forgets about this until their final years.
Giving everyone this ability would make society smarter, but I suspect they would respond to it by dulling their senses – self-medicating with marijuana and alcohol to cope with the gaping maw of wasting their fully lucid, fully hyperburning stardust on making some rich fuck richer.
Hypothetically, if you were asked to describe what garments a person was wearing when they crossed your path, would you be able to recall that? Or, would it be necessary that you were actively paying attention at that time in order to recall such information?
Yeah; it depends on the day. I’d say the recall is limited to my 140° of forward field of view, and really minor details get deleted, blurred or smeared.
I live in a major city, and pass literally, not figuratively thousands of people every day, so my memory is crammed full of ostensibly millions of people at this point. I don’t remember all of their outfits, but I can visualize a memory of say, riding on the subway, and remember almost every person and where they were sitting, and a rough approximation of what they were wearing.
A more unusual outfit would be more memorable, for instance, I had a friend who got a well-paying job, we met up at a convention, and he wore a purple shirt with a mosaic pattern on it. That was in 2015, but I can remember his exact appearance, haircut, the day of, and the shirt because of how unusual and uncommon purple Oxford/business shirts are.
I want to say my memory accuracy is around 88% on aggregate, with the highest quality memories being 96% accurate. Every time I touch a memory, I risk modifying it, so I whiteglove everything, and make sure to not overwrite any information. This is especially hard when reading childhood data because it was literally encoded by a consciousness that was still learning the English language, for ex.
In other words, what I’m trying to say is, my memory is reliable up until there is a lot of crowding. Extremely rich scenes or thousands of people together simultaneously makes it a lot harder, and while the recall is there, up to 10% of the data might be lost.
That sounds like how I believed my memory worked, I used to think it was extraordinarily exact and I was some kind of savant.
But out of curiosity, I set up a test where I recorded a boardgame session with my friends. After we finished playing, we sat and wrote down our memories of that time with as much detail as possible, in a different room and with no input from others, and then watched the recording.
I was broadly correct in my recollections and able to correctly paraphrase others, but whenever I went into detail my recollections were incorrect more often than not.
Turns out, I was gifted at bullshitting myself, lol. My friends and I had a great time executing that little test, we laughed a lot and learned about each other.
Have you ever conducted a test on yourself like the one I conducted?
Yeah; I’ve run similar tests and my working memory is exactly average, which is where my belief that the ability to store long term memories permanently is available to everyone.
For extra long memory validations, I’ve got photographs, and I also leave “memory checkpoints” in the real world, like landmarks in the slipstream of time, or physical objects in vaults that I can reference.
They’re important for the continuity of self, but also to have empirical anchors of “real” objects:
How do you determine what the average long term memory storage is?
Also, what up with the pic, lol?
I have friends from elementary school who I routinely will try to find and ask them about stuff from third grade.
The vast majority of them have no idea who I am – I ran this experiment a few more times with people from middle school and high school, and then college.
I have determined that the average long-term memory for human being is 7 years.
After 7 years you basically get deleted from their memory and while you can prompt their long-term memory it’s a bit almost like memory implantation you’re giving them information about something which may or may not be true.
E.g: “Remember that hot air balloon ride we went on when we were six?”
“Haha, yeah I remember.”
“Really? Because that’s some bullshit I just made up there’s no hot air balloons in the city.”
My brother has a pretty amazing memory for events when we were growing up, but he also wrote in a calendar every night, synopsizing the day’s events. And he enjoyed reading those calendars regularly. Now, at almost 70 years old, he can still remember details of vacations we took when we were young, and I’m certain it’s because of that journalling he did.
That’s incredible, and a great way to do it!