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.
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!