Memory Loss C/D?

there's no way to find out for sure though.

I have NO recall, not even flashbacks (and I've tried hard to remember it). He could be making it up for all I know, I'll never know for sure.

So yeah dud. Very scary.

Worse when, like Di said, you just forget things anyway even when not drunk :( I'm a sieve head.

Oh mind you, you prolly did get abducted by aliens, apparently they prefer drunkards so that the stories can be put down to alcohol!

Oh, trust me can you get drunk enough :/

Wasn't there that Simpsons ep where Kang and the other one abducted homer and then threw beer all over him before tossing him out of the ship so everyone would think he'd been drinking?

But surely that's totally classic?!

i am concerned that i have abnormally high memory loss. i'm sorry to say that i feel like i've brought this up before and revived some thread, but i can't remember if i did, or which one it was if so. i think that my memory was fairly good up through my teens - in fact, who knows, maybe it was really good. at one point i feel like i had the stats from the entire 1987 Topps baseball card series permanently imprinted in my thoughts. i have told the tale before, but in early college i got really drunk and then fell off of a high ledge and tumbled on and on for a while and landed in a creek and hurt my head pretty badly. i'm not sure if it's tied to that, but my memory has been pretty bad ever since. i've gotten used to it (like bad vision before a visit to an eye doctor), but every once in a while something comes up and i just feel awful. like a first kiss. or the first time you met someone. i want to remember, but i just can't. and at work, sometimes i'm put on the spot to remember the particulars of a meeting from the previous week, and...i just can't fucking remember what we decided. childhood is a complete haze, not just up to 5 or 6 years old, but pretty much...all of it.

and other times i'm completely fine, of course. so maybe i'm fine. or maybe something's terribly wrong. i don't know. i certainly don't believe in a god or gods that pay attention, or an afterlife, so this single life is all i have. and often while doing ridiculously inadvisable things i think to myself "at least the memory of this will be great, and i'll be able to keep that", but then what is that worth if 5 years later i lose that memory? there's no god, there's no reward system, there's no punishment system, there are no memories. so what is this? sorry to be melodramatic but seriously wtf?

anyway, i'm trying to figure out what to do. i feel like i've asked this before, and it's embarrassing. should i schedule some sort of appointment with someone? i don't really feel like paying $5000 for a headscan so that someone can tell me that i'm fucked anyway.

Are you me? I really feel like my general long term memory is fucked compared to normal people. My whole childhood is a haze, I also forget work decisions made a week ago, the other day it took me a good 30 seconds to remember what I was doing the night before, wtf. And I also hit my head badly when I was 19, slipped on a concrete floor by a swimming pool and went straight down, head hit the ground first - but there were no immediate effects, concussion or even a headache, and of course I can't remember what my memory was like before!

It doesn't bother me *too* much. My short term recall of numbers etc is great, I've realised at work I have to write shit down if I need to remember, have other coping strategies for general absent-mindedness which may or may not be related. Childhood, pff it was probably horrible or boring. The worst is when a good friend is all "remember when we did this?!" and I'm like ... no ;_; - this happened last night, apparently I've lost memory of a swathe of specific saturdays when just four of us would go drawing for a bit and then hit the pub, before we set up a meetup group. I can only remember things from the meetup era. It bums me out but I dealwithit.gif. No idea if this kind of thing is diagnosable and yeah I'm sure a 'cure' is not gonna happen.

I think if you really want to hold on to memories a diary is probably a really good idea, just to work as a trigger. I've done this for a couple of hols, also for the last couple of years I've kept my google calendar updated with a simple record of what I've done every evening.

i think to myself "at least the memory of this will be great, and i'll be able to keep that"

Not sure that's a good philosophy. Probably best to do things for their own sake rather than for a memory. I've never bought into the idea that a good old age is all about having great memories. The main issue is whether you're enjoying what you're doing now . If not, what benefits are you getting from it for the future (eg a better job, money) rather than a memory.

Wow, Z S, alot of what you wrote I could have written myselfl. For me it's largely psychological (although i did have a major head injury when i was a kid). It's standard stuff for ppl who are abused when they were kids to push those memories out of their consciousness, because it's too painful to remember. Actually this often occurred in real time as it was happening - your mind just goes to another place, and then you don't remember it later (dissociation). I spent years in therapy and even longer in online and real-life support groups for PTSD/dissociation issues that resulted from being routinely violated as a child; but my memory still is largely a black hole from age 8 to 13 which corresponds to when it occurred.

That all makes sense to me. But I don't get why I can barely remember from 2004 to 2010, which was amongst the best times of my life. Things I had never been successful at, suddenly I was, and so many unexpected things fell into place, and I felt like I was finally making a recovery from what what foisted on me as a young child. That's all gone now. I remember many of the things I did, it's the feelings I can't remember, or people I met during that time, or much of my social life, and it's frustrating. I can sometimes *vaguely* remember it, but it's as if it happened to someone else and I just read about it or something.

I have shorter-term memory issues too. Again, I do know I experienced these things myself, but it feels like I'm having fuzzy, vague recollections about things that happened years ago when in actuality they happened last weekend. Also, there are times I can't remember directions to some place I've been dozens of times. This sort of stuff happens to me all the time.

I often find myself having to reconstruct my past rather than actually remembering it.

I have a feeling that this sort of failure of memory is what people really are talking about when they talk about how life starts to whoosh by as they enter middle age. It has a lot to do with sensory overload and general stress. I'm sure alcohol gets involved pretty often, too.

Bullying thread is a good example of the "childhood haze". I strongly suspect I "experienced relatively light, periodic bullying at times" but cannot bring to mind any one specific incident or culprit. In fact I can probably count on one hand the number of names of people I can remember from school - all of it, from 5 to 18 years old - who I'm not still in contact with.

yeah, in my childhood haze i only remember getting picked on all the time (shortest kid in school, male or female, for about 8-9 years), and praying to god to make it go away. actual praying to what i thought was an actual god. but the actual incidents, the humiliating events, the locations, the context - most of that is gone. the only thing i vividly remember is a cowboy (middle school stereotype in my rural school, but for real this kid was soon to be a cowboy) standing behind me as i worked on a computer simulation of a bridge, and hocking up a giaaaaaaaant loogie and dropping it right on my head. turned around and he just smiled and said Haaaww. pretty sure there was chewing tobacco in the spit, too, because even after washing my hair in the restroom for like 4 minutes my hair was STICKY.

anyway this is the memory loss thread and not the bullying thread, but that's the only event that i can remember really specifically, and even with that, i don't remember who was laughing at me along with the cowboy, or the kid's name, or anything.

Going thru my brain trying to remember names, I got one! Ras Griessenb0ck! How could I forget!

(not a bully fyi)

hey z s, i was thinking about your post a day or two ago, i wondered if this might be a cool thing for you to read: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/20/magazine/mind-secrets.html?_r=0
i haven't read it but remember hearing about the book maybe a year ago. the guy is writing about how we used to be able to memorise a lot, phone numbers, directions, but how now we needn't, because we can outsource certain things to phones, &c. he set himself the task of actively improving his memory, i think with exercises & just general smarts obtained by guys who win remembering competitions, & did well/became the best/proved it could be done, &c. i don't know, i wondered if reading a kind of pop-science book about memory which maybe offers some flashy improve your remembering! type exercises might be useful, like mainly just diverting but also with the potential to bestow you w/ some sense of control over something that's bugging you.

I have a feeling that this sort of failure of memory is what people really are talking about when they talk about how life starts to whoosh by as they enter middle age.

There was an interesting piece in the New Yorker a while back about the work of David Eagleman:

One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. "This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older," Eagleman said—why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we're dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/25/110425fa_fact_bilger?currentPage=all

Lately time has been just rushing past unbelievably fast for me and it's true that every week is now basically the same, very few new experiences to take in.

(sorry to post something which totally has nothing to do with Z S's post, which sounds like a heavy thing to deal with. sorry Z S)

heh, i forgot that i had revived this thread a couple years ago, ba-dum-dum ting.

update: i finally managed to attempt to do something about it earlier this summer. i scheduled an appointment with a neurologist (which began bizarrely as they mixed up my paperwork with another man with my name, who apparently recently moved away or died or moved away and died. lots of weird eye contact with recordkeeping division staff). the neurologist asked me what i was doing there but didn't really have any advice or plan of action. i decided to just pretend like i was a neurologist and requested an MRI and "neurological baseline testing", a term i made up on the spot. half an hour later i had referrals for an MRI and "neurological baseline testing", so either i guessed really well or my neurologist isn't a neurologist, either.

i'm supposed to complete both tests and then schedule another appt. with my fake neurologist. i managed to complete the MRI (another bizarre appointment, as i waited around the completely empty registration desk for 15 minutes past my appointment and thought everyone was perhaps fired. after asking around and finally locating anyone who could help me, deep within the bowels of the neurology department, i was chastised by the staff for not boldly walking through the door labeled "DO NOT ENTER" on my own volition in order to locate them). the "nuerological baseline testing" has been a disaster. i was supposed to call a specific phone # to schedule an appointment. i called the number about 10-15 times over the course of 3 weeks and left numerous messages, but no one ever called back. i visited the department in person, twice, in the middle of the day, and no one was ever there. i walked across the hall to the adjacent department to ask if everyone in the psychology dept was fired (i didn't really ask that), but they just picked up the phone and shook their head and pointed at the door. i got really angry at the absence of god and even moved their waiting room couch so that it sat directly in front of the empty registration desk (a bottom-10 low for me) but that didn't fix things, either, for some reason. finally, a week later, i called yet again and someone picked up. i asked if i could make an appointment but she told me i had the wrong department. i was advised to call the original fake neurologist back and ask him to make the appointment for me (?).

in conclusion, never go to kings county hospital in brooklyn

i'm into the idea of being my own fake neurologist now, though. i might make up some memory tests that all involve completing classic videogames, somehow, and then i'll ruthlessly follow a memorytesting regimen over the next few years, beating these games over and over and remembering the classic details of these classic games as i go. once i'm done with that i'll call Acme MRI company (or wherever i got the MRI from) and ask them to give me results using as many acronyms as possible, and preferably without providing the units for any numbers. i'll go ahead and get the MRI results for the dead guy with my exact name, too. then i'll go looking for an appropriate thread on ILX and remember that i had already posted about it, sort of, way back in 2015

jeez man

i was on a run of losing things at the beginning of summer -- my dead uncle's hat, pocket radio, etc. No idea if it was a meaningful pattern or not.

the art of losing isn't hard to master

i got really angry at the absence of god and even moved their waiting room couch so that it sat directly in front of the empty registration desk (a bottom-10 low for me) but that didn't fix things, either, for some reason.
<3

i forgot about everything that happened upthread

here is a cool quote from chris marker, the reason i revived:

“Memory is not the opposite of forgetting but its lining.”