I can remember and rap along to every word from Quiet Storm released by Mobb Deep in 1999. I can’t remember my high school graduation ceremony that took place a few years later.
I can remember Doug Bowman’s influential article on making nice-looking tabbed navigation written in 2003. I can’t remember any moments from the September day four years later when I got married.
I can remember the words to the lullaby my mom sang to me throughout my childhood, the same lullaby I now sing to my kids every night. I can’t remember any of the thousands of times my mom sang it to me, nor do I have memories of when my kids were born.
There are two types of long-term memory: knowledge of factual and conceptual information about the world (semantic memory), and memory of the events one experiences throughout a lifetime (episodic memory).
The simplest explanation I have for my condition is that my episodic memory is basically nonexistent.
In 2015, memory researchers from the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto published a study where they “had a rare opportunity” to speak with a handful of people with memory conditions similar to mine; people who held down very normal jobs and lived normal lives but just didn’t have any memories from their life.
The core takeaway of this research is this: the previously known group of adults with the uncanny ability to remember vast amounts of episodic details (e.g. what they had for dinner on a specific night years ago) are not on a single mountaintop of memory ability, they’re actually at the far end of a not-yet-fully-understood spectrum.
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People who can remember intricate details of their life experiences fall somewhere on the right side of that spectrum, and people who can’t are over on the left.
And on the far-far-left is me, with severely deficient autobiographical memory, also known as SDAM.
It’s hard to describe my “normal” since it’s the only thing I’ve ever known, but here goes: because I don’t have autobiographical memories, the window through which I experience and perceive reality is exceptionally narrow—really just a tiny slit.
I have RAM but no disk storage.
I experience now and then I experience a little bit after now and then a few hours or days later I no longer have access to any of it. The determining factor for the “hours or days” part is the imprint a moment left on me, for example, I’m writing this in the evening and I can’t tell you what I had for breakfast this morning because it wasn’t that important so my brain didn’t remember it. If I thought really hard and you put a bag of money in front of me and a gun to my head and gave me an hour to really concentrate… I still couldn’t remember.
“Maybe a bagel? I don’t think I used the toaster… did I?”
However, last week I went out to a nice restaurant with my wife and If I close my eyes and focus really hard I do have the faintest glimmer of a single frame of memory of the lasagna I ordered. I don’t have a video of the memory in my head: I just have a barely-formed solitary image that feels like it flutters away the instant I try to really focus on it.
And in a few days it’s likely that image in my mind of the lasagna sitting on a plate will be gone, like my memory of today’s breakfast. Gone, like my memory of my son’s recent soccer game. Gone, like my memory of my beloved childhood dog Shukie. Gone, like the memory of my first kiss.
I take a lot of notes. I keep a lot of lists. I take a lot of photos. I collect things that can help jog memories of my life—baseball cards, tchotchkes from old tech conferences, shells I collected with my daughter from the ocean. These artifacts don’t help me remember the moment I acquired them because I don’t have those memories, rather, they act as a bridge between my semantic memory (facts I know) and my life.
“I know that I got this lanyard at the last conference I attended before COVID. I don’t have memories of the conference, but I do know that it occurred and I was there and I had a great time and this lanyard is from that conference and I remember these facts and associate them with this lanyard.”
My home office is filled with stuff because I collect things that are important to me as a replacement for having actual memories. The things I collect are pointers to memory addresses, but since my memories are blank I can only cherish the pointers.