Ask Lemmy

Mate, I look at it this way: if you've forgotten your memory, how would you know that you've lost it? You'ld just carry on.

There are people who exist with a syndrome where they have nearly perfect memory recall of their lived life and can remember nearly every moment of their lives very clearly.

Most of the people who live with it do not enjoy the experience.

Surprisingly, forgetting is a necessary and healthy thing, especially when it comes to things like traumatic experiences.

There's actually been several social scientists who claim that the permanent memory of the internet is extremely damaging to young people because they literally cannot escape every deeply embarrassing mistake they made in their youth. It follows them, haunts them, colors every aspect of their life, especially if the embarrassing moment causes bullying against the young person, leaving them constantly afraid of someone noticing them lest that person bully them for their past embarrassments. They advocate the idea that society and humans need to be able to forget to have healthy lives.

Not really. Just because you can't actively remember something doesn't mean it's lost. Just the pathways to that memory are not being stimulated at the time. There will be random times you remember something you thought you lost but the brain is resilient.

Start journaling now.

alzheimer's on both sides of family so its real possibility for me. that's a better fate than being sane and stuck to a chair with nothing to do like my great grandpa. There are worst fates. Control what you can like treating your body right. Its all you can do.

Yeah, I remember vividly waking up one day at the end of my teenage years and realizing that I almost completely forgot my childhood, now I just see flashes when I try to remember it.

It's why I don't believe in biographies, no way you remember your entire childhood.

Having medical first hand experience with this: your long term memory is safe. Don't be scared.

As someone with shitty memory: I forget a lot. Whole holidays, people, what I ate yesterday... I have always been that way, and so far I've been doing quite ok in life.

But while I forgot how it felt in a past, shitty job, I don't forget how I promised myself to never work for such a boss again. Or how 16-year old me decided to stay in school aftet trying out metalworking over a summer. I may forget how it was, but I rarely forget what conclusion I drew from it. And that is what defines me as a person, not that I remember the face of my condescending, stupid boss.

Also, while it sucks, my life is my present. My past might be entirely hallucinated, and I might be hit by a bus tomorrow. But now, here, I am alive.

Was in an abusive long term relationship. I remember as I was breaking out of it suddenly remembering things I was legitimately repressing. I hated that.

I will say though on the idea of the death of the current self, that is sort of inevitable and absolutely neccery for the future you to exist. Kind of like how us now are different people then when we are 5 years old, and that's a good thing, even if our existence at 5 was also a good thing.

The self is an illusion. If you want to be happy, forget.

Well if you forget them, you wouldn't remember them to forget them.

Though seriously, I find interviews, photos, videos even of people telling stories helps. It's the same idea that documentaries use to tell stories.

If you are referring to Alzheimer's then yes. Few things I find more terrifying than forgetting who I am. You gotta keep your brain in shape. Reading books, doing puzzles, and learning languages help with that.

I've found that you retain the important stuff, and unfortunately the embarrassing stuff.

Memory aids are a thing. So if a picture, song, smell, or object helps trigger a fond memory, then keep that thing around. Failing that, writing things down can help unlock the rest of a memory.

Music, and scent are the two main memory triggers though. If you can link a memory to one of those things then you're golden.

I'm not terrified, but I am a bit of a data hoarder and that includes my memories. So what I did was buy one of these things and now whenever I take my dog for a walk I record an audio log. I've got over ten years of them at this point. For most of that time it was just sitting stored in a folder as a bunch of audio files in subfolders by date, but in the past year or two thanks to the sudden advances in AI I've written up a Python script that transcribed them all and lets me search the transcripts. I'm expecting in another year or two I'll be able to feed all this into a local AI and be able to talk to it about this stuff.

So maybe start making logs like this, knowing that someday you'll be able to do some neat stuff with them.

I have ADHD. I don't even remember how many things there are that I've forgotten, so I'm not worried about having forgotten them.

The amount of stuff I have forgotten over the years is huge. The only way to I've found to remember stuff for events is to have a few photos that you look back on. Like the 3/5/whatever years ago that you get on photo apps.

You can get genetic testing for Alzheimers done; I lived with the Fear for many years until I got the testing done and found I didn't have the gene... such a relief. I'm still a forgetful fuck though

Memories fade.

Take tons of pictures and videos now. Make sure you have storage and backups.

When I was younger I didn't like taking pictures.

When I got older and had kids I didn't want to spend all my times taking pictures. We were "building memories" was my excuse.

Now all I have are memories, but those will disappear when I cease to exist. I don't like that one bit.

Meh, you won't know what you forgot. And when you die you won't know how it's all gone. Best bet is to have kids - tell them your stories when they're young (and can't runaway). They'll remember for a bit and tell their kids. In a way your memories will last forever.

No, but I had a coworker once who very much was. She coped by taking lots of pictures/videos and making sure they were stored in a well-organized fashion. Maybe consider doing something similar? If you want to hang onto internal mindstates, write a journal/diary.

I'm 51 and I have an astonishingly complete long term memory, I can remember parts of being 2 years old, and pretty much everything from age 4 onward. I mean not every single day in kindergarten or anything like that, but I have a pretty good grasp on what my daily life was like most of the time. I kept a friends only online blog for years, and when I've reread it, there's only bits and pieces I don't immediately remember, nothing significant, but when I read it I have good recall of what happened, it's just not immediately on the surface of my mind.

My short term memory is sometimes iffy, it's largely due to stress though from my violent ex, but it improves when I am feeling safer.

I think this is because I read so much.

I used to be worried about this.

Once when I was very young, I wondered if I could fix a moment in my memory and keep it for life - so I tried it.

Stupid result: I still remember that moment quite well, many decades later. It was a dumb boring moment. I'm sure I would have long forgotten, if I hadn't tried to keep it.

Now it is a precious memory of how I have always bent toward scientific method.

All that to say: memory works better and longer than I expected.

Sounds quite simple - if you are healthy, nothing to do. If you fear losing memories - write them down. Like, a diary or journal, but you now write down what happened in the past, how you saw it, how you experience it. That way you have memories written down. You can also over time re-read them and update and double check do you still remember them the same way you used to, or do your memories get "watered down" over time.

I read an article about how we don't remember events correctly and that's why I started writing a dairy. I've been writing almost every day now since 2016, sometimes just half a page, sometimes more.

Having this “backstory” (for lack of a better term), is what drives me forward, without those memories, like if I get a concussion and forgot everything, I wouldn’t really be… well… “me” anymore

Emotional memories is how we develop a sense of self. So if you are really attached to who you are then it will be terryfing to loose who you are.

But we can do really wacky stuff with our memories. We can delude ourselfs into makeing new false memories or misremembering them.

Also you constantly get new memories and change who you are, so you aren't the same person as you were years ago.

I have grown up without that sense of self and I had to sculpt one from the ground up. So I am not really terrified of loosing the sens of self as I can make one once again. It will be different but it will still be ME.

Write down your favorite ones, take pictures and get them PRINTED videos future you will thank you

You, me, and everyone else are the amalgamations and culminations of our individual life experiences. You don’t have to remember the details for those details to have happened and influenced you at the time.

I understand your concerns after having my first concussion almost two years ago now and unvaccinated covid three years before that. Both affected my cognitive state and speed of thinking/remembering, and I’ve wondered/worried how much weaker my mind may be than it could have been. But ultimately what I tell myself is that I can’t change those things, they’re just another thing that led me to now. All I can do is the best with what I have and trust that it will be enough.

But that’s just living with the doom and gloom. I think you may be surprised at what you do remember but can’t recall unprompted. One time I lost the game (I lost the game, sorry) around a friend of a friend who paused for a moment then exclaimed that it had been 15 or 20 years since he last thought about the game. So for all that time one could think he had forgotten, but as soon as something triggered his memory, it was there. Based on that, I advise that you trust that if you have a relevant memory, it will surface at the time it is relevant. Some level of self-reflection is good, but don’t let the reinforcement of old brain connections in memory stand in the way of forming new ones.

Memories are not permanent, it's not their nature.

Not really. Every day I refill on new stuff I can remember.

You got it right; losing your memories is essentially death. However, all humans die, so it's an all roads lead to Rome kind of thing. You could get a concussion and forget everything, or you could get run over by a car and die. There's no reason to give memory loss special treatment over other terrible things that could also happen to you.

No, but a lot of people I've met and encountered have a similar fear. Usually there's no way of assuaging said fears as its very very innate and understandable.

I guess I'm not scared cuz I spent a lot of my early adulthood smoking a lot of weed, drinking a lot of alcohol, doing some psychedelics, and participating in various other behaviors in an attempt to forget my somewhat traumatic childhood, in which I was only partially successful at forgetting.

After going to therapy for some time, I realized that traumas cut deeper than memories, and that there wasn't much to do but move forward with all of it integrated and try and do the best I can. It's an imperfect answer, but it's the best I got.

Because of this when I think about the horror of losing my memories, I kind have made peace with that losing memories is likely simply a part of death. Sure there's the horror of still being alive when it happens, but even if you believe in an afterlife, you likely can't hold onto every memory of life and your infinite afterlife, right? Unless you become God or something I guess, but then you have every memory of everything and everyone...which is...well probably kind of boring...so you split your consciousness off into other beings and live as other entities to keep things interesting until the end of time when you, as God, die... unless God also transcends time...but I'm meandering a lot at that point.

And yeah...it goes on like that...a kaleidoscopic rubix cube of making memories and forgetting them and fearing loss and accepting impermanence... eventually you come to accept it...until existential dread hits you from time to time, but you eventually get used to that being part of the whole being alive and existing thing too.

Or at least that's how my insane mind deals with it anyway.