Tell Me: How Do You Experience Memory?
Over the past week and a half here, I’ve written three posts relating numerous experiences from my past. In therapy today, I wondered how a random third-party would feel after reading those posts if I told them I have some degree of severely deficient autobiographical memory.
I’ve talked a lot, both in posts that have made it over here and posts that have not yet, about aphantasia and SDAM, and this site is sort of the go-to resource on the latter. The discussion in therapy made me realize I don’t really know how other people experience the thing we call memory. In those three posts, I described a fairly large number of specific events from different periods of my life. Consistent with SDAM, per the above, my limitation “is confined to the subjective re-experiencing or reliving of personal past events, even though memory for the facts of those events is intact”.
What I’m wondering now is whether people with more typical memory function recall whole continuums of experience, or whether they recall just specific events. For instance, I mentioned having spent just over two weeks in France when I was younger. I can recall a handful of specific events but not the entire continuum of the trip. Is that true for others?
I mean here something different, I think, than the SDAM, which is about the actual re-experience of memory as opposed to awareness of “the facts of those events”. When it comes to those facts, do you recall discrete events or the entire breadth of the experiences which contain those events?