But that person was trying to say memory errors are some kind of special "magical" error, which is simply wrong. Memory errors are merely logical errors. There is nothing "special" or "mysterious" about them.
> But I have a good memory and I trust it much more
Note that "a good memory" doesn't "scale" or remain constant over time. Plus more importantly you are assuming that something minor or major won't happen to you where for some reason you aren't able to remember things very clearly like you thought you would be able to.
> For Emily, it was validation that she wasn’t, as she puts, it “weird.”
Being one of only like 100 people with the same superpower? Yes, not weird at all :P
Wasn't there some theory that we forget things slowly in order to keep us sane or something like that? Given that these people have perfect recall and remain completely normal and functional far more likely makes it an unintentional fault that needs fixing than an evolutionarily selected-for attribute.
> Those with superior memory remember the good, but they will also never forget the bad. They feel the pain as if it were today. Some with HSAM struggle with anxiety and depression as a result.
Yeah and so do lots of the rest of us, doesn't seem like that much of a correlation.
“I have spoken to many memory competitors who can perform astounding feats and yet they say they can be quite forgetful in daily life, like the rest of us,” he says. “They are not generally using their techniques as they walk around the world any more than you or I are.”
> Of course the human brain routinely stores memories which are vastly larger than 56 bits.
Usually because they are LOW-entropy. Spelling rules, grammar rules, rhymes, shared culture, all of those things erode any utility they may have had as random or unpredictable.
> It seemed the secret for me was to trust my memory had the number in working memory somewhere, rather than trying to persist it my concious stream of thought which inevitably garbled it.
That happens to me too! PIN keys, or bank passwords I know I know, if I try to think to remember them, I'm unable to remember them correctly. Instead, just seeing the input interface, blank my brain and I start pressing keys... And I write them down perfectly!
It is probably not a defect of memory but a difference in the way minds work. What you have done is committed the typical mind fallacy.
One example is imagination. Some people can have really vivid imagination, being able to count the strides on a tiger. Others have no ability to do imagery at all. Most are probably in-between.
In my case, I can't really impose my imagination over reality as if I am viewing a movie. Let just say they like viewing at reality and imagination every other frame.
> I personally prefer the idea, that your memory qualitatively changes in spite of language acquisition, you get another (upgraded) way to access your memory, and then you forget the old (legacy) way. I like this explanation because my own memories from the time I was ~3 yo are strange (conditionally on I could reproduce them well and not to invent things), they are almost eidetic.
I think people stick too much to the idea that human memory is kinda like computer memory.
"Remembering" trauma could also mean that the brain's structure changes in some way as a result of trauma without necessarily recording how the event exactly went.
Reminds me of a video of WW1 shell shocked soldiers I saw recently. It's not the exact memory record of the events which broke those men. Something more profound changed in their brain.
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