How Bad Is It to Forget Someone's Name?
Possibly something better discussed with a psychologist, but I’ll throw it out there.<p>Often I wonder if “memory” is a skill that I never properly learned. It seems for me that simply remembering an arbitrary past event in any significant detail isn’t really possible.<p>Only if it’s a story I’ve retold on several occasions (and likely by now as much fiction as non) am I able to retain a firm grasp on a particular past event.<p>Forgetting names or faces? They slip away almost instantly, and holding onto them is like trying to carry water across a room in my hands.<p>Childhood is more like an abstract notion. If asked to write about it, certainly I remember basic facts but they are as much deduced as they are seen in my minds eye. A few moments here and there—again, probably stories that I retold at some point—but mostly anything firmly in long term memory isn’t really accessible in “true color” like it seems most people can have it.<p>I presume there’s an anatomical explanation that could become apparent upon autopsy, although nothing so remarkable as to alert on a full body MRI.<p>Then again, I can remember code that I wrote 15 years ago. Not exactly line for line, but when I’ve had the occasion to revisit old code, it’s as if I never left it.<p>Again it seems to come down to creation versus observation. Observations which aren’t actively re-encoded just end up in &#x2F;dev&#x2F;null to a great extent for me.<p>My wife says I’m blissfully ignorant, and it certainly seems to have served me quite well as a coping mechanism. Hard to carry a grudge when it just doesn’t occur to you how angry you were about something last month.<p>I’m not even sure it’s something I’d want to “fix” even if I could, except perhaps the names and faces thing.