On an average I have one beer per year and probably longer. My late Great Grand Mother would have one toddy each morning before her breakfast of one egg, one slice of cantaloupe or a half of a grapefruit, one piece of toast. She was a snuff dipper and used that really strong stuff Garrets Blue Label. She was older that 100 when she died so it must have agreed with her.
After a mini-stroke several years ago I lost some ability to recall past events but I’ve been able to connect the dots and fill in the blanks since then. As long as I have a minimal amount of interest in something, it’s committed to long term and I can recall the information pretty accurately. Generally speaking, a person’s name has no meaning to me unless I know that I will have to use the name again for some special reason so I guess that could be called a memory downfall on my part. Personally, I call it clutter. When I was an International Learning Systems instructor, one of the first tests was to help establish the memory recall patterns of a student just to get an idea of how quickly I could expect a student to learn. What was amazing to me was that someone who was functionally illiterate with no mental impediments would generally outscore those who were literate.
This is something that has bothered me, too. I remember a lot of my childhood as well as my adult life. Some things, the memories are so vivid that i still feel the same feeling as as I went though when they happened. Like the Yugo accident, I cringe inside when I remember the panic of that huge 3/4 ton truck smashing into my little Yugo when he was doing over 100 mph. For years, and maybe even now, the sound of a loud car engine close to my car, still startles me more than it should. Other memories are there, but they are hazy, and those are the ones that when I talk about old times with my kids, we have to put the memory “back together” again with input from all of us. However, a while back, Robin and I were chatting and she brought up something that i had no memory of at all. None. Zilch. But, since Robin remembered it, I knew it had to have happened. After we talked for a while, the memory finally started coming back to me, although still vague. The worrisome thing is that we only remember what we know we remember. Now I wonder how many other things in my life I have completely blocked out so much that i have no idea that they happened, and I just do not remember. I will never know about them until something triggers that lost memory.
@Yvonne Smith: But Robin's memory is as imperfect as yours and as everyone else's. As I read folks talk about that their kids recall but they don't, all I can say is that the kids might also have faulty memories. Eyewitness accounts of crimes are notoriously defective, even immediately following the event, much less later at trial after they've had a chance to think about it and reinforce/reshape it. It's quite frightening.
I agree that we all have different memories of how something happened; but in this case, it was a part of my life that I had totally blocked out. All of my kids remember that part, and basically the same way; so it is just me that blocked out the memory of that time in my life. My ex-husband was an alcoholic and drug addict for many years, so I am sure that I just blocked out some of the stuff my mind didn’t want to remember. It just worries me about how much else i have blocked out, and won’t know that I did unless someone else brings it up so I can remember it, and mostly, it would be stuff we didn’t even want to talk about.
That's why I think giving oneself a "10" on the long-term memory poll is silly. None of us know for certain how good our memories actually are.
I see "manufactured memories" quite often. A while ago I told my sister something my mother had said to me years ago. It made such an impression on me that I remember the exact time and place, and what our entire conversation was. Later I told my sister the story, somehow it has morphed into "her story" and she swears that she and Mama had the conversation.
That goes along with what I said. How much of what I think I remember do I actually remember and how much is because I have often heard it told by family members? One thing I remember is nearly drowning at the old swimming hole and being rescued by my older brother. I stepped into a deep hole that had apparently been washed out by the moving water. I was six or seven years old and couldn't swim. I remember the terror of drowning. He swam over and pulled me out. He doesn't remember it at all. I never did learn to swim, probably because I was terrified of water since then. When we went "swimming", I made sure I didn't go too far out.
I can't remember where I heard it, but there is an idea that every time we visit a memory in our mind, we edit it, making little changes to it, often without meaning to.