Reply to If you have an excellent memory, tell us it's pros and cons

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have highly superior autobiographical memory or HSAM. It's been featured on 60 Minutes multiple times and I've been involved with a research team in California since 2011. I even flew out there for an MRI scan. The pros are that school was extremely easy in a lot of ways, as I was quickly able to memorize dates, formulas, parts of the brain, etc. I never forget friends' and family members' birthdays either! I am a teacher and my students find it fascinating and I can learn their names very quickly. The cons are that you have a stream of memories constantly running through your head that cannot be shut off. Therefore, every embarrassing and painful moment from my life stays with me like it was yesterday. Therefore, I relive my grandmother's death and the day my mom got her cancer diagnosis on an almost daily basis. It can be exhausting! [/quote]

Wow!  I remember watching that 60 Minutes episode and having a light bulb moment--while I've never had any tests done, I highly suspect I also have HSAM.  Until I was in college and people started to comment, and then I watchws that 60 Minutes, I had no idea that my memory was anything unusual.  And I'm also a teacher!  It's been extremely helpful because I teach ESOL, so I often have students for multiple years, teach their siblings at the same time, and have worked with certain families for years.  Being a non-classroom teacher means I'm in and out of many classrooms, and am able to recite class lists at will, and can recall which teacher a certain student had for kindergarten 3 years prior.  I can advise teachers about students' past traumas or tidbits of information that might have come out in a meeting with a student's parents years before.  I'm a bit famous in my school for knowing "every" student (population is about 700) and I'm the one people come to with questions about their students' families, because once I find out information, I never forget it.  Things like that make it fun to have this random "skill."

On the flip side, it is distracting because I'm flooded with memories all the time.  It's hard to move on from past embarrassments sometimes.  And I'm never quite sure if a recall is something "normal" people would remember.  For example, we had a baby shower for a coworker last year, and their theme was penguins, because apparently she really likes penguins.  This year, my own DD grew out of some cute penguin pajamas, and I hesitated about whether to pass them on to my coworker, who I don't know super well, because I didn't know if it was weird that I remembered the connection.  It can also be frustrating in everyday conversation, when others have selective memory about how certain events went down, and I explicitly remember exactly what happened, and their version ain't it.

But all in all, it's pretty cool.  I like being an elephant :)[/quote]

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