The Discovery
"I can't remember like you can."
People hear that and smile politely, the way you do when someone says they're "bad with names". But I don't mean "bad with names." I mean there's no drawer in my head to pull from. No internal Rolodex. No sepia-toned cutaway to a moment in 2009 where I'm wearing a questionable polo neck and playing vinyl on a woodgrain monstrosity.
What I experience comes with a different architecture entirely.
Growing Up Different
When you do something strange for long enough, you assume everyone else is doing the same thing and has politely agreed not to mention it.
I spent years being told off for "not remembering" and thought, well, fuck, my brain's just lazy. That was a common theme, actually. My brain is lazy. Not I'm lazy. It comes from having to have a constant fight with it to achieve anything.
Anyway. I quietly built workarounds.
| Dave | I honestly couldn't tell you what colour anyone's eyes are |
|---|---|
| Dave | beyond knowing from memory my mum tells me hers are brown & my dad's blue |
| Dave | but that's from being told, not perception |
One awkward detail complicates this story: I'm clever. Unfairly, almost comically clever.
I don't say that to be an insufferable prick, though I'm sure the talent is there. I fail in many other ways. There are a great many "standard life skills" that I'm truly abysmal at. But I am clever; it's just a truth, it doesn't need to come with a value judgment.
The sort of clever, to get to the point, which papers over structural cracks by inventing an entirely new structure and then getting confused if anyone notices the scaffolding.
The crack, in this case, was memory. Or more specifically: episodic memory.
Not "a bit dodgy." Absent.
The Architecture of Reconstruction
Here's the bit that unnerves people: I don't remember. I reconstruct.
Where most folks reach back and retrieve a scene, I assemble a plausible version on the fly from base principles, stored truths, and patterns. Think: semantic Lego. I don't have the set photo on the box; I've just got a bucket of pieces and an excellent sense of physics.
- You ask about last week's meeting? I infer who was there, what they care about, our norms, and the likely trajectory. The result sounds like recall because it lands in the right place.
- You ask where I left my keys? I model my behaviour, the room layout, and probability. The result looks like memory; I often find the keys.
But this method has a failure mode: if one foundational "brick" is wrong, the whole thing deviates. The story remains coherent, persuasive, even elegant - just not true. And because there's no stored scene to cross-check, I can't look inward and say, "Hang on, that's not what happened." I can only accept better evidence and update the model. It's architectural, not deceitful.
| Dave | episodic memory does not exist for me |
|---|---|
| Dave | there is memory there, but it's memory for facts |
| Dave | and those facts are then used to reconstruct a "memory" simulacrum |
What I didn't realise was this: there's a word for it. Whereas I thought I was just broken, it took me 41 years to find out that Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM) exists. I am also aphantasic and alexithymic, two things which are both excellent words, and classically comorbid with SDAM. We'll come back to them later.
It's hard to have an emotion if you can't remember it five minutes later. To me, emotional memory is not a memory of the thing, but a memory of a description of the thing. I can tell you how I felt, because I have a description of it. But I can't feel it again.
When It Works (And Fails)
Most days, no one notices. My reconstructions are fast, high-fidelity, and socially useful. I've trained them for years. My system works, and substitutes effectively for a memory to the degree that I'm pretty sure nobody even thought about this.
But here's the rub, dear reader. When it goes wrong, it goes gloriously wrong. One incorrect assumption and I've "remembered" a version of events that never existed. Not maliciously. Not even sloppily. Just confidently assembling a cathedral on a plate of jelly.
| Mog | You remember stories though |
|---|---|
| Dave | I remember facts about stories |
| Dave | I can reconstruct the story |
| Dave | but good example |
| Mog | Huh |
| Dave | sometimes I veer off track |
| Dave | if i'm telling them around my mum she'll say "no, that's not what happened then" |
| Dave | the reconstruction is accurate until it reaches a faulty fact |
| Dave | if a base principle is faulty, stories are a perfect example, the story will veer off |
| Dave | it'll be plausible, but it won't be what happened |
| Dave | it'll illustrate the same point, but won't be the correct specific chain of events |
Cue someone I trust saying, "That didn't happen." And me thinking, fair enough, let's rewrite the foundation and rebuild. And that is so often read as doubting what they're telling me. It's not. I'm trying to find the broken piece in the increasingly unwieldy box.
It couldn't be further from the truth, in fact, because the reason I'm quizzing them (the term 'interrogate' has been used) is because I trust them, and if they say one thing but my model says another, something is wrong somewhere.
If I didn't trust them, I'd just move on and we wouldn't be having the conversation.
Why Emotion Matters
Episodic memory is glued together by feeling. For many people, the way they felt in a moment acts as an anchor: fear, joy, embarrassment - boom, there's the scene. When emotion is muted, unlabelled, or filed away as metadata rather than sensation, that glue never quite sets.
Aphantasia
When your mind's eye is permanently closed for renovations. Whilst everyone else is supposedly running their own internal Netflix, you're stuck with a radio at best.
People with aphantasia can't voluntarily create mental images, so when someone says "picture a beach," they're conceptually aware of sand and waves but 'seeing' absolutely nothing.
It's the neurological equivalent of being told everyone else has a superpower you didn't even know existed until someone casually mentioned counting sheep to fall asleep and you realised they meant literally seeing sheep.
Discovered relatively recently (named in 2015), it affects roughly 2-5% of people.
Alexithymia
Essentially when your emotional processing system runs on dialup whilst everyone else has broadband.
You know something is happening in there, but identifying whether it's anger, sadness, hunger, or a particularly difficult fart becomes a guessing game. People with alexithymia struggle to recognise and describe their own emotions, often experiencing them as vague physical sensations rather than distinct feelings.
It's like having all your emotions labelled in a foreign language you never learnt, so when someone asks "how are you feeling?" you're stuck offering helpful insights like "bad" or "not good" whilst your body does its own mysterious thing.
Surprisingly common, affecting about 10% of people, though they probably couldn't tell you how they feel about that statistic.
The Result
Experiences stored as facts with annotations, not time-travel. No memory of a feeling, but instead a remembered description of a feeling.
All this turns out to be suspiciously convenient for negative emotional experiences like pain or fear: I can describe that I was terrified without re-feeling terror. Useful for functioning; infuriating for therapy. Try healing a wound you can't feel but can produce an inventory list for.
| Mog | How often can you identify how you feel? I think the veil got ripped off the painful side of your emotional landscape through the last three years of Dave's Medically Exotic Adventures |
|---|---|
| Mog | Be nice if you could also record joy to balance it out |
| Dave | I still don't feel traumatised by that and didn't at the time either |
| Dave | What I am willing to accept is that I WAS |
| Mog | … you were literally screaming with terror |
| Dave | Yep, and I have a memory of a description of that, not the thing itself |
| Mog | Huh |
| Mog | I mean you realise that points to it very much being trauma |
| Mog | maybe your whole adolescent and adult life is. See. When hijacked by the amygdala one stops recording memory. If you're in fight or flight you're bypassing all the bits of the brain that make memory |
| Mog | So if you're in fight or flight every time you interact with people well |
| Mog | I dunno. You're interesting |
And yes, if you spend years in low-level fight-or-flight, the amygdala hogs the mic and the hippocampus stops laying down rich episodic tapes. It's not a character flaw. It's a traffic diversion.
Living in Real Time
Here's the odd part: it feels normal. The reconstruction is automatic, like breathing through a snorkel - you still get air, you just do it differently. I don't notice I'm building until the structure wobbles.
From the outside, I look just like everyone else. Under the bonnet, I'm running a just-in-time cognition pipeline with aggressive caching and no archive. Which is why social interaction can feel like a full-body workout: everything is inference, all the time, all at once.
Building Guardrails
You can live well like this - if you respect the architecture.
- Externalise the truth. Write things down. Timestamps, decisions, outcomes. Freeze facts before they drift.
- Automate where possible. Calendars that bully you. Workflows that create artefacts. Systems that nudge reality back into the lane.
- Use trusted editors. A small circle who can say, "No, that bit's wrong," and you believe them enough to update your model without sulking.
- Protect endpoints. I'm ruthless about the start and the finish; I'm flexible about the path between. It keeps me effective and mostly right.
Being Believed
The hardest part isn't the forgetting; it's being misunderstood. When I say "my memory is bad," people hear "keys, names, birthdays." I mean "I don't have the mental video player you do." Every act of recall is an act of creation. That's both powerful and precarious. It's also my normal.
What This Is (And Isn't)
- It's not laziness, nor lying, nor convenient amnesia.
- It is a brain that privileges semantic knowledge over episodic replay, likely shaped by temperament, wiring, and long-term stress.
- It is trainable at the systems level, not curable at the vibes level.
- And crucially: it works - until it doesn't - so build guardrails.
The Quiet Upside
When the past isn't constantly replaying, you get an unusual freedom to be present. To update quickly. To choose deliberately. There's less gravitational pull from yesterday, more room for today. That's not nothing.
I can't remember like you can. But I can build - reliably, usefully, and with care. Most of the time, the house stands.
And when it doesn't, I rebuild it better.
I've found a Facebook group for SDAM. If you think this sounds like you, maybe I'll see you there. There's also apparently a Reddit board, if terrible men are more your scene. Hey, I don't judge.
With thanks to Mog, who put up with me while I talked shit about the nonsense going on in my head, and provided some incredibly useful insights in response. The amygdala/hippocampus interaction was all them, as was pointing out that storing trauma as fact rather than feeling is itself a trauma response. I have no idea what I'd do without them.