It can be an advantage and a disadvantage, depending on how it’s used.
I have a photographic memory, but I don’t always have film in the camera, to paraphrase Steven Wright. Some days I don’t use the flash or forget to take the lens cap off.I can remember as a baby–less than a year old–being bathed in the kitchen sink after dinner. I recall the sounds (but not the meaning) of the conversation, the details of the room and how I comprehended certain features that seemed to make no sense as a child of that age but would be completely sensible to someone older.
For example, the kitchen sink had two large windows (large from the perspective of a very small child) in front of them. The windows were like two glossy black monoliths. My baths would take place in the early evening, when the sun had gone down, but the blinds had not yet been drawn–this was mid-winter. So it was pitch black outside and the windows reflected back to me only the light and contents of the room–including the movement of people. I thought that there were two versions of my family members: those that I could see in the kitchen itself and those who appeared in the monoliths’ reflections–I didn’t understand the idea of a reflection, but I can still see them as clearly as the screen on which I’m typing.
My family members don’t believe that I can remember these details, given my age at the time, even when I describe in detail the event that they remember as children and teenagers. It’s a completely accurate retelling of events that happened frequently during the first winter of my life, but for them there’s no way I could have known about them then or remember them now.
The fact that you can provide an accurate first-hand account of an event that you witnessed and have others disbelieve you is one of the challenges you face everyday in different ways–some times trivially and sometimes tragically.
When you remember something that others don’t remember the same way or that suggests that their sense of the world is being challenged or is at risk of being rewritten, typically you don’t find a sympathetic listener.
At an important level, by challenging what others remember you’re challenging their identity, the way they understand the world, and the ways they seek, construct and find meaning.
When you remember every single moment like other people remember what they were doing when Kennedy was shot, or the Challenger exploded, or towers were attacked, you can unsettle people, to say the least. You become acutely aware of the depth and breadth of cognitive dissonance that people employ (and not necessarily on purpose either). If you should accidentally or on purpose reflect back to people that they exhibit forms of cognitive dissonance, they get frustrated and angry. You become the trouble maker, a source of disruption, arrogant, and argumentative. On the one hand, its a really interesting area to understand about your family, friends, and co-workers–where the deeper you go to explore this the more you can learn about a person. At the same time, it’s incredibly dangerous and potentially deadly when it comes to building strong, lasting relationships.
One positive exception–there was a girl I used to see in a class I took that I never talked to during the entire term. She was attractive and smart and funny, and yet I never talked to her even though I wanted to because I was introverted and shy. When she walked out of the final exam, I thought that would be the last time I ever saw her. But it wasn’t. A few years later I ran into her, quite by chance. I asked her if she was in a certain class with a certain professor and of course she remembered that, yes, in fact she was. For whatever reason, with the distance between the two events I was able to tell her what I had thought of her younger self and that I had so wished I had had the courage/ sense to tell her back then. Not surprisingly, she was very taken by my recollection and the genuine emotion that I shared. She was always thirty seconds late, always flustered coming in, always had a large coffee from Incredible Edibles, always had a paisley scarf that was in the process of coming off, and always sat in the back, towards the aisle in a crowded room. You can dwell in detail and emotional states from the past with the full intensity of that moment, while at the same time having something of the self-reflective distancing that time passing provides.
It’s a form of emotional time travel: everything you felt and thought comes back to you but you’ve got everything you’ve felt and learned since then to help better deal with or process a past that you may have wanted to change or redress. Most of the time, there’s no opportunity to change that past. This time there was. In 24 hours we were dating.
You also realize how much people repeat themselves, how they tell the same stories and anecdotes again and again, regardless of whether or not you’ve heard them before. Initially I thought that some older people I knew were simply forgetful, but I find it’s the case with people of all ages, just more common as you get older and there are more narratives that tend to get calcified in their recounting. I used to be bothered by this and have even told the teller that they’d already shared the tale. I don’t do this anymore, realizing that people aren’t telling you a story singularly for your benefit, but for their benefit as well–or even most importantly. The story of “the time I got that scar” shows that the teller had a life of adventure, that they’re funny and perhaps wistful, and that they’re fated to be who they are. My letting them know that this is the seventh time they’ve told me that story in the history of our relationship (and, worse, the context of the earlier six tellings) doesn’t help them. You can’t even easily talk about the fact that people repeat themselves a lot without family and friends getting defensive about what they share with you. People over 35 typically have about 10-12 stories, 5-6 theories, and 3-4 things that they really hate/ love that they keep coming back to, circling around regarding their own lives.
Depending on their age and experience, they may extend their set of stories about themselves to stories of their parents, their co-workers, their partner, their kids. But even those stories are almost always about them processing their own 10-12 stories.
On a trivial level–literally speaking–when the board game Trivial Pursuit came out my friends and family loved playing the game, at least for their first turn. And then, at some point, I got my turn. I answered question after question to the point that in some games my first turn would be the last turn of the game. In no time, I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to play the game. I was the jerk, the cheater, or the fanatic who must have spent days memorizing the answers just to show off. I was the person who wrecked the game for everyone else.
There’s a bar room version of the game, the TNT network. Some jerk winning every game in a bar is not a happy outcome for the other folks in the bar.
Part of my studies included a course on Milton and his epic poem, Paradise Lost. The poem is over 10,000 lines long. One test in the course was simply to identify lines from the poem–including the speaker, the Book, line, and dramatic context. Milton was a blind poet who had memorized his primary texts: The Bible,and the Classics, etc. before going blind and in part, the test was a lesson in humility: Milton was great. We were not Milton and never would be. No one was expected to get every answer right. The test was 80 minutes long. I finished in 20 minutes. It was like asking someone to list the numbers from 1-50 and then the letters of the alphabet in alphabetical order.
One strange wrinkle is that I can remember details in dreams very clearly as well. Once I dreamed I was on stage with The Cult playing their song, She Sells Sanctuary. I’m not a big fan of the band and while I had heard the song on the radio and in clubs, I had never tried playing it. But there I was–in a dream–playing it with the band. The next morning I got up, went to work and arrived home nine hours later. That evening, as I was heading out the door with a friend, I mentioned my dream and picked up my guitar to see if what I played in the dream was anything like the song (having remembered the fingering and fretting). To our surprise, I was playing the song from memory, note for note, but without every having attempted to play the song before.
In another dream just days before a PhD exam (Renaissance Drama) I dreamed that I was taking the exam and the exam demanded that I perform the role of Hamlet. So I did. From memory. I told a friend about the dream and his response was . . . but you didn’t actually play the role, you just dreamed that you did. I responded by performing Hamlet’s opening scene.
Delusions of Adequacy 