I Have a Terrible Memory. Am I Better Off That Way?

The existential divide between Rememberers and Forgetters.

I call my sister all the time to ask her about myself. Like, “Lily, do you remember if and when I completed my HPV vaccination series?” “Yes, in ninth grade. You complained that your arm was sore afterward.” She describes my past with an unnerving ease.

I am 32, I am neurologically healthy, and I have a terrible memory. Not in the sense that I constantly lose my keys or forget the names of colleagues. More in the sense that after I experience something, it doesn’t tend to stick for very long. I believe I have 50 recollections in total, all high-drama events that I’ve repeated to myself so often they’ve become canon. My sister describes her memory as something I more closely associate with the word memory: an accessible inventory of her past, filled with both mundane and emotional files, colored with rich detail. In conversation, she casually brings up childhood playdates, Monday-night dinners from a decade ago. I, meanwhile, have begun to feel my college years slipping.

To my mind, the world is split into people like my sister and people like me: Rememberers and Forgetters. My friend Sarah is a Forgetter. “A few years after a period ends, it disappears,” she says. “Save for a few especially emotional moments, there are entire swaths of my life that are blank.” My friend Henry is a Forgetter too. (Henry and Sarah are both pseudonyms.) “Whenever I’m reading an interview where someone is talking about how they got to where they are, they’ll drop these anecdotes, and I’m like, What? I don’t have anecdotes like that,” he says. When I asked a friend at work about her memory, she said, “I guess if I picked, say, the summer after sixth grade, I could remember what books I was reading, which friend I was hanging out with most, the time she cut my hair, what math exercises I did, and what I was doing on the computer. You can’t?” Rememberer.

This didn’t seem to be a particularly useful distinction until a year ago, when a family friend died. The friend and I didn’t see each other often, so I had only a few memories of her along with a general sense that I’d loved her very much. My sister, who saw her as often as I did, told me she was flooded with memories after her death, that reliving them felt haunting and exhausting. I wondered if this meant she felt much sadder. Of course, memory and selfhood are intrinsically tied; there are entire schools of thought dedicated to the subject. But it seemed as though our capacities for memory — hers, teeming; mine, not so much — might mean we experienced the world differently.

Autobiographical memory is a small part of the “larger memory system.” It’s the part that allows us access to our personal histories and lets us piece together narratives about ourselves. The question of whether some people have inherently worse autobiographical memories than others may seem simple enough: Does this kind of memory exist on a spectrum, like intelligence or athletic ability? But when I posed it to several memory researchers, they tended to pause. “I don’t know,” Dr. Charan Ranganath told me. He just wrote a book called Why We Remember. The field doesn’t yet have a consensus, he said, on whether people have differences in the ability to retain personal memories. (Ranganath likes to say differences; his feeling is that more memories isn’t necessarily better.)

Until recently, research on variabilities in memory often focused on cases involving external factors: trauma, strong emotion, mental disorders, age. But in 2015, researchers published a paper identifying SDAM, or severely deficient autobiographical memory. Tests showed there was nothing seriously wrong with these people (no dementia, Alzheimer’s, or brain trauma), but the first-person perspective of everything they experienced slipped out of grasp basically as soon as it ended. If they did manage to retain any details of their past, those details would seem like they were about another person altogether. A decade earlier, a mirror condition had been identified at UC Irvine: HSAM (highly superior autobiographical memory). People with HSAM don’t forget much of anything; if you give them any date of their conscious lives, they can tell you what they were doing down to the most stunningly prosaic detail.

HSAM and SDAM represent the polar extremes of how memory functions, but their identification has compelled some memory researchers to further consider what lies in between — the variability of autobiographical memory from person to person. And researchers have noticed traits associated with each condition. Those with HSAM seem, on the whole, a bit miserable. “I’ve read interviews of some people with HSAM who struggle with letting go,” says Dr. Brian Levine, the cognitive neuroscientist who helped identify SDAM. “They ruminate about negative things. There’s an obsessiveness. Likewise, I’ve talked to some people with SDAM who are really happy. Bad things don’t stick to them. They don’t seem to feel that emotional pull.”

I described my memory to Levine. It didn’t sound like I had SDAM, he said, though of course he couldn’t say from a phone call. Still, he thought my less-than-stellar memory might not be such a bad thing, based on what he’d learned from his research. Perhaps, like the people he knew with SDAM, I was not so stuck on individual instances. Better at thinking conceptually.

Although it’s impossible to say if being a Forgetter has informed parts of my personality or just enhanced preexisting qualities, I do think my inability to remember has allowed for easier passage in certain ways. It’s hard to feel guilt about things you don’t remember, and it’s hard to hold grudges, too. My Rememberer friend from work, on the other hand, said she sometimes finds it difficult to talk to old friends — the shame of her past offenses feels too accessible, present. And how could she not hold a grudge when the memory of the event that produced it still presents itself in such sharp relief? My father, who is a Rememberer, says his nostalgia often borders on unbearable. If he thinks of his cousin, who died years ago, he can slip into a memory of the two of them at 6, playing hide-and-seek in their grandfather’s house. It sounds beautiful and excruciating at once.

Observationally, Forgetters and Rememberers like to team up. This can serve a practical purpose: e.g., my sister acting as a sort of personal-memory contractor for me. It can also be difficult. Henry the Forgetter is dating a consummate Rememberer and often finds himself at a disadvantage in their arguments. “I want to disagree with her but don’t have the evidence,” he says. “She can speak in more detail. It allows you to control the narrative.” My Forgetter friend Sarah describes this dynamic in her relationship with her Rememberer boyfriend almost word for word: “When we get into fights, he has the transcript, so to speak, and I have the emotional version of it.” The emotional transcript isn’t the winning one, she finds.

The fear in general for the Forgetter is that their side isn’t being represented — that they’re not able to authoritatively tell the story of their own lives or relationships. We can be a shapeless bunch: untethered to our own narratives (what narratives?), our pasts residing primarily in other people’s minds. This strange fact leaves the Forgetter in a sort of perpetually crouched, weakened position. Sarah has a close Rememberer friend, she says, who often reminds her of things she’s done in the past. This can be unsettling. How can she correct a record that she can’t access?

Still, Ranganath cautions against Rememberer-Forgetter essentialism. For the latter, “you have to be careful because often people will remember things very confidently but that don’t track accurately. The more time they spend recalling it, the more it gets lodged.” It does seem to be self-fulfilling. One Rememberer tells me she always considered herself to be someone with a good memory, so she worked hard at it and kept a calendar of daily events that she could look back on. “Because people rely on me to know that information,” she says. Forgetter Henry, meanwhile, said that while he once tried harder to remember things, he has pretty much given up. Now, “I just glide forward,” he says. “I’m not thinking back; I’m not reflective. I don’t go about life with much consciousness of my past.” Me neither. I think it’s easier.