Why I remember random line from a movie which I watched 10 year ago

SagXD@lemm.ee to ADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 358 points –
52

I don't have bad memory at all. I have no control over what I remember, though. Sometimes I will see something and know that I will remember this useless information.

And sometimes someone important will introduce themselves, and I will very badly want to remember their name, but it's gone before we're done talking.

I literally write down all names in notes. I'm so incredibly bad with name recall that I forget names of people I worked with and known for years. That app is a life saver and I open it a lot.

I also use the trick to imagine their name as something completely over the top absurd. Which works because the image is so much easier to recall. For example Karen would be then behind the wheel of a Ford Ka running on its back tires. A Ka Run... But this is very difficult to do in the moment.

Otherwise yeah I can lose names at any moment of anything at any point in time. People, towns, events, brands, objects, concepts... Just gone. My mind went passed it with a 1000 miles a minute and forgot to grab it.

Yeah, same, but it's hard for people to understand that.

One day a coworker told me he went to the doctor because of his bad memory and they were suspecting ADHD. This person is extremely well organized and methodic about every thing, the one person who was always the most likely to be paying full attention on meetings and that sort of stuff. Everything about him screamed the opposite of ADHD. And the doctor was suspecting ADHD because he forgets things and that's an ADHD symptom.

Me, on the other hand, I clearly have problems that resemble being forgetful, but I know that's not what's going on. I just need my memories to be triggered. If I'm going to the store and you ask me to bring you some coke, I'll forget about it immediatelly and won't think about it again, but if I walk past the sodas and see the coke brand, or if I do a mental check "did someone ask me to bring anything?", then I'll remember it. It's very different from just being forgetful.

(tbh the mental check sometimes will just make me remember that someone did ask me for something, but not make me remember what it was)

And imagine a scenario where I can share this useless information with someone, but that never comes.

If the subject comes with a good feeling it will be remembered. If it comes with a neutral to bad feeling it doesn’t even gets saved.

If the subject comes with a good bad feeling it will be remembered. If it comes with a neutral to bad good feeling it doesn’t even gets saved.

FTFY.

I might be having a different problem...

Doom 1 noclip code is IDSPISPOPD.

Edit: For you youngins, Doom 1 came out in 1993... 30 years ago.

Yeah dude! Why do I remember that too? Also IDKFA - guns & ammo? IDDQD - invincibility I think.

Short for Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles Of Putrid Debris, a made-up game proposed as a follow-up to Doom by people shitting about on Usenet. Carmack thought it was funny and that's that.

I can remember obscure things from almost any point during my life, but I can't remember a person's name even when I'm told less than 2 minutes ago regardles

FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

Fuck! I knew that one by heart

I'm 44 and I can remember my best friends phone number from 5th grade. Couldn't remember it when I was in 5th grade and I can't remember any actually useful numbers today, but I know that one. A guy named Jeff has it now. He's nice.

windows xp?

Yup. One time I used it for a password. Then forgot that it's what I used for the password, until I reset the password to something else... But I still remember the key.

I remember the phone number of an older guy i talked online for like a week when I was 13 or so, 20 years ago. Thanks brain. Also thanks for reminding me about all the embarassing/shameful stuff i've done over the years. Why not replace those slots with, dunno, SOMETHING USEFUL!

You know I’ve always wondered, since memories can be changed as they are accessed (memory is absolutely fascinating, and very very very flawed), is it possible to knowingly reprogram your own memories to change your own subjective history?

I’ve been trying but I always forget that’s what I’m supposed to be doing.. 🫤

Our disk defragmentation never runs and it’s always full. So it’s slow at I/O but with enough time we can recover data from a long time ago.

And whoever implemented our garbage collector must have taken it quite literal, without looking up what it means

When I was a kid there was a song that I guess was popular around here that mocked bald people with several "pet names", one of them was "Moskito Airport".

Over a decade later I started taking the train to go to work and it took me literal years to stop getting that song pop up in my head every time the train announced the airport station. Nobody around me even remembers that song exists. I don't even remember who sang it or where it would play, but still - listen to the word airport and the song starts playing in my head. Same thing is true for pretty much every word that is not often found in song lyrics.

I watched a horror movie (that i hated). But, a substantial part of the film had this song that was driving me crazy, tickling the back of my brain. Finally the movie showed the tv that the music came from, a 50s cartoon that was part of a classic cartoon compilation VHS i watched 40 fucking years ago.

But i can't remember the name of that guy who's come in to the shop every day for a year.

I know so much about a ton of things that have effectively zero utility in my day-to-day life.

This is the way, I guess?

ADHD is super fun. I remember even the smallest details about the most obscure things, and the most random stuff will remind me of that. I also usually can think about 3-4 things at a time! So cool.

What isn't cool is that, I don't get to pick either. Random details? Not sure which ones are going in and not coming out.... Thoughts? Plenty, but I have no choice in what I'm thinking about.

It's a fun little game of whack a mole, trying to get my brain to do what needs to be done.

I heard that because working or short term memory is so deficient, the brain retasks to long term memory more often.

This is missing the part where if I manage to misremember something, it is all but impossible to correct the memory.

How does A and DHD form those associations? I do not like this meme.

My parents always used to joke about this: "Couldn't I have done something better with that neuron?"

Kid me interpreted this to mean that memory was finite and that, once allocated, was not reusable. It seems incredibly silly in retrospect, but I starred making a conscious effort not to remember things I didn't need to, so as to "conserve space" so to speak. I still occasionally have to stop myself from doing that.

All it got me was a complete lack of practice at remembering things. I still have exactly this problem -- I'll occasionally remember perfectly something I saw over a decade ago, but forget where I left my phone, without exaggeration, three seconds after I set it down.

There you go, OP -- empirical evidence that that's not why. It's not that our brains get full, we're just eternally cursed to be like this