According to sdamstudy Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM) refers to a lifelong inability to vividly recollect or re-experience personal past events from a first-person perspective. The research on this topic emerged from studies of autobiographical episodic memory in healthy adults and individuals with brain disease.
We have Superior Autobiographical Memory discussed in this forum and when searched no topic was found for this condition hence creating this thread for discussion.
Through Aphantasia discussion and searching I landed on this topic and discovered that I also have SDAM and am not able to recall any episodic memory.
This discovery explained many things in my life like why I was not able to improve my game of Chess, and why the memory palace technique does not work for me in the way how others explain they have done it.
All I have is semantic memory and that is what I was using all these days even to create memory palaces and not at the same level as how others not having this condition can.
If any one of you has the same condition we can share what worked for us and what methods you have found to overcome this condition. Also how you have coped with the expectations others have of you when this condition is undiagnosed and unknown.
I’m sure I have this. I’ve always been extremely vague about my memories.
I found a workaround, but it’s a lot of work. For the past 3 years or so, I’ve been engaged in a “remember every day” project, where I try to remember an image or scene from every day that passes, and review the images on a particular schedule twice a day. I got 1200 days in and decided to consolidate and cull the diary - so now I picked a few crucial images from each month, attached them to a memory palace, and review them twice daily. It’s given me an extremely clear picture of the past 3 years and makes a very good “prosthetic autobiographical memory”.
Wow. I’ve known of my aphantasia for quite a while. My images are vague, I can’t see faces in them, and motion is almost impossible for me to envision.
But I never connected that with my past memories. I only have past memories in snapshots, not motion. And like the one article said, sometimes I’m not sure if my memories are real or if they’re just from pictures that I’ve seen or stories that I have been told.
Plus, things that aren’t that important or that I don’t have pictures of, I don’t remember at all. Like where the laundry was in my freshman dorm. Granted, that was 30 years ago, but still.