This might be a memory of the first time you saw the person you married, or a flashbulb memory of a tragic event. When experiencing this level of autobiographical memory, you can literally remember things that happened down to the second. I couldn’t get enough.”īut whereas lifetime periods have more specific beginnings and endings, you would not be able to say when exactly those weeks of a general event took place. This level of autobiographical memory refers to those kinds of memories when you basically remember a set of days, weeks or perhaps entire seasons gathered around a theme.įor example, when you tell someone a story about a fascination you had, you might say, “I studied that topic for a good couple of weeks. General events are much less fluid and don’t have distinct borders like “grade seven,” which has a beginning, middle and end.Ī time-based event like the fact that you attended grade seven at school is a general autobiographical memory. For example, they would include how your memory divides: Some scientists include other categories in this type of autobiographical memory. Jean Piaget described these periods in great detail in his theory of cognitive development. This literally means the memories you have to distinguish childhood from your adolescence, early adulthood, middle age and senior year. It’s useful to distinguish them because they involve different kinds of autobiographical information. There are three levels and four “types” of autobiographical memory. As the personal suffering seen in the Price case shows, there might be such a thing as too much reflective thinking. In fast, it is very telling that superior autobiographical memory is really the only kind of memory that has shown this feature. People with hyperthymesia are simply more efficient at calling all those different types of memory into the same “room” to help produce the experience of personal memories. Researchers have noticed that some people with superior autobiographical memory tend to journal much more than the average person. But whether or not repetitive journaling explains this level of recall or not, here’s the easiest way to think about it: Jill Price is one such notable case where people have noticed that obsessive levels of journaling have featured across her life. If this finding proves correct, then it would be elaborative encoding that explains the high levels of recall these people experience.
In fact, some scientists think that there might be OCD or obsessive levels of self-reflective repetition involved. Superior autobiographical memory or hyperthymesia isn’t understood well by scientists. This form of memory is sometimes confused with eidetic memory, which is itself mistakenly associated with photographic memory. Yes, and the scientific term for superior autobiographical memory is hyperthymesia. Do Some People Have Superior Autobiographical Memory? This is different than implicit memory, which involves unconscious processes. In other words, if you’re trying to remember something about yourself, you will gather all those different kinds of memories into one “room,” the same way you gather your family members for Thanksgiving dinner.Īnd because autobiographical memory is something you can deliberately call upon and experience consciously, it belongs to a larger level called explicit memory.
If you think about these different aspects of memory as cousins and uncles who live in different neighborhoods throughout your brain, then experiencing an autobiographical memory is like an event. This means that when your brain serves up autobiographical memories about your life, it might be drawing upon: Gary Small describes it, memories are distributed into what you can think of as “neighborhoods.” You see, memories are spread all over the brain. In a word, this type of memory is a “system.”Įven cooler, it’s a system that draws upon other systems. Once you understand the different levels of autobiographical memory, you’ll be able to understand yourself and others better.Īnd those psychology exams? Consider them aced when this term comes up. So let’s take a step back and get a working definition of autobiographical memory and some examples that are easy to understand. In reality, this aspect of human memory is pretty complex.Īnd the way scientists write about it can be hard to penetrate. The term “autobiographical memory” sounds straightforward enough, doesn’t it? Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | RSS
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