Social Memory

I'm just beginning to realise that I have a very poor memory of other peoples lives.

I've been told one way of being more sociable is to remember what someone says they will be doing at the weekend so that you can ask them about it the next time you meet. Perhaps fundamentally I just don't care what they will be doing, or I've never practised it, but I don't seem to remember much about anyone else's life that doesn't effect mine directly. Obviously I can't just expect anyone to take any interest in me individually if I show no interest in them, but it actually seems like I don't really have the memory 'slots' available to do so.

Also I don't seem to attribute things to specific people. If I have to report on a conversation it will be 'Someone said 'x', to which someone else replied 'y', but I have more difficulty remembering exactly who said what.
This isn't just in real life either, if I read various on-line forums I'm far more interested in what is written than who wrote it, so I don't really track names or avatars and get a feel for the different personalities over time. Consequently though I might get the 'feel' of the community in general I never feel like I know any one individual any more than any other.

I have a real problem with this as well, and friends can quote entire conversations back at me that I never remembered having. But hey, I have an image-based memory that can put them to shame, because I can SEE all the places we've been.

This is an issue at work, so these days I have to pretend I give a flying crap what others are doing because it's useful to mention stuff like that as an ice breaker. I'm going to be working with them all day, so I'm going to adapt to them. I'm not going to be one of those who sits around expecting all the neurotypicals to magically change to adapt to the minority on the spectrum, although they could become a little more tolerant of eccentricity in general.

breakingout wrote:I don't seem to remember much about anyone else's life that doesn't effect mine directly. Obviously I can't just expect anyone to take any interest in me individually if I show no interest in them, but it actually seems like I don't really have the memory 'slots' available to do so.

I get something similar, but unfortunately it extends to not being able to recognise people very often, or remembering their names.

About 4 months ago, someone walked straight towards me in the supermarket car park, and I thought "who the hell's that ?"

...it was my wife - and we've been married over 16 years !

breakingout wrote:Also I don't seem to attribute things to specific people. If I have to report on a conversation it will be 'Someone said 'x', to which someone else replied 'y', but I have more difficulty remembering exactly who said what.
This isn't just in real life either, if I read various on-line forums I'm far more interested in what is written than who wrote it, so I don't really track names or avatars and get a feel for the different personalities over time. Consequently though I might get the 'feel' of the community in general I never feel like I know any one individual any more than any other.

As far as tracking conversations, again, I think I have a similar problem - there have been several occasions i've made a statement and been asked to back it up, but have been unable to remember the source. One was as a juror watching video evidence against someone accused of child abuse of two kids from the neighbourhood. The closing words of a kid who had been roped in "for fun" were "if she did it, she deserves to go to jail". "IF she did it"... The poor woman who had been accused of it was completely innocent, and the kid at the heart of the case had made the same accusations against anyone who upset him - he'd done it to at least 7 other people prior to this. In this case, her "crime" was she refused to give him alcohol and cigarettes (he was 10).

I used to run a bulletin board system on my computer (~June 1993 -> ~2000) and quickly found that I was able to judge someones' character very effectively using the at-the-time equivalent of instant messaging.