Episodic memory like a jigsaw puzzle missing most of its pieces
Here’s a question for fellow SDAMers: Writing on SDAM often describes people who may have excellent memory of facts about past events (such as dates, names, and sequences of events) but can’t remember what the events felt like. My episodic memory is very different, nearly the opposite. I’m more likely to remember past emotional reactions (i.e., to remember what it felt like to be in a situation) without remembering facts about the events that triggered them. I’ve described my autobiographical memory of any given past event as being like a jigsaw puzzle with the great majority of the pieces missing, and not always the same pieces. Sometimes, I can access a quick glimpse of a visual impression. Sometimes, I remember only the feeling and a vague sense of time and place. E.g., I have a memory of walking across the street to avoid a bully after a session of a summer school class sometime in my teenage years, but I have no memory, semantic or episodic, of any summer school class I ever took.
Does this resonate with anyone?