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This is too strong a response. You and nobody else has a 1:1 memory map of an intense experience. It can takes weeks if not months (plural) to remember everything that happened to you in the last month. That is because basically your brain samples space time and segments in in your memory in a non-linear fashion. This is why people have flashbacks. When people recall linear events, they only recal prioritized samples. (eg, highlights, takeaways). It's universally understood that this sampling is also highly biased. That is why we have the concept of "type 2 fun". You can google this but the gist of it is that lots of things that are insufferable during the event form warm and fuzzy memories afterward upon recall. There is also the related case histories of people who compartmentalize basically into a black hole, where the thoughts never come back to consciousness or only after some extraordinary event (therapy, or otherwise). Certain types of trauma survivors fall in to this category.

Clinical use of disassociation is somthing involving this process and its important to understand it as part of a continuum.



If you don't remember events due to not paying attention (being "tuned out") that is simply not the same as not remembering who you are or who your boyfriend is.

In the former case, you don't remember the events because you were neglecting to commit them to memory. In the latter case, you have the memory, but it is temporarily inaccessible --- and comes back.

Memories that you did not form because you were tuned out never come back because they don't exist. For example, you will never recall the words of the bore whom you tuned out at last night's party. You nodded your head but were completely occupied with thinking about something else.


There are (clinically) lots of times people don't pay attention and 'tune things out' due to hyper-viigilance.

That process leads to somewhat fractured long-term memory. Basically your brain starts to use short-term memory for something like l2 cach and starts writing stuff that would have gone first into short-term memory and then archived elswhere with a "bibliography" note, directly into deep memory at 1:1 without any simple summary of the memory.

This is how you get people with intensely detailed memory "stacks" without a fully operational "card-catalog" of what is actually in the libary.

The key point is these steps are somewhat plastic.




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