Understanding Neurodiversity: Memory Loss
What it’s like living as an AuDHD (ADHD Autistic)
While making my to-do list one day, I decided to add calling my favorite lecturer to the list, and that’s when it hit me — I’d forgotten the name of my favorite lecturer.
Later that day, I tried to remember his name while washing my hands, but still nothing. Unlike before, this did not puzzle or agitate me.
Now, to clarify, I spent most of my productive days during my final year in his office with my friends, discussing and researching our undergraduate project. Some of my colleagues even thought he was my supervisor (he wasn’t).
He was my role model and impacted my life so much, yet just 2 years after graduation and a year of no contact, I couldn’t remember his name.
All this happened two days ago, and even now, as I write this article, I still can’t remember his name.
Hopefully, it’ll come back to me by the end of this article, or I’ll just have to ask my friends for his name, again.
When people think of memory loss in neurodivergence — particularly ADHD and Autism — they think:
- We forget the stuff that doesn’t interest us;
- we forget stuff that when stressed;
And boy, wouldn’t life be easier if things were so simple?
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as this. If it were, then many neurodivergents wouldn’t suffer from CPTSD. If things were so straightforward, then that would mean we neurodivergents have an amazing superpower.
Imagine being able to forget that one breakup that made you consider admitting yourself into a mental institute, that one time you embarrassed yourself in school and your crush(es) saw it, or that time you lost a lot of money doing whatever it is you do.
Imagine that there’s a group of people, who by the difference of a few neurological wiring, could forget everything that ever hurt or bored them. Imagine because no such person exists.
If you do know anyone though, tell them they have a fan all the way here.
As an autistic ADHD, I’ve come to realize that I have as much control over what I remember as the average neurotypical, actually, I have less control.
Memory loss for neurodivergents isn’t determined by whether or not we are interested in the memory. To date, there’s no reset
And sometimes, it’s not that we forget, it’s that the memory was never there in the first place. It never formed.
In 2018, I had the hardest period of my life mentally. I was forgetting things at an alarming rate, and this caused me to do some research where I learned that ADHDers are prone to developing Alzheimer’s. This didn’t help my anxiety at all.
During that period, there were times a friend or a colleague would try to remind me of an event that happened prior that I supposedly witnessed, yet no matter how hard they tried, I just couldn’t recall it. I still can’t.
Those weren’t memory losses, those were memory gaps. It was as if my working memory lapsed during specific periods, causing no memories to be registered or formed.
Rachael Green wrote in her article for Very Well Mind:
Studies of children and adults with ADHD show weak alpha modulation during encoding and retrieval stages of memory, meaning the brain isn’t efficiently separating relevant details from distracting and unimportant ones while creating the memory or while recalling it.
Alpha waves are what’s responsible for filtering out all the irregularities in your everyday life, allowing you to focus on the information at hand, thereby making encoding possible and easy.
Basically, if the neurotypical brain was like the latest Apple AirPods with topnotch Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), the mind of a person with ADHD would be like an earbud without any noise cancellation.
Imagine trying to listen to music in a noisy environment with the latter.
Other neurodivergents also experience memory loss, although not, in the same way, ADHDers do.
For Bipolar, memory loss often occurs during the periods between mania (period of extremely high emotional state) and depression (period of extremely low emotional state).
In DID, when one member of the collective gains control of their host’s body, the other personalities are unaware of what happens during that period. So it is not so much as a lapse in memory as a lapse in time.
So if you interacted with a person who had 2 personas in their collectives, and you spoke to persona A, persona B has no memory of that conversation because it never happened to them.
Aside from the ways I mentioned earlier that my ADHD impairs my memory, there are also ways my autism impairs my memory.
I have issues remembering names and faces, but no issues remembering specific details I notice. So while I might not remember what you look like after meeting you five minutes ago, I might remember that tattoo slightly hidden under your sleeve.
This helps me a lot when socializing because it’s really hard to explain to people that it’s not that they have a forgettable face. My brain just refuses to remember faces.
A recent study by Stanford researchers actually found that there’s a link between autistic children and poor facial memory.
What’s interesting about this study is that all the autistic kids are considered high functioning with higher IQs than the neurotypical kids, yet it still showed that autistic kids had issues with general and facial memories compared to their peers.
More research like this needs to be out there to shine some light on the issues that high-functioning autistics face which are often disregarded, trivialized, or unnoticed.
Most high-functioning autistics go undiagnosed for years because our impairment is not “as severe” as other autistics.
This is not only insulting to the persons in the other levels of autism but also dangerous for high-functioning autistics as it can make it difficult for us to get the help we need.
Despite having such a bad working memory (that’s the official name for short-term memory), my long-term memory is highly functional. I remember events as early as when I was 5 years old.
When I do remember, it’s mostly in photographic form.
I realized this late during my undergraduate days, but it significantly improved my learning and my grades. All I had to do was include highlighters in my note-making and watch YouTube videos with subtitles on my courses.
