Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory
Over the last couple of decades, neuroscientists began to study people who have much richer and more detailed and more complete memories of their own experiences than most people have. Many of these people had challenges in daily life because they could essentially fully relive any moment in their past, and spent too much of their time doing so. This condition got named Hyperthymesia, or Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM).
I don't have HSAM. I have the opposite condition, called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). That means I can't really relive in any first-person way any of my prior experiences. I know facts about myself and my experiences, but in the same way that I know facts about Abraham Lincoln's life.
This is not something that gets diagnosed in any official way, as it isn't something that detracts from day to day experience in a medical sense. But it does mean that I have a very different conscious experience than most other folks I talk to.
It's been about seven years since I came across the term "SDAM" (it was only coined in 2015), and when I read about it, I felt a frisson of extraordinary recognition. This was exactly what it was like to be me. One effect is that it gave me a vocabulary I previously lacked for interior mental experience, which shifted how my wife Irina and I thought about and related to each other. She found it incredible that I couldn't call up my experience of our getting married on a beach in Mexico, like she could. I recall facts about the experience, for instance my concerned discovery a half-hour before the ceremony started that all the chairs needed to be moved back on the beach, and that I needed just to do it myself, since everyone else was still getting ready. I can’t re-experience the emotions that I had that day, though.
Even my fact-oriented memory of my own life is quite limited and leaky. At least once a week, Irina will (usually gently) point out that some new realization I just expressed is one I've had several times before.
Some other places to read about this:
The critical early research study is https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25892594/
An article in Wired: https://www.wired.com/2016/04/susie-mckinnon-autobiographical-memory-sdam/
A BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181112-severely-deficient-autobiographical-memory-is-surprisi