one of the really troubling memory issues that I have is when not remembering if something has happened in the past creates an error with generalization.
Generalization is when, upon experiencing or learning a thing, new information gets applied too broadly. I forget what it's like to not have known the new information but also generalization can cause a sort of... timestamp problem. Along with or perhaps because of the never not knowing rewrite, I can lose when I gained the information (and a lot of memory indexing has to happen to figure out when I actually learned something that has generalized super hard).
So this means I can experience something entirely new, know in the moment that it's entirely new to me, and then my brain goes "what if you forgot this happened before" while also losing the timestamp and suddenly I'm dealing with multiple mental realities:
- You just learned the thing, try to hold onto the timestamp
- You've always known this from this source, this new memory is misplaced temporally
- You knew this already from something else, you forgot and have been reminded (sometimes true!)
- You've learned this thing (multiple times) before now, you forgot and you still don't remember past learning it (also sometimes true!)
That last one sure is a kicker. Any given day, every one of these comes up, plus some that I'm failing to think of right now. Anyway, I try not to beat myself up too much about not being able to figure out which reality is real (after a decent attempt), and just live with several potential realities that are simultaneously treated as real until proven otherwise.
(And then the kicker there is forgetting some of the potential realities, only thinking whatever happened only happened one to many but not all potential ways, then finding out it happened one of the forgotten ways-- and once again coming to terms with the whole memory thing. I come to terms with the memory thing a lot. It's exhausting)