You Won't Remember the Pandemic the Way You Think You Will

[chia]

13. And I'm not saying it's entirely inaccurate either, so perhaps we're talking past each other.

I tried to access the paper referenced in your first link, but it's behind a paywall. I tried to find another source that would provide more information than your first link which gave a percentage for the days-after result, but no percentage for what the subjects remembered when asked months later. ("With longer delays, participants recalled fewer details, but the details they did report were accurate.&quot

A couple other sources were out there, one of which had this to say:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-memories-events-retain-remarkable-fidelity.html

The results showed that participants' accuracy was high in both cases, though, as expected, the number of details they remembered decreased with age and time. At best, they recalled about 25% of their experience. "This suggests that we forget the majority of details from everyday events, but the details we do recall correspond to the reality of the past," Diamond said.

It's normal to retain more of your experience in your memory a couple days after vs. months or years after, and nderstandably, a flashbulb memory event will have more impact than everyday memories. But without being able to access the paper itself, I'm left with the various ways it's been summed up, one of which tells me that while the study's subjects remembered what they remembered with accuracy, that over time what they remembered was about 25%.

I think that's a significant distinction, but that's just me. Not trying to be pedantic about this but there's a wide range of possibility in our ability to remember our own life events. We can remember less or more of a stressful event depending on how we handle stress as a unique individual. When it comes to a threat to our survival, for example, people are often likely to focus on the weapon rather than on the environmental details around the weapon. When your life depends on the gun pointed at you, your focus can narrow down, instinctively. We may bury memories that are too painful, we may embellish memories that make us look better, conveniently forget memories that convict us. We can be self-protective in our memories. We can magnify memories out of anxiety. There are just so many variables.