>>10881750I had a REALLY bad memory for a very long time. I think it's due to not having learned any good mnemonic strategies early on, which made me decide that I liked math in particular at school because I could get away with not memorizing anything. Fast forward 30 years and basically over that time I made things a lot harder for myself than necessary by not even trying to work on my memory because I thought it was just "bad" and I had excellent ways of avoiding having to memorize or remember things. Even my episodic memory was quite bad, so I had a terrible time with names, faces, events, etc.
However, it turns out that all those memories are still there, it's not like they just "disappear". You don't really forget things, you just can't access them unless you try hard and practice. So just by doing some basic visualization and mnemonic techniques I've already gotten a lot better. It's also made me feel quite a bit smarter in ways unrelated to memory, because obviously having better memory helps with cognition in general. Don't let anyone tell you that this is something that's just fixed in childhood and can't be trained once you're out of school.
