maybe one explanation for autistic people being gaslighted by neurotypicals

There sounds like a ring of truth to that, how delightful to not feel inferior about our difference for once!

(Though I appreciate with spiky skillsets, some will have the opposite)

I'm really poor with names too.  having them written down for clients was my workaround and I still write names of people in meetings down as they introduce themselves (hehe and then can't read my handwriting another joy of autism...)

Realising this I learnt of a strategy where one takes a salient characteristic of the person and superimposes it on their name as a "hook" to remember it by.

The first time I tried it I spent a day with a client who had a runny nose.  His name was Mr Smith.

When under stress I said "goodbye Mr SNiff" I realised that the technique might not be one best for me...  :-)  The days of Sir, Madam et al are sorely missed by me...

I was told or read somewhere years ago that the CIA and other agencies train agents in these sort of memory techniquies so as when they're debriefed they can give as full a picture as possible of what they've seen and expwrienced. I don't know if it is/was true? But it would be interesting if it was, that something we do so naturally has to be learned by others for work purposes.

I can sometimes remember extra sensory details too (that aren't always relevent), like the sounds of the playground or the feel of a tree trunk or a certain smell. I'm curious now whether that's a trait of our memory recollcation, or something that everyone has.
I can imagine being able to exam all the details and then work it out, rather than just remembering a feeling helps to rebuild ideas behind memories, if that's what you mean? (I could have got that wrong, in case do say!)

I find myself being able to hold a memory and visualise it from different facets, this helps me learn from unhelpful situations as I have diferent perspectives on it. I think NT often come up with an idea of how will happen and remember that, rather than what actually did happen and they seem to do it collectively too.

I have a fantastic visual memory, terrible with names unless I see them writted down (visual), and my memory can be affected by sleep/stress/panic.

I was severly disappointed to get a C in a Maths exam (it didn't matter as I was only taking it as an extra module for fun), as I had a panic attack in the exam, and it was like in my mind I could see the text book but all the answers were erased -it went completely blank, and I couldn't remember anything after that.  The teacher must have appealled with my normal A standard work and got it bumped up to a B, but it still shook me to the core that I could blank like that and remember nothing.

Wow, I was just reading over the three articles linked and it is really interesting. 
I have a specific example in my mind of my memory of an event (playing at another girls house as a kid) and her memory of it years later was wildly different and I never understood how she could get it so mixed up till now. 

I remember having a grand time, making a radio show (I remember all the words to a song we made up still 30+ years later), remember being afraid of her labradour dog(her being afraid of scotty dogs), remember the pudding (it was angel delight and it stuck in my mind as I noticed it was served in silver bowls but the dad got a peach yogurt instead and i realised I must have his bowl), getting to see in her dad's taxidermy studio, and the mum saying how nice and well behaved I was as she had a cousin over the week before who was a nightmare, loud wild etc.

The girl years later when she wasn't a friend (so in the generic bullying crowd of everyone else) said I was awful and wild and wasn't allowed back. This could not have been me being quiet and polite.

Now I can see the WHY of her having swapped memores, as she couldn't allow a memory of having a nice time with me to exist, so had alter it so I was a bad person to be around which fitted with the general view of me. I just thought she was daft, but now I can see why she was adament in telling others this distorted perpective. 


But I can also see how my memory is filled with the details of how my mind works.

understood Stuart333 there is so much complexity that it is difficult to generalise as you pointed out earlier.

My rabbit hole burrowing also took me into a tunnel of research from Cambridge UNi with prof Baron-Cohen et al from 2016 where some to my mind less than sturdy studies looked at autistic memory and found it to be deficient.

As you say simply being stressed puts a totally different spin on things for example with "fight or flight" highlighting visual memories and down playing social communication...

Yes, would be interesting to run the tests again with the NT controls experiencing the same level of stress as the autistics were....

I remember lots of stuff and forget lots of stuff. Given sleep is a problem, being sleep deprived messes up memory making.

Also bring stressed can help or hinder, depending on context.

hehe just to put a spanner into the mix as to whether I truly have autists truly have  better memory..

it depends! of course  Memory and the Autistic Brain | The Neurodivergent Brain

Thanks for your analysis of NT thinking - hmm yes, less detailed therefore easier to be more fluid in interpretation maybe...

False memories for dissonance inducing events - PubMed  as evidence for changing memories in people.  (Test was on 144 undergraduate students with no mention of NT or ND and I haven't quality checked the paper...)

Nothing specific for the thread hypothesis that I've found yet.

Will be interesting to see what other autistic people think too if they also respond.

I can say that I do what you say; remember the event but change the interpretation.

I am not sure what NTs do. I think they have less detailed memories and remember the essence of the event. So the details can change if the story alters.

But I am not sure if generalisations are reliable.