i could never remember a lot far back until an incident caused some more recent years to disapear from memory. now i have some memories of when i was a baby but not from my teenagw years. i think its all in there, paging it in is just practically impossible to do on demand. maybe some people can do it though..
What you’re describing is dissociation, if you’re looking for a word! Its effects are not as well known and it’s under-appreciated how common it is. Plus having 3 different societal definitions really makes the concept difficult to talk about.
I’ve done a lot of work on this myself and one can connect with one’s parts, if that model seems accurate to you.
I had a similar experience when deeply intoxicated, I saw a shadow that reminded me of the texture of the wallpaper in the first home I grew up in -- it unlocked a cascade of memories from my early childhood (I must have been 2) that I never would have been able to recall otherwise. But I can't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday.
Another fun one on this example is somebody after coming out of a coma being effectively fluent in a foreign language. Obviously the person had to have at least some familiarity with it before, but there are countless cases where somebody goes from knowing a few words of a language (presumably having forgotten everything they learned in school or whatever) to suddenly speaking it, more or less, fluently. Similar incidents can also completely change a person's accent and have other such interesting effects.
There's almost certainly some way to tap into this without (what is usually/always) brain damage, which has interesting implications for the long-term future of education.
