science

Yeah; it depends on the day. I'd say the recall is limited to my 140° of forward field of view, and really minor details get deleted, blurred or smeared.

I live in a major city, and pass literally, not figuratively thousands of people every day, so my memory is crammed full of ostensibly millions of people at this point. I don't remember all of their outfits, but I can visualize a memory of say, riding on the subway, and remember almost every person and where they were sitting, and a rough approximation of what they were wearing.

A more unusual outfit would be more memorable, for instance, I had a friend who got a well-paying job, we met up at a convention, and he wore a purple shirt with a mosaic pattern on it. That was in 2015, but I can remember his exact appearance, haircut, the day of, and the shirt because of how unusual and uncommon purple Oxford/business shirts are.

I want to say my memory accuracy is around 88% on aggregate, with the highest quality memories being 96% accurate. Every time I touch a memory, I risk modifying it, so I whiteglove everything, and make sure to not overwrite any information. This is especially hard when reading childhood data because it was literally encoded by a consciousness that was still learning the English language, for ex.

In other words, what I'm trying to say is, my memory is reliable up until there is a lot of crowding. Extremely rich scenes or thousands of people together simultaneously makes it a lot harder, and while the recall is there, up to 10% of the data might be lost.