When performance is poor, brain dysfunction is inferred. Memory failure for day to day events is a well-established finding with dissociation. Dissociation is low in patients with medically established brain damage. Therefore, there is no logical reason to expect memory difficulties arising from dissociation to be associated with impaired performance on cognitive tests. Tests of dissociation are the appropriate measure for detecting memory failures arising from dissociation.
Poor memory is frequently traceable to compromised attention.
Impaired sensory processing of tasks involving complex stimulus sources is common in patients with fibromyalgia. The deficiencies come into play when environmental stimuli require the individual to simultaneously process information from multiple channels, activity common to real life situations, but not detectable by commonly administered measures of short-term memory. Currently available cognitive measures of short-term memory rely on selective attention to a finite set of information and are therefore suitable for assessing difficulties in only a small portion of the attention spectrum. They provide a snapshot of short term memory functioning at one point in time on tasks limited to highly focalized attention. They do not provide measures of memory under heavier processing loads requiring attention to be allocated to competing stimulus sources.