It rather sounds like it may be an issue of priorities— if it feels like you are neglecting friends or family I would strongly encourage you to spend more time with them and do not like academic guilt, the feeling that you should always be studying or working, from establishing and maintaining healthy relationships. History can be a lonely field of study all the way from undergraduate through graduate and into the professional sphere as the field puts more emphasis of solo work/publications than it does team/community produced work (though that has changed slightly and slowly— hopefully a bit quicker in the future).

Otherwise no, I can’t say that my fields of study or teaching have caused me to forget details about other people. I have lots of weird, interesting, and even boring stories to tell at parties thanks to my profession, but I try to stay active in my social relationships so that historical quips are not the only thing I have to offer.

I suspect the closest I came to being a hermit was taking PhD comprehensive exams which involved a massive reading list that could not actually ever be completed, but needed to be at least partly memorized— though really its more likely learning a very special jargon rich language than memorizing things to regurgitate. But that was only temporary and I recall an advisor telling me before the exams that during those two weeks I took my exams would be the time I knew the most about the most diverse set of topics as afterwards I would specialize and would never really need to remember that much again. After all, historians don’t sit and write everything from memory— maybe we free write out our thoughts, but we always go double check things later and hunt down the citations that we only half remember.

Learning to be a history student should be much more about learning the tools and language of historical research than rote memorization of massive amounts of information.

Anyway, if none of this applies to you, then maybe you have nothing to worry about. I have, however, seen others forget the importance of friends and family and suffer when that safety net was not available during the mental stress and anguish of doctoral or career pursuits.