I do not remember my life and it's fine

https://aethermug.com/posts/i-do-not-remember-my-life-and-it-s-fine

by mrcgnc • 1 year ago

301 216 1 year ago

andoando• 1 year ago

"Write about a time during your university studies in which you faced a difficult problem, and what you did to overcome it."

I assume these are difficult for anyone who hasn't prepared for them.

I've always attributed this to the fact that we usually never categorize/conceptualize events in these terms in the first place.

paulcole• 1 year ago

What do you mean “hasn’t prepared for them”?

Isn’t just living and thinking preparing for questions like this? They’re not that hard.

numeri4• 1 year ago

They're definitely quite hard for me. I bet my colleagues, friends or family could answer them for me better than I can without prep (which would involve chatting with my wife). Many of the experiences in this article resonate with me, but it's definitely not quite as extreme.

malwrar• 1 year ago

I don’t think about my life and experiences that way. It’s hard for me to just reach into my past and pick some specific instance of an arbitrary experience category in a portable story form. I have to prep, or otherwise just hope I don’t do bad enough that it damages my prospects.

1xdevnet• 1 year ago

Presumably for interviews - specifically STAR[0] format. And no, "just living and thinking" isn't preparing for this. Not everyone thinks in that manner.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_resul...

stephen_g2• 1 year ago

I'd have to think for a few minutes to really come up with good examples because it's basically going over a huge number of random memories and re-categorising them into a framework that's completely different to how they're stored in my memory. This is even with me having (I believe) pretty good autobiographical memory with not really any of the deficiencies talked about in the article.

Off the top of my head without really stopping and thinking for a while I can often only come up with some boring and generic examples.

cstrahan• 1 year ago

I often can’t remember what I did the previous week / weekend before that. I’m 36, and this is how I’ve been for as long as I can remember (our high school had alternating daily class schedules, and I very often forgot if the day before was an A schedule or B schedule, as I could recall some random moments in class from the past handful of days but I couldn’t tell if one recollection was of yesterday or the day before, or the day before that — it’s all a jumble).

To expand on that: questions about travel are my Achilles heel when it comes to dating. “So, where have you been, and what did you do while there?” Well, I took a trip to Iceland with my ex-girlfriend, and I’ve been all over the place with my family, but… I don’t remember the names of the places, and I don’t remember all that much of historical sites and such. Probably doesn’t help that I’m not all that engaged with the names of places / things to start with (vs simply experiencing the thing itself), so that’s in one ear and out the other. What I do recall is conversation and feelings of connectedness, and a couple snapshots of particularly picturesque scenery. But which cities? Which museums/sites/regions? What did I do while there? No idea. I actually rehearse such scenarios before dates to avoid an awkward first impression.

I’m great at remembering how things are connected, why something is the way it is, and how things work. But I couldn’t remember individual facts (names, numbers, the chronological order of independent experiences, etc) to save my life. But most of life is made up of individual, isolated details — which then means that most of life isn’t very memorable for me.

masternight2• 1 year ago

They're hard for me because the events that a lot of people consider achievements don't really stand out in my memory. Often I tend to forget they happened.

I've solved some programming problems that I considered quite mundane and unremarkable, yet others think it was some great achievement.

While it might have been hard at the time, in hindsight the events seem unremarkable and just me doing my routine duties.

"Write about a time during your university studies in which you faced a difficult problem, and what you did to overcome it."

I guess the university example I could spin a story about how I failed a subject and had to repeat it and got high marks the second time round. The thing is I probably won't remember the event if I'm in an interview and under pressure.

When I started writing this post, I couldn't think of anything difficult that I had to overcome in my CompSci degree. It took me a while to even remember failing that subject, and in hindsight I don't have any emotional attachment to the event. It just doesn't stand out in my memory as remarkable or interesting or even difficult. I did change up my tactics the second time around and did quite well in the subject, so I have material for a story.

The problem is most of the time I don't even remember failing that subject. Even if I did remember, I'd probably dismiss it as I don't remember it being difficult.

bravesoul25• 1 year ago

"They are not that hard" yet apparently there is a medical term for people who would definitely find them hard mentioned early in the article.

khazhoux• 1 year ago

Unlike you, many of us do not have instant recall of good stories to tell from our previous experiences.

I have jobs I've spent four years at that right now I can only account for what might be 2 months of work. If I stop and think hard, I might squeeze out another 2 months of recollections.

scythe• 1 year ago

I think what I find hardest about that kind of question in particular is that the first clause prompts me to think of problems that I didn't handle very well, but obviously I want to tell a story that makes me look good. Eventually I will probably think of the right story, after I throw out five or six of the wrong stories.

iamflimflam1• 1 year ago

The ones you didn’t handle well are actually the most useful ones - it’s what you learned from that experience that the interviewer will find valuable. What did you change about your approach so that next time you face a difficult problem you’ll handle it well?

neilv• 1 year ago

Yeah, this is mostly an interview prep thing. It's not nearly as bad and soul-sucking as Leetcode, but they both mostly answer the question of, "How much time did you spend preparing for interviews?"

For those of us who sometimes have trouble with "tell me about a time..." interview questions, but have no trouble recalling relevant examples when discussing an actual real-world question... I wonder whether part of the problem is the interview context is activating different thinking, and maybe you just need to trick yourself with a mental prompt, like:

"The interview is a colleague who is having trouble with a situation like this, and what advice would you give them, and what relevant supporting examples pop into mind? Great, now change gears, remember you're in a bad interview for some company that apparently does bad interviews, but don't tell the interviewer that, and instead carefully speak the most straightforward and uncontroversial example you thought of, in unhelpful STAR format. So that the interviewer can checkbox that you used STAR format. Bonus points if you can twist it to hit a Leadership Principle, and you should mention the Leadership Principle by name, so the interviewer doesn't miss it."

InsideOutSanta• 1 year ago

Yes, I think this is more of a retrieval issue than a memory issue. I have memories of most of the things I did in my work and studies, but I can't retrieve them based on an abstract query like "a difficult problem."

When I get a question like this, I have to find a more concrete approach to retrieve things I did (e.g. "what kinds of problems did I work on together with Sarah in the Compiler Design class"), and then filter them for difficult things that had interesting solutions.

tstrimple3• 1 year ago

At some point I'd expect these questions to have come up enough for you to have some basis on which to speak. By the tenth interview asking a similar question, are you still trying to come up with something brand new on the spot? I have a lot of the issues mentioned in the article from face blindness to a general lack of memory around events. But I've talked about the time I accidentally ran "rm -Rf /." instead of "rm -Rf ./" on a production system on one of my first jobs and the lessons I'd taken away in probably over a dozen interviews during my life. I don't have to try to remember it.

One of my favorite managers comes across as a very charismatic person who always had great stories to tell about his life and work. After working with him for years, it became clear he had half a dozen decent stories he could tell well and rotated through them. Enough new people were introduced and others enjoyed his stories so would encourage it "Tell them about the time you worked for the Canadian Mafia!" They were crafted by that point. He didn't have to "remember" them so much as they were tools in his belt that he could pull out on demand. I'd guarantee some of those stories come out when he interviews somewhere.

brabel• 1 year ago

Pretty much and I think this is the most normal thing!? In fact most of what the author describes is exactly the same for me. Do you guys just remember everything clearly as you need it?? I am inclined to believe that if you can do that you are the one who’s not “normal “

anon3459• 1 year ago

Same

dpc_01234• 1 year ago

Same.

gchamonlive• 1 year ago

I can create images with ease in my mind. It's very useful overall but I don't think it's particularly helpful for preserving memories.

It's all a grayish blur with a tint of sun and green here and there and there are memories that I can recall almost as if I'm there, but this sentiment that big chunks of my life is totally lost I think is the same.

I've also come to terms with it. I write down once and again on my journal. I try to crowdsource memories from friends. But what ultimately makes this ok for me is the prospect of creating new memories and the faith that the crucial lessons from past experiences are embedded in me. And if not it's always an opportunity to relearn everything with more attention.

It's tiring but it can be very rewarding.

wat100004• 1 year ago

Same for me. I can visualize fine, but the author’s description of their memory, or lack thereof, is exactly what I experience. The thing about spatial memory especially. I could draw a decent floor plan of every place I’ve lived since the age of about 4. Some of those places I’d struggle to tell you about any concrete events I experienced there.

It isn’t something I’ve thought about too much. I’ve noticed that other people seem to remember events better, but it didn’t seem too remarkable. But the author’s presentation of this as anomalous really reframes it.

They do say that only half of people who have this also have aphantasia, so we’d expect plenty of people without aphantasia too.

evanrelf• 1 year ago

Wow this resonates so much with me. This is so similar to my own life experience.

VonTum• 1 year ago

My experience is similar to the SDAM described in the post. Indeed factual information, or things that are linked to locations are easy to access, yet more arbitrary information like "That one restaurant is named Fleep Burger" or "That person I met a while ago is named Bert" completely escape me.

I do feel like it's a major disadvantage. I often have to act the part when people remenisce about important shared experiences that I was involved with.

Luckily it does tend to only come rushing back when they tell me "Ah yes, it was in the mountain range with the red cabin", but that's usually past the point where I've already made a fool of myself

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

I've always attributed this to feeling that I truly don't care about some moments or scraps of information. Holding onto them is an entirely pointless chore for the mind, so we forget them by default. Mapping of physical space must be a very different form of memory, however. This doesn't seem to degrade very much over decades and decades of time.

magicalhippo• 1 year ago

I'm certain I got aphantasia, but while I don't "see" my memories, I have a very decent recollection of events in my life. Both my mom and my sister have said they were surprised at how well I recall things from my past.

It's more like I "feel" I'm there though, and I know who was there, what items and such. I'm in my mid 40s, and could easily talk for several hours about when I was 4-6, for example, recalling events from that time.

Of course some are a bit more fuzzy than others, but most memories capture the salient points.

The weird thing is that if I see a name of someone I know, I don't picture them in my head, but if I see a face I've seen before, even briefly, I usually always recognize them. I'm terrible with names though.

OptionOfT• 1 year ago

This is exactly what I experience, and for me, this is a huge issue when it comes to 'selling myself', whether it is in an interview, or writing a self-assessment for a review.

And just like the author, I couldn't answer questions about hard problems that I've solved, until someone pointed out a moment where I did something they would call an achievements.

Now, at that moment I have the right references. It is still hard to talk about it as an achievement, but at least the recollection is there.

And just like the author, I have an excellent spatial memory, remembering roads and direction, and the ability to use that to recall other details.

I wonder how much of this is related with having ADHD, which often makes things feel like you're merely a spectator in your own mind. While I was never hungry as a child, and had access to a good education, the situation with between my parents had a lasting impact on me.

klysm• 1 year ago

In the same boat, also with ADHD.

catskull• 1 year ago

I have a very very strong episodic memory.

I have a very hard time "selling myself". I've added solid stuff to my resume in the last year simply recalling what I've done from an outsider's view. From my perspective, I was just messing around. From another perspective, I was building "impressive" "successful" things.

Learning to give myself credit for my accomplishments is what I think made me the difference between a senior engineer and a staff engineer, as silly as that sounds.

strogonoff• 1 year ago

The trick to jump from the “messing about” to the “impressive” perspective lies in big picture view and a few rounds of “why”. Ideally, you do it before you start (when it comes to the innermost whys you may encounter resistance, bad faith answers, or answers you don’t like), but if that ship has sailed you can still do it as a post-mortem.

tomrod• 1 year ago

I think it is about adopting the right framework. A mix of Clayton Christiansen and 5 whys works for me (similar issues).

I start by writing down the big things: In this year I worked at/for/with ....

WHY was I there: I think about the major projects I did.

WHY was I there: I think (and try to verify) the impact #s/%s those projects had.

WHY was I there: I think about the technical and soft skills needed to make that happen.

WHY do I care: I consider if there is any configuration of things that would make me consider doing the project again.

Having to track past performance as a business made this much clearer -- I adopted the above approach to expand out CV, then developed a similar approach for business development templates to explain recent past work.

I sometimes will drop these templates into an LLM and have it work with me to define or identify ways to better communicate.

alexjplant• 1 year ago

And just like the author, I couldn't answer questions about hard problems that I've solved,

I have a giant Markdown-formatted list that I occasionally add to that has all of the random technical junk I've done in it. I add to it occasionally and reference as necessary.

steve_adams_86• 1 year ago

As I read this I thought “this sounds a lot like having ADHD”. Sure enough…

Feeling like a spectator in your own mind is a very difficult phenomenon to deal with and to explain to people who don’t experience it. In a sense, sometimes it almost seems like other peoples lives are more real than mine, because I experience my own from such a peculiar lens. The experience of others seems much less adulterated by that interference. Of course, this is far from true, and only another illusion produced by my weird brain.

Like you I can’t sell myself at all. Not only is the recollection poor, but I give equal weight to my success and failures. I’m far too objective about myself in settings where I’m not supposed to be.

protocolture• 1 year ago

This is exactly what I experience, and for me, this is a huge issue when it comes to 'selling myself', whether it is in an interview, or writing a self-assessment for a review.

I wonder if this is genetic. I have had a significant number of interviews with people from a couple specific geographic regions that cant relay to me details of a situation where they did XYZ. But given the question simply tell me how they would deal with it.

It made me super curious, because you could see in their job history that they definitely had those experiences but could not recall them.

dmos625• 1 year ago

This made me curious, I too have difficulty sharing experiences. What's the region?

zellyn• 1 year ago

Ask people you worked with who have a good impression of you for a list. Better yet, book an hour of video chat and talk through it with them. They will have a lot of examples. Write them down.

I mostly blundered my way through this through this recent round of tons of interviews, and by the end of it, my "Tell me about a time when…" doc is actually what it should/could have been at the start!

antihipocrat• 1 year ago

Before leaving any job, or when updating the CV. I look at my sent folder (comms app) and completed tickets.

List everything and grab the high level doc/ticket summary for each. Remove any business strategy and now you have a list of achievements that can jog the memory

keleftheriou• 1 year ago

If you don’t mind me asking, what was the situation between your parents?

CMCDragonkai• 1 year ago

Maybe try writing things down?

frereubu• 1 year ago

If you have excellent spatial memory, have you heard of memory palaces? Might be interesting to try and construct an "achievements" memory palace for when you need to answer similar questions in the future. (This isn't a problem for me, just thought it might be an interesting avenue to pursue).

sensanaty4• 1 year ago

I genuinely hate to be that guy lol, but I've found LLMs great for this.

I've been updating my resume lately and I've had some LLMs create scripts to call Jira + Linear APIs to fetch all tickets I've had any involvement in and to analyze it. It hallucinates details all the time of course, but I can at least get a rough idea of the things I worked on, cause I'm the same as you and forget immediately what I worked on last week.

krzat• 1 year ago

I don't quite get the connection between ADHD and feeling like a spectator.

drcongo• 1 year ago

Aphantasic here and this article describes my experience perfectly too. I've wondered a lot about why my brother is able to recall entire sequences of memory from our childhoods and I've got, at best, snapshots that aren't exactly mental images, just stuff I think I know happened.

sausagefeet• 1 year ago

I do not have ADHD but also struggle to "sell myself". It's something I had to work on. My view is that the industry can be kind of obsessed with these kind of stories. It's kind of like the "great man of history" world view, but in the small. A common challenge for me is in companies that have a "cultural" interview where they want you to talk about some conflict that happened and how you resolved this, either I'm incredibly naive or I just don't see conflict in this way that makes it a story. I just try to treat people with respect, I try to talk to them in a way that makes them feel open to talk to me. If I have hit conflict it didn't strike me as a moment where I had to think about it in that or it never escalated to being a problem. And it can be the same for programming. I don't have a cool story about the "hardest bug I ever solved" because it's just the same iterative process as any other challenge I have and it feels the same to me in the moment and after, just sometimes it takes longer. And I am no way trying to imply this represents some exceptional behaviour on my part, it's just by nature or nurture how things work, I didn't choose it.

sensanaty4• 1 year ago

The way I've interpreted conflict in these contexts is more of a "You have ticket X, but it can't be done because Y. How did you communicate about that to your PM/Team/Manager/Relevant Stakeholders?", not literally "How did you handle a fiery argument in the office". It also doesn't hurt to ask the interviewers directly to define "conflict" for you, though.

I think using the word "conflict" is idiotic, but it helps to rephrase it. Because indeed, like you, I've never in my life had "conflict" with anyone in a work setting, I've had plenty of disagreements though and that's just part of the job/life.

I tend to just make something up here on the spot honestly, because as you said, I'm not keeping a book of grudges where I record every single disagreement I have with a colleague. I'll say something like "On Project X (which I've been talking about during the interview) we had a disagreement on how to do Y. I resolved this by gathering the facts on the pros and cons of method FOO vs method BAR, and we sat down as a team and discussed the approach we preferred to take". The anecdote is usually completely made up, but there's been enough situations during my career where the approach has definitely made sense.

vonunov2• 1 year ago

I really hate some of these questions too. I'm going to talk at the hypothetical interviewer a lot so "you" isn't you.

Name a time I had an angry customer? Lol, like, all the time forever? I almost feel like this one must be a trick question designed to catch people who can't deal with the job. I forget about such customers as immediately as possible. As a matter of fact, over the years I've relied on my ability to not reflect other people's temperature or allow their demeanor to take up a lot of space in my field of attention in the first place. I'm not sure if anyone with good chances of coping in this line of work [IT/support/sysadmin was the context when I originally posted this self-quote elsewhere] should really have any honest answers to this question readily available.

I can only name one time I had an angry customer, but obviously I've had countless angry customers. I can name that time because he left a voicemail like four minutes long ranting about how unacceptable it was that we had a full call queue and that he was asked to leave a voicemail, and demanding to be put in touch with various executives. I keep that one in the toolkit because it's easy to twist into inspiring stories about above-and-beyond customer service, or taking ownership, or whatever.

How do I explain something technical to a customer in simpler terms? It's not just me, is it? These seem patently ridiculous, like if they had bothered to do some kind of trial run or think for 30 seconds about how they might answer them, they would have realized...

Or is it just me? Does everyone else have an overt methodology for doing this that they can articulate on demand? I would probably come off like some kind of idiot in that interview. Uh, I dunno. I guess I, like, you know, use the context of the interaction so far to gauge their likely understanding of the salient points? And I audit the explanation for unnecessary tangents and jargon and opaque concepts? I then tailor the explanation to what they need to know and what I think they'll understand in the most useful way in that context? So I guess, in a nutshell, I would say that I explain something technical to a customer in simpler terms by just, like, doing it. This is, like, a bespoke service, sir, perhaps you should try the TJ Maxx down the way.

How do I deal with different personality types? I just, like, do it? This feels like another one where having an answer is a red flag. I've never needed to handle this overtly/consciously either, and I think that's a good sign.

Can I give an example of a situation where I had to go above and beyond for a user? No, and I don't think you grasp the core concept of "above and beyond". If you want some stories about times I didn't have to, let me know.

Edit: Actually, you know what, I do have one of when I "had to go above and beyond" but probably not in the way they're hoping for: https://i.vgy.me/7ZAwjj.jpg

Where do I rate my office suite skills on a scale of 1-10? I'm terribly sorry, I must be in the wrong interview, have a nice day

sReinwald4• 1 year ago

I can relate to this very strongly. The difficulty in 'selling yourself' by recalling specific achievements for interviews or performance reviews is a challenge I know all too well.

Like you and the author, I have aphantasia (and possibly SDAM), but through self-reflection and quite a bit of therapy, I've come to believe this specific issue lies more firmly in the domain of ADHD. For me, the problem isn't just an inability to recall achievements, but a failure to feel a sense of achievement for almost anything in the first place.

A very recent example from my own life illustrates this perfectly: For context, I struggled through university for about 12 years without a degree before receiving my ADHD diagnosis. Afterwards, I decided to switch careers and applied for an apprenticeship as an IT specialist for system integration, essentially a helpdesk/support role. Because of my self-taught skills, I was hired directly, skipping the apprenticeship. Intellectually, I know this was a very good outcome. In the 8 months since, I've taken on tasks far beyond my initial role - automating reports, working on internal tooling and a local AI solution, and developing customer-facing tools. Just yesterday, I was officially promoted to Test Automation Engineer with a 50% salary increase.

And I know intellectually that going from applying for an apprenticeship to an engineering role in 8 months is a significant achievement. But I don't feel it as such. My dominant feeling is that, at 35, I'm finally just starting to catch up to my peers. To an outside observer, that probably sounds absurd.

My working theory for this is that it's a mechanism very similar to the common ADHD experience of misplacing keys. The issue isn't a failure to recall the memory of where you put them. The problem is that the memory was never properly encoded in the first place, because your attention was already split between several other thoughts at that moment. You can't retrieve a memory that was never saved.

I suspect something similar happens with achievements. If an event doesn't register emotionally as an "achievement" at the moment it happens, the brain doesn't file it under that tag. It just gets stored as another factual event - 'a thing that happened' - which makes it incredibly difficult to retrieve when a prompt like "tell me about a time you solved a hard problem" specifically asks for something from the 'achievements' file.

packetlost2• 1 year ago

... huh.

This makes a lot of sense to me in a not good way. Thank you for writing it.

kordlessagain3• 1 year ago

You were LABELED with ADHD by people without our condition. "Having" it is accepting the label and it's definitions. The school system (counselors) tried to label both my kids as having ADHD and suggested medication. Instead of giving my kids amphetamines, I told them to stop trying to force everyone at the school to learn using methods that require memorizing images, which neither one of them do.

Our brains are workhorses of indexing things. Of course we have varying attention, especially when we already "get" what was shown to us. When others have to practice it over and over, we just "get it" and move on to something more interesting (and worthy of indexing). Taking medication to "address" this active attention mechanism is going to affect our ability to form good indexing habits.

pesus4• 1 year ago

This is blatant misinformation. There is ample evidence that ADHD exists and is detrimental to all aspects of life. It is not some quirky different way of thinking, it's a disability. My life was made significantly harder without medication, and it's the only thing that allows me to function on a day to day basis. Your kids may end up resenting you down the road for preventing them from accessing one of the only proven treatments that can help with this nuerodevelopmental disorder.

ahmeneeroe-v27• 1 year ago

and move on to something more interesting (and worthy of indexing).

I have had an ADHD diagnosis in the past and I am 100% on board with this. Maybe the things I can't pay attention to aren't worth paying attention to and I should be working on something else.

Taking medication to "address" this active attention mechanism

I also noticed that when taking medication I became really good at boring, non-creative work, but I struggled with deep or innovative thinking. I decided I'd rather be good at deep/innovative things, even if it costs me my ability to do some mundane things for hours at a time.

neRok2• 1 year ago

I've only just clued on to how my ADHD-PI has actually affected me. It was hard to tell because I'm evidently "smart enough" to work around the issues. Put simply, my "executive function" sends me a ton of inputs that I manage to juggle, but it takes effort, and so I look for ways to reduce my effort. So I'm not too good at recalling things like jokes, because I've put 0 effort in to remembering them. Part of the reason why is because I've been "shy" since childhood (because if you dont talk then you cant say something dumb or be rude - so problems solved), and so if I'm not talking, then there's no point in knowing jokes (and thus, potential effort is avoided). Just this afternoon I had a worked out that the reason why I don't "listen" to lyrics is likely because it requires "focusing" through the music, but I like the music, so I just listen to the vocals as if they were an instrument (and every now and then I'll just randomly hear some words, which gives the jist). I actually embody most of this meme: https://ifunny.co/meme/the-nooticer-the-37-year-old-nooticer...

Anyway, no more about that. Below is a very fresh "nooticing" — straight from my brain to ChatGPT to you;

Child 1) Me, male, left handed, ADHD-PI, aphantasia, strong spacial ability. Child 2) Female, right handed, ADHD-PI, good mental imagery, dyslexia, long time smoker. Child 3) Female, right handed, ADHD-PI, good mental imagery.

That's all of us, born around late-80's. I didn't dump that all that in to chatGPT (more of a drip-feed), but a pattern emerged quickly regardless; FYI: ADHD is in the Prefrontal Cortex (front of brain), whilst Dyslexia is in the Left Temporal Lobe (~mid left).

Some studies suggest that fetal development could influence handedness. The position of the baby in the womb and the amount of hormonal exposure (such as testosterone levels) may have an impact on whether a person becomes left-handed or right-handed. Some theories propose that exposure to higher levels of testosterone during pregnancy may increase the likelihood of a person being left-handed.
Spatial abilities are often tied to the right hemisphere of the brain, which might explain why some people with ADHD-PI (especially left-handed individuals) can develop enhanced spatial reasoning skills, even though their challenges with focus and attention are more prominent.
Aphantasia, the inability to create mental images, has been linked to differences in how the brain processes and integrates visual information, particularly in the right hemisphere, which is responsible for spatial and visual processing.
ADHD-PI and Dyslexia often co-occur, and research has shown that people with ADHD are at a higher risk of developing dyslexia or other learning disabilities, particularly dyslexia.
Testosterone plays a critical role in fetal development, particularly in sexual differentiation (deciding whether a fetus develops as male or female). However, higher-than-normal levels of testosterone exposure during pregnancy can influence brain development, potentially affecting handedness, as well as behavioral tendencies (like aggression, risk-taking, and cognitive development).
Elevated testosterone levels in utero have been linked to prenatal androgen exposure (often associated with more male-like traits), which may influence cognitive abilities and behavior: - Some studies suggest it could lead to enhanced spatial abilities and higher aggression. - On the flip side, it may increase the risk for neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD or dyslexia, depending on how it affects brain regions involved in attention, language, and executive function.
There are a few reasons why a mother might have elevated levels of testosterone during pregnancy: - 1. Maternal Health Conditions (e.g., Polycystic Ovary Syndrome - PCOS) - 2. Stress During Pregnancy: Stress—especially chronic stress—can increase the levels of certain hormones, like cortisol. However, there is also some evidence suggesting that stress can lead to altered hormone balance, which might include an increase in testosterone levels. - 3. Maternal Obesity - 4. External or Environmental Hormone Exposure: Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are substances that can interfere with the body's hormonal systems. Some EDCs mimic or disrupt normal hormone functions, potentially leading to higher levels of testosterone in the body. These chemicals can be found in a variety of products, from plastics to pesticides.

Testosterone is the common thread there, and so the question is: why did mum have so much? She was both a stress-head and smoker, but I can't ask her any specifics, because she's dead. So in hind-sight I would say that she had ADHD as well, and so she must have been internalising many things that would then lead to overthinking, which would cause stress and anxiety ("over-worry" sort of thing).

Her and dad also smoked cigarettes forever since I can remember, but they would always go outside. I'm not sure if she smoked whilst pregnant, but I would have thought so, because the advice to quit may not have been common? My sister reckons she didn't though - so I don't know. Regardless, dad would have been smoking, but even when smoking outside, it's well known that 2nd and 3rd hand smoke can affect kids.

So I already suspected the smoking link (the nicotine to dopamine connection), but I didn't realise my left-handedness, spacial reasoning and aphantasia would all be implicated.

neuroelectron• 1 year ago

Very useful condition to have in certain situations where you're not socially allowed to notice certain patterns.

joshgachnang• 1 year ago

I don't have it as bad as the author, but I've run into this enough times I keep a couple running notes: challenges I overcame, achievements, and amusing stories to tell at social events. They definitely help to refresh my memory ahead of time.

lukeholder• 1 year ago

I thought everyone was like this? No one has a perfect memory. I’m sure it’s a very small slice of people who have their memories filed in a database like lookup system? Some memories stick, most don’t?

opan3• 1 year ago

Reading the article, I think I can do what the author can't, but I also think he probably imagines what he lacks to be more clear/detailed than it is for people without the issue. I can recall specific events from many years ago from my perspective, but it's tidbits, and the info feels lossy. The question he struggled with about past challenges is difficult for most people, I'd guess, but I do not think his issues are fake/normal because of that.

numeri4• 1 year ago

I think you're assuming more people are like you than actually are.

This is part of the classic debate around aphantasia – both sides assume the other side is speaking more metaphorically, while they're speaking literally. E.g., "Surely he doesn't mean he literally can't visualize things, he just means it's not as sharp for him." or "Surely they don't literally mean they can see it, they're just imagining the list of details/attributes and pretending to see it."

adriand• 1 year ago

I suspect I'm close to the SDAM side on the autobiographical memory spectrum, since reading this my immediate thought was, wow. But you make a good point. So I have a question for you, which is, do you remember acquaintances from a few years ago who you haven't seen since?

I have these jarring social experiences where I encounter people who readily recognize me, refer to me by name, etc., and I have no idea who they are. Usually (although not always) they look vaguely familiar, so that I know I must have known them at some point, but they have essentially been erased from my mind. I cope with this by greeting them warmly and just faking it.

I am also absolutely terrible at remembering personal details from other people's lives, although I have great recall of scientific facts, figures and dates.

In general I feel like my past is about about three or four years long. I'm in my mid-forties and everything from before the pandemic feels like it happened a century ago. But I have no gauge on whether that is normal.

educasean• 1 year ago

I can picture my wife's dead grandfather in my head. When I do, I can almost hear his gruff voice and the mannerisms with which he spoke. My mind also immediately conjured up an image of his garden full of cacti, and the yellow wooden chair that sat beside it.

I believe this is the stuff people with aphantasia struggle with.

kamaal• 1 year ago

Im always confused about this. I think my brain has rewritten memories to a large extent.

While its ok to have fictional memories for fun, I think this is disastrous for legal reasons.

Plus I do think memory recall is strong for a lot of people. Wanting retribution for harm done long back, or even life long trauma for bad things that happen to people early life is real.

viccis3• 1 year ago

Half the time when people describe aphantasia, I want to say something like "you realize that most people don't 'see' things in their mind as clear as open eye visuals, right?" but I keep quiet because I know that the worst thing you can do with something like this is make them feel as though you've invalidated something that has become a core pillar of their identity by that point.

numeri4• 1 year ago

That's the thing, some people do see things in their mind that clearly. It's about as rare as full aphantasia, but it's absolutely a spectrum.

stephen_g2• 1 year ago

Hard to tell though - I don't have aphantasia, but I can't visualise images very vividly. I'm happy to accept that many people can "see" their visualisations much more vividly than I can though, because I can visualise sound, voices and music almost as well as actually hearing them, and maybe that comes at the cost of not being able to visualise images as well as others can (but visualising sound better perhaps).

foobarchu2• 1 year ago

I feel like a lot of responses here are lecturing about aphantasia rather than SDAM. I learned of SDAM from this article, but it resonates with my own experiences.

I would describe this in terms of telling stories from childhood. Many people I know can spin a narrative around significant events from their childhood, as if they're living it again as they tell it. This is something media has taught me is the normal way of experiencing a memory. But for me, it's just a list of facts. I can tell you various bits about the time I got punched in the face as a child (second grade, his name, my telling him to "make me" before he did it, every teacher not believing I could have been partially at fault), but those are simply fact lookups in list form. Part of that is aphantasia sure, but the other part is the lack of an emotional memory. I don't remember how any of that made me feel, I can just assume based on context. If I felt anything other than what would have made the most sense in context, it's logged as a fact about the incident.

Sadly, that means I have very little actual memory of my childhood. It's mostly a list of incidents and some data points about the incidents. I don't have emotional core memories of my grandparents, just some events associated with them that I know happened, but can't relive.

saltcured2• 1 year ago

I'm somewhere in between. I mostly learn a lot like the author of the article says, just incorporating things into my worldview. I am terrible at remembering things like "so and so's" theorem/algorithm/historical proclamation. But when I absorb the idea, it becomes part of my own operating model. I'm terrible at citation.

Despite aphantasia, my autobiographical memory is a weird mixture of gaps and some very solid vignettes/moments where I remember a lot of detail. It's never a long-running scene. Many of these memories are pinned at some traumatic or surprising moment, but some seem to be much more mundane and yet somehow were recorded as if they were pivotal.

I have a pretty high ACE score. Ironically, some of my pivotal memories are meta-moments when I had a sudden veil lift from previously repressed memories. I'm remembering not the original traumatic moments, but the moment of realization that my memory had these decade-plus gaps or eras to it.

physicles• 1 year ago

Then she adds some spatial information, like "it's on the last floor of the XYZ building in front of the station" and suddenly I'm transported there in a roller-coaster instant and it all comes back to me clearly.

This works for me too. Let’s say I run into someone I met once a couple months ago. Maybe I recognized them, but I might not remember their name, and certainly don’t remember what we talked about. As soon as I can get details about where in the city the venue was, or where we were sitting in the room, then it all comes back.

I don’t have aphantasia, just a sometimes frustratingly inadequate memory.

NoPicklez• 1 year ago

This is a fairly normal aspect of recall where our minds need some help to recall further memories.

It's why if you forget something you were thinking or going to do, go back to where you were and do the thing that lead to that thought and often it will come back to you.

Aphantasia I think is different, because this type of thing you describe happens for all types of recall not just visual imagery.

xnx• 1 year ago

Attachment is suffering

mkfs• 1 year ago

To some degree, mind's eye clarity is an illusion, with many overestimating the fidelity of their mental imagery. One of the better, more recent examples is the "draw a bicycle" experiment: https://road.cc/content/blog/90885-science-cycology-can-you-...

Granted, many can't draw at all, but people's inability to reproduce from memory an object of some complexity that they see (and likewise, use) every day is telling.

Also the well-documented inaccuracy of eye-witness testimony.

Affric2• 1 year ago

So I read your comment before following the link and drew a bicycle perfectly.

I find it absolutely inconceivable that someone could be unable to draw a bicycle in Liverpool or a similar city.

I am not sure this is related to what OP is talking about.

retsibsi• 1 year ago

I've seen a lot of bikes (and ridden thousands of kilometres), but when I had reason to draw a bike I felt the need to look up some photos to refresh my memory. I'm pretty sure I would have made some basic structural mistakes without that visual reference.

If you find this inconceivable, IMO you're assuming other people's minds work more similarly to yours than they actually do!

In my case (not aphantasic, but I think my visual imagination is significantly weaker than average), the information just didn't seem to be filed in full detail. The image was weak, as are most of my mental images, and I guess I had never paid that much attention to the concept (i.e. how the parts of the bike fit together as a whole; when I had had to pay attention, it had been to specific things like how the brakes work, how to reattach the chain, etc.), so it was all a bit of a muddle.

roganartu• 1 year ago

I don’t think this really has much to do with fidelity/clarity, so much as accuracy. One could have an extremely high fidelity visual of a bike that is incorrect and you wouldn’t say they had aphantasia as a result.

I have aphantasia, I have no voluntary visual component to my mind as far as I can tell. I also have quite a good memory. If I were to draw a bike from memory I suspect I would make similar mistakes as those.

One thing I have noticed in the threads that come up about aphantasia is comments either directly or indirectly calling into question its validity. I want to share a test I got from another HN comment, so I won’t take credit, that I have found to be the easiest way to explain to people how completely absent the visual component is for me.

Close your eyes and imagine a ball bouncing across a table. Imagine the sound it makes as it goes. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. What colour is it?

Most people I ask answer this question without hesitation. It’s easy, because they were just looking at it, maybe still are. I have asked this question of various friends tens of times, and I still don’t know what colour the ball is for me because it doesn’t exist. I know what a bouncing ball looks like, I know the sound it makes. I know what colour it could be. But I’ve never seen it.

That is aphantasia. It’s not foggy, or blurry, or “low fidelity”, it’s just nothingness.

harrisi2• 1 year ago

I think I have aphantasia, and there's two interesting things about this to me.

One, I couldn't tell you what sound a ball makes when it bounces on a table. I've never thought about absence of other senses but, thinking about it a bit, I can't really think of what a glass feels like or a fire smells like either. I have descriptions for all of them, like a glass is hard or a fire smells like.. smoke? Not really the best description. But in all of these cases, I instantly know I'm touching a glass or smelling a fire when it happens.

Two, I only thought of the ball in terms of the parabola it makes. When I read the color question, I can assign a color to it, but nothing in my "imagination" changes. There's just another word, blue or whatever, associated with it.

Thanks for making me think!

constantcrying• 1 year ago

This seems like people who aren't thinking about the problem at all and don't even think about the mechanical problem.

I have no doubt that many of my recollections are bad, but I can imagine essentially every detail of a bicycle, all the mechanical components and how they interact.

jaggederest7• 1 year ago

I can imagine essentially every detail of a bicycle, all the mechanical components and how they interact.

As I understand it, this is extremely uncommon, perhaps you might be categorized as hyperphantasia. How's your memory? They're commonly linked attributes, as per the article, some people with hyperphantasia have hsam - highly superior autobiographical memory, apparently from being able to conjure such accurate mental images.

dmos625• 1 year ago

You'd be surprised how developed these skills are in people that are in visual arts.

burnt-resistor3• 1 year ago

Memory uses lossy compression where sometimes the compression is terribly inaccurate or leaves nothing at all. C'est la vie.

jiggawatts2• 1 year ago

How could people possibly be this bad at drawing a bicycle!?

Was this study done on aboriginals living in a rainforest that have never gone to a paved part of the world where people use bicycles?

Sure, I'd get a bit flustered if asked to draw a modern mountain bike with rear suspension. Err... there's a spring back there... somewhere?

But an ordinary road bike? How could you get that wrong?

smeej2• 1 year ago

I have hyperphantasia, and only realized within the last decade or so that most people are not walking around with a detailed virtual overlay on the whole world.

This bicycle example really helps me appreciate the difference between how things are in my mind compared to most people's, and I appreciate your sharing it!

kordlessagain3• 1 year ago

I must respectfully challenge this interpretation on phenomenological grounds.

To presume knowledge of another's mind's eye is to commit a fundamental epistemic error. Having conducted extensive interviews with hundreds of subjects, I've discovered that visualization manifests along a vast spectrum of human experience, each with its own unique phenomenology and nomenclature. For some, the mind's eye is void; for others, it blazes with such intensity that it eclipses physical sight itself.

The bicycle-drawing analogy fundamentally misconstrues the relationship between mental representation and motor expression. These are orthogonal cognitive faculties—one need not be a sculptor to possess perfect proprioceptive knowledge of one's own face.

The eyewitness testimony example actually undermines the original argument. The critical factor isn't visual recall but temporal-causal sequencing—the who, what, and when of events. My research suggests that aphantasics demonstrate superior accuracy in reconstructing factual sequences, unencumbered by the distortions of visual reconstruction. Indeed, one might argue that the ideal witness would be someone who processes experience without the intermediary of visualization.

This points to a deeper truth about cognitive diversity: what some dismiss as deficit may in fact represent an alternative—and in certain contexts, superior—mode of engaging with reality. The visualizer's mind performs an act of creation with each recall, reconstructing and thereby potentially corrupting the original experience. The aphantasic mind, conversely, may preserve information in a more pristine, unrendered state—accessing facts without the degradation inherent in repeated mental imaging.

This is not merely a neurological curiosity but a profound philosophical distinction: between those who remember through representation and those who remember through direct apprehension. Each mode carries its own epistemic advantages, and our insistence on privileging the visual may blind us to entirely different ways of knowing.

wat100004• 1 year ago

Those seem like totally different things. If someone can visualize things in perfect detail, why would that necessarily mean they can remember the configuration of a bicycle?

dyauspitr• 1 year ago

This is me but I can recall some scenes and isn’t as bad as this but pretty much this. The nice thing I’ve noticed is events that would be traumatic to a lot of people aren’t really all that damaging to me.

lll-o-lll2• 1 year ago

I do not remember my life and I’m a bit sad about it. Aphantasia is completely fine - I feel like that makes me better at various things. SDAM just feels like mostly downside. It makes it hard to notice the passage of time, or plan for the future. It makes me sad whenever I look at pictures of my kids, but can’t remember them being young like that. It makes me sad that when I am old, I will not have the memories of my youth to look back on.

gnat2• 1 year ago

Our 23-year old son died two and a half years ago and while I'm sure SDAM helped me to get through the horrible immediate times, it's quite sad to be without a lot of detailed memories and events that I can look back on to relive the good times. On the whole, I'd rather have had a functioning episodic memory. (and my son)

lll-o-lll2• 1 year ago

I’m so sorry to hear that. Thank you for sharing it — you remind me to make the most of the moments we have. I need to go hug my kids.

scruple2• 1 year ago

I agree. It isn't a superpower, even if it does help us get beyond the bad times. I mentioned in another comment that my wedding day and the birth of my children are basically like any other day in my life to me. I know they're special but they don't carry much emotional weight.

dgreensp• 1 year ago

I met someone with SDAM who described it in a more striking way.

He said he doesn’t have any “first-person” memories. Most people, even if they forget most things they do day-to-day, and don’t have great “indices” of their memories, can think back on certain times where they remember being there, doing a thing, probably with some visuals associated with that, which can be played back. This person said that none of the things they remember that they did, they can remember personally doing, if that makes sense.

For me, I have scattered samples, like once in a while throughout my life, my brain sort of takes a snapshot and forms a memory. I can imagine myself back in each place I lived, for example, or each place I worked, or graduating from college, or walking on the beach.

apothegm• 1 year ago

Oh, wow, there’s a term for this?

I, too, lack episodic memory for anything that wasn’t extremely emotional —- but have extremely strong semantic memory. As well as memory of specific occasions or patterns being linked to a spatial sense (which in turn relates to vague visuals —- colors and textures; spatial relationships; sometimes a very blurry visual snapshot or one with blank gaps in it; but not actual images).

awkii• 1 year ago

I have aphantasia, and today I learned that I also have SDAM.

There are benefits. For example, I find that I have no issue forgiving people. It's more work for me to harbor a grudge. I don't relive the burden of that initial pain of betrayal when someone close to me harms me, so it's easy to forgive and literally forget.

Fun fact: My dreams are very rarely visual.

bravesoul25• 1 year ago

How do you know you have emotionally forgiven (as in let go) even if you have forgotten?

This is a rhetorical question... No need to answer for you situation but I wonder.

Nevermark• 1 year ago

It's more work for me to harbor a grudge.

Sounds like functional forgiveness, as apposed to decision or emotional arc forgiveness. "Letting go" being a very strong default, that would require special maintenance to avoid doing.

I am this way in the long run. Regardless of the situation, at some point I just realize I completely don't care.

Once I know someone operates in a problematic way, I spend some time figuring out how they tick. People really do operate differently internally, and understanding the variety of cognitive damage that nature and nurture can inflict goes a long way to being able to be objective about people's shortcomings.

Then I use common sense to avoid any recurring problems, without negative feelings. I may not want to be connected with someone anymore, but if I run into them, or we are thrown together for some practical purpose, I can be amiable, without any conflicted feelings.

switchbak• 1 year ago

How about the pain of reliving old memories? I could do with a little less of that right now.

scruple2• 1 year ago

I also have aphantasia and I do believe I have SDAM, too. I also had a traumatic childhood and am a combat veteran. I think I've always been this way but that's a hard question for me to truly answer and is one that I grapple with a lot, actually.

How about the pain of reliving old memories? I could do with a little less of that right now.

I don't relive the past the way it seems most people do. I know what it's like to feel hurt or feel stuck but I don't generally feel emotions about things in my past. That's good because I've endured a lot of bad shit but also sucks because my wedding day is kind of like any other day to me, as was the birth of our kids. I guess I know all of the good and all of the bad things that have happened to me -- though I don't really carry them with me the way some people seem to, they're part of me but I don't spend much if any time ever thinking about them -- but I don't feel any particular way about any of it. I know that I love my wife and kids more than life itself, I know these facts and I know the timelines but there's not much else there. I know these things but there's no emotional weight to them.

Oreb• 1 year ago

Me too. I’ve had some very traumatic experiences the last few years, and the emotional scars will never heal. I’m not the same person I was before, and I never will be.

Some people these days are hoping to combat aging and make potentially infinite life extension possible. I find that idea far more terrifying than death. Infinite lifetime would mean that experiences more emotionally and physically painful than I can even imagine would happen countless times. Slowly I would become so messed up by all the accumulated traumatic memories that I would no longer be able to function at all. I would only consent to an infinite or radically extended lifetime if I could also selectively erase memories I don’t want to keep.

aidenn02• 1 year ago

For example, I think I may also have mild face-blindness, the difficulty in recognizing faces and linking them with names. Usually, it doesn't cause major issues, and with some effort and repetition, I can learn to recognize people. But the face-blindness really rears its head when I meet someone not-so-familiar in an unexpected place, like random encounters on a train. Since I don't have the usual contextual cues to help me, in these cases I find it very hard to pin down who they are. They go "hey Marco, what's up?" and all I get is the vague sense that I know this person from somewhere. Only when they mention names or other contextual information do I have a chance of allocating them in their rightful place in my mental social network.

Oh man, I don't have aphantasia (though I do have unusually poor autobiographical memory), and things like this happen to me all the time. Even more embarrassing is when I introduce myself to someone and they say "we've met several times before."

Tor32• 1 year ago

I also have problems with faces, if they've changed slightly or I see them in unfamiliar places. I don't have aphantasia, or problems recalling my past - quite the opposite, I have strong visual memories from before I was three.

On the other hand I'm extremely good at recognizing people from their gait. I can see someone in the far distance and know who they are, even if we haven't met in years. For some reason I also recognize people from how they place their shoes.. as when I walked in somewhere and saw a pair of shoes and immediately knew that it was one of my cousins I hadn't seen in ten years.

Kichererbsen• 1 year ago

I have a similar thing about the gait and I think it might have to do with me needing glasses, but it being mild enough (-1.0, -2.0) that I didn't wear them as a teenager and in my early twenties - so my NN just trained on the data it had ready access too: Gait, preferred colors, movement patterns etc.

The not recognizing people in unexpected locations is something I just mark down to "page fault" and move on. Nobody expects total recall anyway.

cantor_S_drug3• 1 year ago

I have a strong memory. I can cluster memories of a particular vibe (e.g. rainy atmosphere) on demand. But it hurts my brain if I do it too much.

tessellated• 1 year ago

This happened to me yesterday. Sorry Wolfgang.

542354234235• 1 year ago

My partner has this pretty significantly. One interesting byproduct is that for most of her life, she didn’t really understand that other people could just recognize and recall faces. So when a bartender would recall her by name when she had been to a place 3 or 4 times in the last month, she thought they were a creepy stalker and not just someone that automatically recalled her. Because for her it is a deliberate and active process of picking out distinctive traits (glasses, beard, bald, gaunt face, small nose, haircut) to “learn” someone’s face. Or thinking she was just completely anonymous if she went to the same club, on the same nights each week, stood in the same place, and people watched. She was horrified when I told her that everyone that worked there definitely remembered her and probably a bunch of the other regulars too.

mystified5016• 1 year ago

Last year I switched to a local mom&pop pharmacy from CVS. It was a really strange experience when the owner greeted me by name after seeing me twice over a month apart. Almost startling and somewhat offputting.

I just kind of forgot that some people are just that good at recognizing others. It's something I can't relate to at all, so it's a concept that just slips away from my mental models. But I suppose that's always how it is when you try to conceptualize how another being experiences the world.

bravesoul25• 1 year ago

Yes job interviews love those situational questions. Sure you can keep a diary of what you did every single day (pain in the ass as that is) but then you'll be assumed to be "reading notes" and "suspect they are lying". So this ends up being bias against people.

usrme2• 1 year ago

As someone with aphantasia and SDAM, this is what I've literally done for the past 4-5 years. I've kept a log of every single work day so that I could refer back to what I've done over whatever period as otherwise there is literally no chance I'd be able to recollect much of anything.

sh34r4• 1 year ago

Those tire kickers are looking for any reason not to hire people. Trying to prepare for their mind-games is a fool's errand. They've almost always made up their mind when they see your face and decide whether you're fuckable or not.

Do you really want to work for people like that?

Affric2• 1 year ago

I think I have a similar mental world to the author (with important differences) but will say a few things:

- My lack of memories of my late mother has left me with untold grief in a way the passing of my grandparents did not.

- Mental health is too focused on the individual and the variation in our behaviour should be viewed not only with regards to our own individual fitness but also the fitness of our group and our kin. Most things that are decried as disorders are understudied in group settings designed to maximise the positives. And I despise people overhyping ADHD etc etc as some sort of superpower.

burnt-resistor3• 1 year ago

I had hyperphantasia as an ADHD kid, and now have ADHD and aphantasia as an adult. I don't even dream anymore when I sleep.

emmelaich• 1 year ago

I'd love to see a study of correlations between aphantasia and other properties of the mind.

   1. schizophrenia?  (blind people never seem to be schizophrenic)
   2. artistic skill
   3. alzheimers and dementia
   4. empathy - the ability to see yourself in other's shoes

TaupeRanger• 1 year ago

Hot take: aphantasia doesn’t exist, it’s just that individuals have very different understandings of nebulous words like “memory”, “minds eye”, “mental imagery”, etc. The essay here is just one person describing problems that everyone has in various degrees of severity.

enneff• 1 year ago

That is a hot take but it doesn’t really line up with research nor my anecdotal experience discussing the topic with close friends that have aphantasia.

vasco• 1 year ago

Also while describing their inability to remember specific episodes they describe specific episodes.

There are many memories there, but most of them can't be retrieved with convenient keywords like "a time when X happened".

In a paragraph about "times when I couldn't recall specific episodes" and describing a job interview from the past.

screaminghawk• 1 year ago

I have this too, or something similar at least. I have the same issues around visual memory and first person memory.

I noticed it specifically when talking to my wife about remembering feelings and emotions. I have a lack of empathy (different to sympathy) and when looking back at past events I struggle to feel the emotions I was feeling at the time. I can recreate them using facts and things I understand but it's different to experiencing the same feeling.

The author of the article doesn't touch on this so I'm curious to know if they have the same experience.

z5h• 1 year ago

I’m realized years ago I have full blown aphantasia. But I don’t suffer from autobiographical memory deficiencies. For me it’s akin to what happens when you close your eyes for a moment then open them again. I’m not shocked by everything in the room “appearing” suddenly. I knew it was all there, but not because I visualized it while my eyes were closed. So when I remember past events, it’s with that same sensation of being there but just having closed my eyes to it. I do dream with full imagery.

vladmk• 1 year ago

How does he remember this? "Occasionally, someone shows pity or commiseration towards me, as if I were in constant, daily suffering from a crippling disability. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course."

usrme2• 1 year ago

Fellow aphantasiac here: it's not so much a memory of that very situation happening, for me at least, but the feeling of it happening and some of context around it.

Same goes for tragic and happy events: I can't remember their details, but I remember my emotions.

neRok2• 1 year ago

For me, something like that is saved as a "data point" in the "facts folder", and thus is readily accessible. For example, I've got a big beard, and lots of people make compliments about it in public: at least once a month for over 5 years now. I know this as fact. But if you want me to recall a recent example of it happening, then nothing just springs to mind. As I probe my mind trying to find an example, one has come to mind, but it's not recent (from Jan this year). It occurred in the context of a notable event, so like other people have said elsewhere, it must be because I associated some importance with that event (and it was a novel event, which explains that), and that this beard-compliment has tagged along with it (the whole event has come to mind at this point too).

And just now in the process of writing all this, a quite recent example has come to mind, which may be the most recent, and it was when I was on walk and just crossed a corner when a car arrived at the corner to turn, and the male passenger already had their window down, and so he yelled out something like "cool beard", and the driver was female and didn't really pause turning or anything, and I didn't acknowledge the bloke at all (because fuck off, dont yell out at me from a car window). I'm not confident, but I think the car was a small-ish SUV. Anyway, apart from where it happened, I can't think of anything else. I don't know what clothes I was wearing, what they looked like (besides being ~30yo and white), what color their car was, what his voice sounded like, which direction they turned (it was a roundabout), etc.

* By probe my mind: in my case I am constantly "talking" in my head. It's as if someone is sitting over your shoulder going "uhh, you go to the shops often, maybe check that folder. nothing? uhh, what about ..." Eventually something will just pop-up. (I don't really say folder in my head, more like "maybe at the shops, maybe on the outside, maybe walking inside, whilst at the checkout? nothing? uhh..."

* By spring to mind: It's kind of like an email arrives in my inbox with all the details in it. All I can do is probe my mind a bit, then "check the inbox", then probe, etc. Whilst listening during conversation, events relevant to the conversation can just appear in the inbox. I don't know if the talkers words can trigger it, or if it's because my inner-voice is reviewing/breaking-down* what they are saying as they are saying it, and that's the trigger. This is also what happens when I am reading. Things can just appear whilst I am talking too, because my inner-voice is usually planning ahead in the conversation (and it also monitors tempo, audience response, etc), but I think it might be the same part of the brain that does speech, so it can only work at like half speed. Sometimes I will forget the word I was going to say or muddle a moment of speech, which is probably the inner-voice using too many resources. And of course, I can just "get distracted" and fork the convo at any moment (the classic "speaking of which"). My inner voice also plans ahead whilst I am writing, and it makes similar mistakes. Sometimes I will miss a word, or even just skip ahead a whole sentence (to the point where it was planning). It's particularly easy to "lose a sentence" if the word I'm typing is similar in letters to the one that's just been planned.

* Because my inner-voice is talking whilst they are talking, it can notice something interesting said in the conversation, or it could trigger an idea (I haven't pondered this before, but perhaps a 'new idea' notification just arrives in the inbox too...), and at the point my focus can drift as my mind explores that idea/topic (I think this is the ADHD "Predominately Inattentive" aspect at play).

* PS- Because I ponder so much, I have pondered something pretty "meta" before, like in the way that the universe could be a simulation. So yes, I have wondered if the voice in my head is me (it sounds like me), or if it's an entity that has "taken control of the wheel". On the rare occasion that it's not talking, I get the sense that it's still there, waiting. After a few moments there might be a "hmmm...".

Also my inner voice can do very accurate impressions, and sing just like the real singers it copies. There is a strange distinction between "singing lyrics" and "hearing a song with lyrics" in my head. It can even make sounds with my voice that are quite impressive, and I get the impression that it is possible for me to make those sounds. It tries for a moment to convince me to do it, before it chuckles and says "there's no way".

* PPS- As I was typing that last part, a memory popped up! I was at the strip club one time talking to a girl, and out the blue she goes "you've got a good voice, i reckon you would be a good singer", which made me think "fkn what". lol

* Update: I was just in the kitchen making a coffee, and thinking about how good this post was. A few things popped up; 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mj2fVcyVkU 2) https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/hurlburt-heavey-kelsey-201... — "The median inner speech frequency of the participants in the Heavey and Hurlburt (2008) and Mihelic (2010) studies was 20 percent." 3) On the last project I was on, I think the engineer I was working with ended up with PTSD from all my ideas, lol. But still, they all liked it when the reviews from construction came back as "this is the best ever!"

As I was gathering those links — 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5bJvo_THvg When people without inner voices watch a scene like that, I wonder what they think is happening. The TV show Peep Show is another example. Do they think the person is "first person" is actually saying those things? It would make no sense!

kevinsync• 1 year ago

I’ve gone through periods of life where I didn’t recall dreaming for years at a time, and others where I have frequent, vibrant dreams. I’ve had sleep paralysis many times when I was younger, a handful of extremely lucid dreams, times when I close my eyes and see nothing, and times when I can close my eyes and visualize clear, fully-actualized images.

I bring this up for two reasons: I wonder how fluid this sort of thing is, and I wonder what factors can dial up and down the intensity. Nicotine, patches in particular, absolutely supercharged my dreams to be bright, vivid, insane, bizarre hallucinations.

In general, my memory of novel events / odd connections / hilariously specific details is quite good, going back many years. I can also forget what I’m supposed to be doing right now within minutes. I can often remember when/where/how I read/saw something but not WHAT I read, so I have to retrace my steps to get to where I know the information is that I’m seeking.

It all seems to oscillate and shift and it’s fascinating.

philsnow• 1 year ago

My experience is nearly identical to this, except that I’m not aphantasic. I’m not trying to minimize the effects of aphantasia, but I also don’t think the thrust of the article is about aphantasia nearly as much as it is about SDAM.

The map view in Google photos / Apple photos is often my key to looking up the date of a memory. Well... really is that I know I’ve been to certain places, but have no actual memory of being there, so I look up the locations in the map view of Photos, see the photos, and that triggers actual memories.

I’m sentimental about objects for a similar reason. I don’t recall lots of memories with people, but when I see or touch an object that is associated with an extant-but-inaccessible memory, the memory comes back to me in living color, so to speak.

My late wife passed way six years and six days ago, and I’m still in the process of giving her clothes and things away to charity / finding new homes for them. It’s extremely difficult for me, because I don’t have much recall of particular memories of the 12 years we were married or the 8 years we were together before that, and I worry that losing access to these totems will cut off even the tenuous access to the memories I have of her.

achenatx2• 1 year ago

I have this anxiety for sure. I cant even picture her face.

Touching objects for me doesnt help, though looking at pictures does. Ive tried to get her to make scrapbooks for every year we have been together with explanations and stories, but no luck so far.

She remembers what we both were wearing the day we met.

dmos625• 1 year ago

What helped me when I was grieving is to remember the feeling of the loved one's presence. At first it's subtle, then as you start enjoying the visualization it becomes more pronounced. Like imagine you're sitting alone and then that person walks in, and that "changes the room", probably in a different way than if any other person walked in. That wonderful feeling that comes over you when you remember the person's presence allows you to maintain a connection even when the person is not there physically. Or, at least, it did for me. This developed in me the sense that the person is still with me and always will be.

I'm pleasantly surprised that this thread has multiple threads about loved ones and grieving.

pfdietz• 1 year ago

Wait... so those with SDAM are never subject to intrusive thoughts about some hideously embarrassing event that happened decades ago, and that only they would have remembered?

What a blessing.

joey_spaztard• 1 year ago

I typed my intrusive thoughts in to a document and analysed them. It turns out I had a hundred of them.

It really helped to write up why they don't matter now, such as "I was a child when that happened, I'm now an adult who knows how to handle that."

My brain thinks that a physical piece of paper is much more authoritative than a thought in my head and makes less effort to remember things that are documented so having twenty page booklet that I can get out if I need it seemed to help.

ttiurani• 1 year ago

I realized I have aphantasia, not SDAM, just a year ago or so. Mine is mild because I have visual dreams, but just can't get anything going when I'm awake.

I'm now playing around with visualizations just when I'm falling asleep, when I now notice I actually can do it. To me, seeing pictures in my head just feels very odd and kind of pointless.

fishtoucher2• 1 year ago

I think I have a fairly similar experience to the author. Different in some respects, I'm not aphantasic, but I resonate strongly with the lack of autobiographical memory and feeling like an observer in my own history.

I can't describe how many times someone's asked me what I did last weekend and I told them that I did just had a quiet one at home, then later I'm reminded I actually went skiing or something notable that I completely forgot. Not just passing conversations with strangers either, this happens with family just as much.

I take a more pessimistic view on how it affects my life than the author does though. He handwaves the downsides even saying that he '... had learned my lessons from them [trials in university], even though I forgot how they unfolded.' I understand the desire to think that but I'm not sure how you can really justify it. The brain definitely learns to compensate in other ways and I have really unbalanced cognitive tests I took as a kid as evidence, but memory deficiencies are undoubtedly a disadvantage.

meander_water• 1 year ago

This is uncanny, I was going to write almost this exact comment. I've been told mine is due to a deficiency in working memory, which can then lead to the brain not converting to long term memory. something that ADHDers present commonly with.

jaggederest7• 1 year ago

I'm in the opposite camp - I also have poor working memory, but instead I have extremely good episodic memory. Good enough I have to remind other people about our shared experiences routinely. I never claim to have eidetic memory but I've only met a couple other people who have memory like mine (one is my mother, so that's kind of cheating)

It's interesting though because I associate with a lot of what the article is talking about with spatial and knowledge memory too. I often have to remember where something was to "step into" the memory again.

sh34r4• 1 year ago

Depression causes similar memory impairments.

ralfd• 1 year ago

and I told them that I did just had a quiet one at home, then later I'm reminded I actually went skiing or something

This is wild!

fishtoucher2• 1 year ago

It's a ridiculous and extreme example but it actually did happen. I was going skiing quite often at the time though so maybe it didn't have the sticking power it would've normally.

In general, without some kind of trigger my ability to remember specific episodes is nonexistent. The OP talks about this too but those times when you have to give 3 fun facts about yourself or when someone asks my hobbies are moments of of existential dread because I genuinely have no idea what to say.

I realised recently that there are whole years of my life I'm basically missing when I think back. Like I know where I was living, what job I was working, and my general circumstances, just not anything specific I actually did.

polynox• 1 year ago

I have come back from week long international trips, having arrived by plane on Monday or Tuesday, and by Thursday someone will ask me what I did last weekend, and I'll draw a blank, and the social pressure of not having an answer and not wanting to pause for a whole minute to exercise my memory to reconstruct the last week will make me say something like, "nothing much, you?". It's that by the second or third day of being back in my routine, I forget what it was like outside of that routine, feel so immersed in it day-to-day, so unless I remember that I did have a disruption I won't really remember anything...

BobbyTables2• 1 year ago

As I’ve gotten older I realize how little I remember of what happened even a year or two ago. The experience of going on vacations is quickly forgotten.

I remember some major work accomplishments but have some trouble selling myself. (A lot of time and effort was spent on solving problems somewhat artificially created by unique & unusual circumstances).

ddingus• 1 year ago

I do remember my life and I am not fine.

I remember a lot. One oddity with me is I seem to remember an unusual amount when it is connected to a question. I seem to record for a while, then can play back.

And this sticks, sometimes for years until the question is resolved. Then a bunch of it fades and becomes like most other memories are.

I remember every year of school and a lot of related activities. Saturdays out playing, or first concert, that sort of thing.

So, why am I not fine?

Take 9/11

I remember the state before that day. We have come a long way since then.

Too far, if you ask me.

Cops in schools. There were no police in my schools. Kids made mistakes, teens demonstrated poor judgement, and other things..

They were treated like kids.. today??

They have records..

I worked for one company for too long. The culture shifted. Soon, I felt like the stranger. I held the history nobody else did, or if they did, they did not share.

Now, I do consider these mostly nice problems to have. I have options and can exercise them.

Thought you might appreciate some perspective.

I enjoyed this piece.

Traubenfuchs• 1 year ago

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. I've been successful at most of what I've tried to accomplish in my life until now, and never had to battle with a sense of being disadvantaged. On top of that, even aphantasia experts generally agree that it is not a disorder.

This almost sounds similar to deaf rights activism that tries to prevent children from getting cochlear implants to me.

You never experienced what you are missing, you have no idea what you are missing.

I can, on demand, replay my most beautiful memories on loop. They are my most valuable treasure. Unless they are lost to dementia, I already know which memories I will replay before death.

Being able to visualize mental images is essential to experience the full range of what it means to be human.

I do wonder how drugs with strong visuals work on those people though? What do they see when they take ketamin or DMT?

achenatx2• 1 year ago

I have aphantasia, SDAM, and face blindness.

Like the author i rely on mental models (I wrote a book called visual models for software requirements), Im good at getting to the heart of things and am constantly organizing information so I can remember the principle.

I do get anxiety about not remembering people once they pass away. I might only remember a few things about them. But when I look at pictures I can often times remember all kinds of details. I think some of the information is there, it just isnt retrievable.

Im bad at networking, when I go to events lots of people know me, but I have no idea who they are. Im waiting for glasses with cameras that will identify people for me and go over their background.

Aphantasia is supposed to be rare, but I think many engineers have it. At least at my company it seems more prevalent than it is supposed to be in the general population.

In some ways it is a gift. I barely remember traumatic events, but unfortunately I dont really remember amazing events either.

dmos625• 1 year ago

I do get anxiety about not remembering people once they pass away.

Have you tried remembering how their presence felt/feels? Consciously identifying the feeling that a loved one "carried" was an important part of a recent grieving I went through.

burnt-resistor3• 1 year ago

I have aphantasia now and I miss being able to visualize anything at all.

I have the opposite of face blindness and subconsciously process every face but I have lethonomia (cannot remember people's names). Years ago, I was once riding my bicycle from campus at probably 21 mph / 30 kph and recognized the brother of a lab partner when they were completely to the side of me and 75' / 22 m away in profile after seeing a photo of them once. I'm probably not as good as I once was due to a TBI.

kaashif2• 1 year ago

Those vague "problems I had to overcome in university" that the job screening question wanted from me had happened, and I had learned my lessons from them, even though I forgot how they unfolded.

Is the author sure about this? How do they know they learnt the lessons if they don't remember what happened?

The best way to convince most people of something is to tell a story about it. Ask a senior engineer how splitting up a monolith into microservices can go wrong and they'll have a dozen stories. Ask someone about the importance of clear communication and they have hundreds of stories of things going wrong. And when I want to convince someone, I deploy a story from my experience and it has a good chance of working.

I can tell someone my mental model, but also the evidence that went into the model from my experiences. Not having that second part is like publishing conclusions without publishing the data.

I understand it's fine for the author but it does seem like a real handicap. Dwelling on it is not going to be useful for the author, but actively handwaving this all away doesn't seem credible.

And on another note, when a loved one dies it is nice to think about them and remember things we did together.

By doing away with reminiscences, flashbacks, and graphic visions of possible futures, I can stay focused on the now, and on what I can do now to improve tomorrow.

My graphic visions of past experiences and possible futures when someone says "let's do a complete rewrite of this business logic" are actually very useful for convincing people not to do that...

zero_bias• 1 year ago

After a severe anxiety episode earlier this year, I ended up forgetting all of February. Feels very strange when I recommend a cafe to a friend and he tells me we were just there together three days ago

SlowTao• 1 year ago

While I wouldn't say "yeah I have SDAM" or whatever, yeah generally memory of life is a complete blur, always has been. You can still learn the lessons and make good in the world but not having to carry around a burden of trivial past history.

zgougou123• 1 year ago

I once read a theory about aphantasia where the author thought that aphantasia mostly comes from a confusion regarding how one would describe their own internal thought. Some would use vivid terms or descriptions to describe their internal thought which would lead other people to think "wait, that's not how I view things, there must be something wrong with my thoughts".

9witz• 1 year ago

I can see myself in this. Face blindness is really a problem for me, too. Thankfully younger people (who all look the same to me) have taken up tattooing themselves, which makes it a lot easier to identify them (because it's easier to remember than a face)

Malcolmlisk• 1 year ago

What nobody says is that, face blindness is a protection mechanism from our brain for protecting ourselves from losing our minds. When you see your friends growing up and don't remember when you were kids, or when you see the kids at school and you think 'they are younger than I were when I was in there', that's your brain using this mechanism. Forgiving all the faces that we had back then, so we don't feel so much like growing and getting old. That's why your family will always look like they are right now, and you need to make an effort to remember them when you were kids, and remember them in their kid form.

vaylian• 1 year ago

As a matter of fact, spatial memory is the closest thing I have to an "index" for the musty file cabinet of my episodic memories. If I can remember where something happened, there is a good chance I can remember many more details about what happened.

This. Information retrieval typically happens based on an impulse. For many people the impulse can be a question like "what did you do yesterday?". But some people organise their memories differently. From reading the article it is clear that the author does not have a bad memory. Their memory is just wired/optimized differently. The biggest problem is other neurotypical people who, without bad intentions, assume that it is easy to answer a question, that is framed around time.

ahaferburg• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/BGfTD

naikrovek• 1 year ago

My memory feels like a file cabinet without labels, a database without an index, a dictionary of randomly-ordered words without a table of contents. There are many memories there, but most of them can't be retrieved with convenient keywords like "a time when X happened".

Duuuuude that’s how I am. I can’t remember anything autobiographical without some trigger. But once I have the trigger, I remember the event whose memory was triggered. Vividly. But I don’t have the ability to tell you what happened yesterday without a reminder from somewhere. I can’t simply recall stuff a lot of the time. It drives people nuts.

tgaj3• 1 year ago

I wonder if this is one of the causes of hoarding. I hate to throw away stuff because for me it's like erasing memories from my brain.

cantor_S_drug3• 1 year ago

I have one suggestion to make to Marco Giancotti. Please read all of Oliver Sacks books. They will help you clarify your situation a lot due to some case studies he has mentioned in his books.

Related : People with no internal monologue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u69YSh-cFXY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqjrILPwIoo

baibhavbista• 1 year ago

Also, I think I read in one of Sacks' books that he did not have any visual imagery either? I think it was in the chapter about himself in the "Mind's Eye" book

cantor_S_drug3• 1 year ago

In one case study, a person was going progressively blind. After he became completely blind and 1-2 years later, he couldn't picture how his wife looked like in his imagination

cryptonector• 1 year ago

Someone near and dear to me has aphantasia, and it's very disturbing to me, but it doesn't appear to hold them back in the least. I can visualize every sense (sound, smell, taste, touch, sight, and acceleration); I can't imagine not being able to.

_DeadFred_• 1 year ago

I could never much remember life events. Then my life fell apart. In a time of need and when I needed strength I remembered events with my kids with great clarity. With my grandparents. Then my mom got cancer and passed I could remember so many moments with her. So many moments even of just us eating pizza for lunch somewhere together. Or going to The BK Lounge after going to the Capitola mall. I could suddenly recall the tapes mom played in her car taking me to school. All kinds of things.

Same with remembering names. I never used to be able to. Then I realized that was just a shitty behavior and that people deserved to have their names remembered. Suddenly, once it had value and 'wasn't a thing I couldn't do' but 'something I want to do' I could remember names.

I do not remember my life and it's fine

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