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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's pretty much what my therapist said when I first expressed this to him, so you're in good company there.
I thought about this more on my commute home from work, and I'm starting to suspect that "SDAM" might essentially be the long-term effects of alexithymia or interoceptive blind spots, which are fairly common in neurodivergent people with ADHD, autism, or both.
For context, alexithymia is a significant difficulty in recognizing, sourcing, and describing one's own emotions. Interoception is the sense of your internal bodily state.
You can likely relate to being so deep in a flow state that you don't notice how badly you need to use the restroom, or how hungry you are, until the feeling becomes so overwhelming it finally breaks through your focus. That's an interoceptive blind spot in action.
So, to further elaborate on my theory: If alexithymia raises the required signal strength for an emotion to be consciously recognized as significant, our brains - which strive for efficiency - will only tag and store memories that cross that unusually high threshold of "important." All the "little things," even the nice ones, get dropped because they never registered with enough emotional weight at the moment they happened.
The brain prioritizes emotionally significant information for memory storage. If an event doesn't trigger a sufficiently strong or clearly identifiable emotional response at the moment it occurs - because your baseline emotional processing is affected - it might get stored as just factual information rather than a rich, emotionally resonant autobiographical memory. It becomes "a thing that happened" rather than an "experience I had that affected me emotionally."
This explains my memory pattern perfectly: I remember most big family holidays - Christmas, birthdays, weddings - because those come with heightened emotional anticipation and distinct social components. But I'm already struggling to piece together what we did on Easter this year, and have absolutely no idea what we did last year. The quieter, more routine positive events apparently don't meet that higher "emotional importance" threshold for deep encoding.
It's like having a filter that's calibrated too conservatively - it's protecting you from information overload. Perhaps that's why it's so common in neurodivergent people, both ADHD and autism heavily affect how we take in and process external sensations. If there's any positive spin to this theory, that I will agree with you, makes sense in a not good way, it might be that. But, unfortunately, it's also discarding experiences that others would naturally encode as meaningful memories.
> For context, alexithymia is a significant difficulty in recognizing, sourcing, and describing one's own emotions. Interoception is the sense of your internal bodily state.
Oh yup. The way I've always described myself is I have extremely "muted" emotions, bordering on none the overwhelming vast majority of the time. I only very rarely feel extreme emotions of any kind.
> This explains my memory pattern perfectly: I remember most big family holidays - Christmas, birthdays, weddings - because those come with heightened emotional anticipation and distinct social components. But I'm already struggling to piece together what we did on Easter this year, and have absolutely no idea what we did last year. The quieter, more routine positive events apparently don't meet that higher "emotional importance" threshold for deep encoding.
I don't remember hardly anything about my own past outside of factual information, and that tends to fade rather extremely with time. Even times when I was quite literally sobbing I don't remember the emotional impact of, just the fact that it happened, sometimes not even the cause.
On the other hand, I have extremely good factual memory about random shit and can usually build up a solid approximation for how something works from first principles on demand for an extremely broad array of things. Trade-offs, I guess.
It's what I imagine being an AI would feel like from the perspective of the AI.
> It's what I imagine being an AI would feel like from the perspective of the AI.
I've been 100% immersed in AI all of 2025, and I think it's impacting my communication skills -- especially the way I write.
Wouldn't it be amusing if after the disruptive period of AI's rise is over, people with ADHD end up being highly sought after for our ability to communicate clearly with them?
> Oh yup. The way I've always described myself is I have extremely "muted" emotions, bordering on none the overwhelming vast majority of the time. I only very rarely feel extreme emotions of any kind.
I remember infuriating my mother almost every day after school when she'd ask "How was it?" and I would just shrug and say, "I don't know."
She thought I was being evasive or something, but I was being completely honest. I genuinely didn't have an answer because my internal state was, as you describe perfectly, muted. Most of the time, I just felt... like a neutral, warm grey. Well - still do. There was no data to report.
> I don't remember hardly anything about my own past outside of factual information, and that tends to fade rather extremely with time. Even times when I was quite literally sobbing I don't remember the emotional impact of, just the fact that it happened, sometimes not even the cause.
I think remembering the fact of sobbing but not the feeling is the perfect distinction between semantic memory ("a thing that happened") and autobiographical memory ("an experience I had"). The factual data point was recorded, but the emotional qualia wasn't encoded for retrieval.
> On the other hand, I have extremely good factual memory about random shit and can usually build up a solid approximation for how something works from first principles on demand for an extremely broad array of things. Trade-offs, I guess.
I wouldn't even necessarily call it a trade-off so much as a logical consequence. If the brain's system for storing rich, first-person experiential data is impaired, it makes sense that it would rely on and strengthen its system for storing third-person factual data. The "what" gets stored efficiently because the "how it felt to be me when it happened" isn't taking up much space on the hard drive.
> It's what I imagine being an AI would feel like from the perspective of the AI.
Sounds about right to me. I feel the same. I have access to the facts, like my I'd argue objectively fairly impressive achievement I described above, but I don't seem to have the emotional data. So, I can reason myself into knowing that I achieved something - but I'm not feeling it.
I have (self-diagnosed) aphantasia and SDAM. I do not relate to your belief that SDAM is related to the emotions felt. I don't believe I have ADHD nor autism. We don't currently have a scientific understanding of the mechanisms that cause these differences in experience, so everyone forms their own ideas of what's going on based on their own grab-bag of internal experiences and qualia.
That's fair criticism, I'm obviously coming at this from my personal perspective and that is shaped by how my brain experiences the world. I should've been more precise, I didn't intend to suggest that alexithymia is the only pathway to SDAM, there are likely multiple aspects or pathways that can contribute to or cause it.
However, I would challenge the premise that SDAM is entirely unrelated to emotional processing. It's important to distinguish between the conscious feeling of an emotion and its subconscious role in the mechanics of memory formation. There's significant evidence that emotional salience is a crucial part of how the brain tags and consolidates strong autobiographical memories. A disruption to this process doesn't have to be a consciously felt emotional deficit; it can be a mechanical one operating below the level of awareness.
We can look at this as two distinct points of failure in the memory pipeline:
Failure at the input stage: If the emotional signal required to "tag" an event as important for rich autobiographical encoding is never met, the memory is formed, but only as a semantic fact ("a thing that happened"), not a re-experiencable episode. The processing can't happen because the right input was never provided.
Failure at the retrieval and re-experiencing stage: For someone with aphantasia but no issues with alexithymia (like you, I'd assume), the initial emotional tagging might function perfectly well. The disruption happens later. The core deficit of SDAM is the inability to "mentally time travel" and re-experience the past. Aphantasia, by definition, removes a primary tool for this: visual imagination. The brain processes and integrates emotions by revisiting them. If you cannot truly "re-live" a moment because the visual data is inaccessible, then the episodic, first-person quality is lost.
This second point matters beyond just losing access to nostalgia. We process and regulate emotions by mentally revisiting experiences, integrating them into our broader life narrative. If you have greater difficulty "re-living" moments of joy, achievement, or connection because you lack the tool of visual imagination, your ability to extract meaning from them and build emotional understanding is compromised.
Both mechanisms effectively lead to the same subjective experience: a past that feels like "someone else's life" that you know facts about but can't emotionally (re)connect with. The specific pathway might vary between individuals, but I now strongly believe that the underlying issue remains the disrupted relationship between emotional processing and autobiographical memory formation.
Does this potential explanation align more with your personal experience?
I might have to spend some time over the long weekend to explore this a bit more, and to properly back it up with studies.
Thanks for the follow-up. I find this stuff quite interesting.
I feel my emotions strongly as I live through them(as much as one can say, we can't feel others' feelings), but feel them not at all when I relive them (because I cannot relive them). My emotions are a guide for me, but after the initial feeling of them, they guide me semantically (why was I feeling anger during a particular conversation? maybe I need to reconsider my position).
Incidentally, I generally think of this as being able to "let go" of emotions/grudges/etc that I might otherwise spend unnecessary time worrying over. It does set me up for being an "especially boilable frog" in that I can quickly acclimate to conditions that others might have trouble with.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
> Maybe the things I can't pay attention to aren't worth paying attention to and I should be working on something else.
When these things are vital things like feeding yourself, going to work, of driving, this absolutely does not apply. Without treatment, I often cannot even get myself to do things I want to and are fun. ADHD isn't "I can't pay attention to a boring movie", it's executive dysfunction.
well, that's a pretty dramatic take on what GP said.
there's a world of difference between literally starving and being unable to break focus on something to feed yourself and maintain a healthy weight and ensure that you're getting all the vitamins and nutrients your body needs to operate beyond a minimal level (especially as you age). i've definitely skipped multiple meals before while caught up in something and it ruins the rest of my day, my sleep, and impacts me moving forward beyond that til i can reach more of an equilibrium.
edit: i see from your other comments that you're not really willing to accept that some people have issues with their brains that make them behave differently from the idealized version of yourself that you hold in your head. so whatever. i hope you grow some empathy for others.
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.
This is honestly wild to me. It's not a disability, it's probably not actually even real at the scale that it is currently diagnosed (15% of boys!). Certainly should not be so heavily medicated at that scale
I understand where you're coming from -- but you should also know how crazy it is to read this about ADHD as a 41-year-old that spent from ages 19 to 22 unable to function as an adult due to executive function disregulation.
We're about the same age. I too made a ton of dumb decisions as a 19-22yo.
Can you give me more info about being unable to function? Were you truly unable to live or did you just make a ton of bad decisions that you now regret?
It is legally a disability, and you can get accommodations in college for it. I'm glad it hasn't negatively affected your life, but that doesn't mean it doesn't affect others. Believing it isn't an issue won't magically make that true, and only prevents people from getting the help they need.
It's perhaps not a disability. But, it is a disabling disorder. It imposes much greater challenge for many tasks that are straightforward for others. I barely graduated high-school on time, I was suspended from a community college for having a 0.6 GPA, and I've failed countless courses I've taken. None of my failures were due to an inability to understand the information; they resulted from challenges with the processes and procedures inherent with formal education.
Although I was suspended from community college, I had no problem teaching myself linear algebra or diff eq. I eventually was able to get a job as a software dev, it took me until age 28, when someone else perhaps could have reached it right out of college. I'm now trying to finish a dual math and comp sci degree in my spare time, and even now I've still failed trivial courses.
I was among the brightest students in my class growing up, but willfully chose to stop taking my ADHD meds in 8th grade. I was a stellar student until then. I've resumed them only very recently, but I have complete confidence that had I chosen to remain on the meds the whole time, I wouldn't have faced all the same challenges.
I don't think the evidence aligns with your understanding.
>it is a disabling disorder....they resulted from challenges with the processes and procedures inherent with formal education.
So it's not even a disabling disorder. You struggle with formal education (me too!), so maybe formal education is the problem. "Formal education" as we know it today is not a solved thing. We don't actually know the best way to spread knowledge, we just happen to be doing it this way at this moment in history.
If you want to take medication to be good at that, I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE you to do so, and I'm very happy for your current successes.
It is a terrible standard by which to create a medical diagnosis and feed children medications.
It is a difference in function, ability, and physiology that our society does not accommodate naturally.
>An individual with a disability is defined by the ADA as a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment.
People with ADHD have all sorts of recorded impairments including things like being more likely to cause traffic accidents.
It's currently popular in some progressive circles to insist that neurodivergencies are "not disabilities" and I don't like it.
Sure, the accommodations are pretty simple: Stimulants, awareness, some help with forming good habits and training on project management and life management. But it exists.
My friend is a dwarf. His chemistry accommodation is also simple. It's a stool, and an understanding that he won't be lifting large, filled flasks anywhere. He does very good chemistry other than that, and most of his work time is spent doing statistics on the chemistry he does. But pretending he isn't different is doing him a disservice. (He also dislikes "little person" and prefers dwarf because he's a LOTR fan).
>it's probably not actually even real at the scale that it is currently diagnosed (15% of boys!). Certainly should not be so heavily medicated at that scale
This is FUD. Worse, it's the exact FUD that is the reason I was not diagnosed as a child ("he's doing well in school, can't possibly have ADHD, we can't be giving kids stimulants, they'll bounce off the walls!) and why my sister was "tested" for ADHD in the 90s and found to "not have it" despite very definitely having it and being trivially diagnosed decades later.
Your disbelief that psychologists are able to do their job is responsible for the exact spike of adult ADHD diagnosis that people point to as "can't be real".
Meanwhile, giving stimulants to children with ADHD is demonstrably effective and has lasting, proven effects on long term life success. There's even evidence of physiological improvements in brain development.
US numbers are in the same ballpark as other countries. Even countries like South Korea with a significantly more regimented and constricted view of society.
Why is it so surprising that actually, human brains arrange themselves in very different ways? The idea that the "normal" brain is actually normal is just a wrong assumption. Neurodivergencies are significantly inherited, so it's more like "There's a couple lineages of humans whose brains are wired differently and have different ways of working. The percentage of people with neurodivergencies are just the percentage of the human race descended from those lineages.
My brain is built different man, stop insisting that smart people who have demonstrated that shouldn't be trusted about dealing with that. The only people you hurt are the exact people who have to go through hell to get very necessary medication that improves their lives because people like you cast us all as pill seekers even though stimulants do not have that effect for people with ADHD and a tiktok self diagnoses is not even close to enough to get a prescription for medication! Pushing amphetamines on anyone who contacts you is exactly what got a bunch of pill mills shut down during COVID, and also got BetterHelp slapped and it's still controversial to advertise them.
Understand, getting medicated requires jumping through hoops like keeping several appointments. It's harder to keep a stimulant prescription than it is to keep an Oxycontin prescription even after the opioid epidemic.
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).
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
Exactly, I have severe myopia, that was quickly developing during my teenage years so my glasses were often too weak. Beacuse of that my brain learned to identify people by gait too.
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.
Arguing that something isn't a spectrum and then immediately comparing it to something with a clinical name that literally has the word "spectrum" in it really isn't doing yourself any favors.
I don’t know much about it, but a source used by Wikipedia says:
“It is also possible for a non-disjunction to happen after fertilization (about a 1-2% chance). In this case, some of the patient's cells are normal and some contain the extra chromosome. This is called mosaicism. Patients with this type of Down syndrome have milder symptoms.”
I often cannot recognize people I know mildly well, especially if I lack context clues. This is not due to carelessness: trying harder does not help. But I do not have complete face-blindness.
Whether this means that you are wrong about when prosopagnosia is a continuum, or whether it means we should characterize how things work for me in terms separate from prosopagnosia (and thus perhaps in terms separate from face-blindness), I do not think it is productive for you to basically insult me and everyone like me by attributing our behavior to not trying hard enough. I've tried quite hard.
It's very socially bad not to be able to recognize people. I pay high costs for this inability and I would love to eliminate it if I could. I think (as the OP suggests) being aphantasiac might make it difficult for me to remedy this inability, because having a visual memory might be the best (the only?) way to record features of faces well enough to recognize people you know mildly well. I am aphantasiac and that too is something I cannot remedy. I would appreciate not being lumped in with assholes.
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."
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.
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 “
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.
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?
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.
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.
I have very similar problems with remembering "events" that people typically like to share. I have traveled to many memorable places (for those who are able to) but my recollection in terms of details that would move a conversation forward is sparse at best. It is really frustrating to be honest. My memory problem spills into work and tech and makes me wonder if I am going to be able to employ myself for the next 20 years (as I need to) or not. The deluge of details and the constant change ... it is exhausting.
I had the same setup in school- alternating schedules- and had to keep my schedule printed out in my bag to reference between almost every class, every day. I still have dreams (nightmares?) to this day about not knowing which class I was supposed to be going to next and ending up in the wrong place without the work done.
I have to keep a list of everything in a doc of some sort or I can't remember anything I've "accomplished"... and I when I tell my coworkers that my memory resets every weekend and half of Monday is spent rediscovering what it is I'm supposed to be doing all week, they think I'm joking.
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.
This I am finding a problem. If you are a senior developer you are leading every day and doing senior things but it is like walking. I don't remember each step I took.
In the performance review you now need to say "On this Tuesday I needed to get from the salon to the baker so I initiated by motor neurone and walked out of the salon. This made me get there in 5 minutes which had the impact of my mum getting her cinnamon scroll" and you have to remember that happened. For those with worse memory this is an extra job. If you don't do it you get discriminated against.
"Tell me about a time when you tripped over while commuting."
"Tell me about a time when your feet touched each other during a walk."
"Tell me about a time when you were facing north-east and a bus passed in front of you." [follow-up question] "What type of bus was it? [suburban, long distance, etc] You say you saw it, so walk me by your visual experience."
If you have lived your life as a walking person, as you seem to imply by your comment, you surely have done these things multiple times, right? Failing to respond in a truthful and satisfactory manner will be counted heavily against you.
Though, as someone who's done a number of those interviews over the years, I'd replace the word truthful with manner that the interviewer regards as truthful
So I'm on the other end of the number line from the SDAM folks and I'm kind of mind blown that people don't remember when they trip, I remember at least 6 instances off the top of my head. Ditto feet touching each other - which shoes I was wearing, what the weather was like, where I was at. The bus question I would have to dig a little but I'm sure it happened at least once.
That's wild. I can remember categories of tripping. For example, I know that one of the more frequent ones involves stupid cats who don't realize that it's a bad idea to walk in front of a rapidly moving creature who outweighs them by a factor of 13. But I can't recall any specific instance of it.
I remember tripping as a child (ice cream truck...), in middle school (stairs), in high school (book bag), while getting coffee over a decade ago with coworkers (sciatica). I couldn't necessarily tell you which dates those happened on but could probably get it within a month or so.
I mean, I've definitely had all these experiences and know I have, but I couldn't tell you a single detail about anything of those moments. I've missed plenty of buses because I've had music blaring and I wasn't focused on the bus stop, but I definitely don't remember anything else about those moments other than they, at some point in history, happened to me.
I feel like fuck it going to be that frank in the interview. Or all my examples will be from the last 21 days. Do a lot of heroic stuff at work for 21 days to coincide with the interview!
Presumably for interviews - specifically STAR[0] format. And no, "just living and thinking" isn't preparing for this. Not everyone thinks in that manner.
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.
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.
I could do it really easily if I had 30 minutes to write it out. Doing it in a conversation, though? I might prefer being waterboarded. I'll remember a much better example less than an hour after the call ends, too.
I'm convinced neurotypical people just lie through their teeth in these STAR interviews. It'd be so easy to just tell them some bullshit story. It sure seems like they only want to hear some absolute bullshit.
I mean yeah, you should lie in interviews. Mind you I don't mean make up ridiculous fabrications like "I single-handedly saved the entire company from bankruptcy", more like little white lies and twisting of real truth to make for a better story. It's unfortunate that that's how it has to be done, but it's an adversarial circumstance to begin with, so I understand why people do it even if I'd prefer to not have to.
Companies absolutely will lie and cheat if they can get away with it, for example by saying their hiring budget is only X amount for the role when the recruiter knows full well the real budget is X + 20,000. They will absolutely lie about things like PTO and flexibility. So there's no reason for you not to also engage in it, because you're really only screwing yourself over if you don't. It's unfortunate, but that's the system we've built.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I also have aphantasia, and find it really interesting to hear about people thinking of things in a similar way to me! Thinking about the ball in terms of the parabola it makes it exactly what I do too. Similarly, the ball doesn't exist as a physical "ball", but rather the knowledge of the concept of a sphere (which doesn't then have size or colour). The table, not a physical table, but the concept of a plane (with no thickness, size, colour (or legs)) - just the 'concept' of the important properties.
Despite aphantasia I have always been able to conceptualise spatial relationships, but it feels much less like trying to visualise it, and much more like "understanding" the fundamental properties connecting each thing.
You've exactly described some of my very early memories - from before I had begun thinking in language.
To this day, one of the things that comes to mind when I think of a "door" is the way I conceptualized it before I knew there was a word. The best I can describe it is a combination of the act of reaching for a doorknob, followed by a plane hung vertically, pivoting inward from the right side. It seems to come from the act of opening a door... but the weirdest part is that while I was an infant in my memories of that type of internal dialogue, the conceptual representation I described describes the motion an adult would use to open a door.
I don't have aphantasia, have a very strong spatial sense, and ADHD-PI is a huge part of my life.
I don't have aphantasia and I struggle to imagine anyone truly having complete aphantasia.
If I tell you to draw a (low detail, toy, 2d) car, you probably would be able to - and quickly so.
However, if I ask you to describe the shape of the car, you would certainly take a lot more time to think of a description anywhere near as accurate as what you've drawn.
So what did you draw? Clearly not a description, as you do not have that available. Instead, you drew the image you have in your mind.
Since I see so many people talking about having aphantasia, I assume my thinking is wrong somewhere. Can you tell me where I went wrong in this thought process? Do you, contrary to my assumption, actually have an accurate description of all the shapes you could draw (a car, a tree, a circus tent) readily available?
I don't have aphantasia but you might be wrong in many different ways:
- you assume the outcome of your experiment which is not a given
- even if the outcome is what you assume it is: there's the possibility of other explanations: for example having a pen paper to draw the car serves as an aid that helps them draw the car without having to imagine it. Just like having pen and paper can help me compute the square root of 4572847 without having to imagine the computation in my mind.
Since you seem to want to appreciate the differences... I am also pretty far toward the aphantasia end of the spectrum.
Things like cars or airplanes, I could draw well enough to impress friends as a kid. That was partly partly due to constant classroom doodling. And, this was only for certain iconic types that I really studied. E.g. the round headlights of a classic Porsche 911 or the front view of an F4 Phantom II fighter yet from a Vietnam war movie. Even then, I couldn't really picture them directly, but I could _feel_ their 3D topography and use that almost like a surface model to feed into my hand acting as a 3D rendering pipeline. I don't see the image and reproduce it. I somehow feel the spatial model projecting onto the page and then try to pencil in that feeling before it dissipates. Yet, I can't do that for everyday items like my own car, laptop computer, or toothbrush. I can draw a generic representation, but can't remember and then reproduce any of the distinguishing characteristics that make my own possessions unique compared to the generic concept.
Similarly, I'm not face-blind, but I cannot remember and reconstruct any of the faces I know. I know them when I see them. I can also feel a lot of "this person looks a lot like that person", which sometimes helps me realize the specific expression features, angles, proportions, or even dynamics that are triggering my recognition. But I can't really recite any of that to tell you what I recognize.
I'm a bit like someone else said earlier in the thread. Imagining a bouncing ball, it's a feeling of the diminishing parabolas in 3D. You might sketch it the way a cartoonist shows a trace in the air behind something to indicate movement. But that's already more visual than my own imagining of it, which is more like a faint echo of that cartoon trace. And, it is somehow both dynamic and static. I feel the linked chain of parabolas all at once, but also somehow feel the movement vectors.
If you told me to imagine a particular type of ball, I could even imagine different trajectories and deformations, e.g. a hard rubber "superball" vs an old tired tennis ball vs a big squishy dodgeball from elementary school. But just asked to imagine a ball, I wouldn't select such details. It would just be the abstract path. And even when specialized, I still don't really see the ball or any color, just a feeling of the spatial scene that it traverses.
For me, this aphantasia is all about my waking/voluntary mental mode. I can have completely vivid lucid dreams which can sometimes be mundanely realistic and sometimes surreal. If I'm very tired, I might also get some imagery right as I near the hynogogic threshold. This is true for imagined vision, hearing, proprioception, and touch senses. They are all very "abstract" when awake and take form as the waking world slips away.
Not sure it is relevant, but I also have no internal monologue whether awake or in dreams. I can think about words or speech, but it is abstract and a bit like composing them in an editing buffer (which, due to aphantasia I can't really see!). Thinking is not at all like talking nor like listening.
Readily available? No. But if I wanted to draw a car, I'm iterating through parts in that way. And the accuracy of our "mental description" is certainly in question. Similar to how folks who can "picture a bicycle" can picture it incorrectly.
My wife and I have very different navigation skills. She can almost always tell me the compass direction and she's very good at relative directions. If she's in the house, she can instantly point in the correct direction of our children's school. I've got to stop and think through the steps I'd take to get there. I have to "reason" it out and she can just "see" it. It's almost like she's looking at a map of places and I'm dealing with a graph of nodes. I can walk the graph and understand how places are connected. But I can't really step back and see the bigger picture like she can. And I've got a lot of gaps in my graph because I only add nodes when needed. I could drive by a church a hundred times and not be able to tell you it exists. But when my daughter has a girl scouts meetings there, the graph gets updated.
So, I do not have aphantasia, but I do have an impossible time recalling tastes. Kinda like how you describe your lack of memory of glass.
I can tell apart a strawberry from a pineapple, but I can't re-experience a taste later. If I want to compare two things, I need to taste them back to back. Or I need to write down what I think to compare with next time.
But I have no problem remembering things like: how crunchy or floppy the pizza was. That's not taste.
Yeah I describe my imagination to people as kinetic. Even if I'm trying to "see" a static object, it's in a form like a sparkler drawing.
Similarly, I can't hear a particular song in my head even if it's an earworm. Instead, I hear a rough approximation of it as if I were trying to describe it to someone else (instruments as mouth sounds, bad falsetto, and so on)
I have aphantasia, but it doesn't extend to imagined sounds. It's almost the opposite really. I can imagine a variety of sounds a ball might make hitting a table depending on materials involved. When I've got a song stuck in my head it tends to be quite detailed. Full instrumentals and all. That doesn't mean I have perfect recall of songs or music to any degree. And it's not exactly voluntary. I can't tell you the full lyrics to any song off the top of my head. But when I get a song stuck there, I can "play" through it all and pick out details.
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!
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.
Did you see the pictures in the link? The chain was going between the front and back wheel! The pedals were where the seat goes! Basically, a bunch of nonsense. There are chat-bots now that can do better.
I couldn't draw a detailed 3D technical drawing of a derailleur, but I can draw a sketch of a bicycle without needing a photo reference!
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?
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.
> 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.
I suspect if you ask the person who did a good job drawing a bicycle to label the parts, they would do well at that too.
I could do a decent job a drawing a bicycle and know the names of the parts because I’ve done a lot of the maintenance on my bike so I’m pretty familiar with it mechanically.
Perhaps, but I have hyperphantasia and could easily assemble/visualize a bike in my head without a clue what many of the parts are called. I know the big ones like "handlebars" or "pedals," but I haven't spent more than a few hours on bikes since childhood because of a deformity in my neck that makes my hands go numb in a riding position.
In some cases, it very well may be familiarity, but for some of us, it's just memory and visualization.
Yeah, that's where I'm at - I could take apart a bike mentally but beyond knowing "those are brakes", "that is frame", "those are gears", I have no specific bicycle knowledge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have many times thought about how scars and tattoos have a lot of similarities. From a certain perspective, a tattoo is simply a bit more intentional. A tattoo is like saying, "I belong to this group and it shows". I think of an emotional scar as a tattoo that is 100x bigger than a regular tattoo: it's so big, that you can't see it, it's like not being able to see an image when you zoom in too much. And, even though you might not see it with the naked eye, you can feel it, it's something on you that says "I was there", "I experienced that", "I used that to become the person I am".
And, then you might recognize that all of our personalities are constructed out of these scars, it's just that most of them we're not aware of and most of them aren't painful to think about. A time comes, when you notice that your association with a given negative memory becomes more neutral, there's a bit more distance between you and it.
I can say for myself that every experience I labeled as negative, I was haunted by, turned out to have a positive outcome at the end. There are hardships that "haunt" me now, and I don't know how it will have been a positive influence on me, but I believe that it will, and that helps.
I hope I don't come across as pushy with my viewpoints. I resonated deeply with what you said, and felt the need to share.
By the way, a practical tip, I find that if I prompt an LLM with something like:
> I'm going through [a difficult time]. Help me reflect. Ask a question or give me a prompt, I'll respond, and so on. Act like a friend.
That has been for me surprisingly effective for releasing debilitating emotional stress.
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.
I think it's more about not remembering the feel of being hurt by someone - like he knows that this person did something bad to him but he doesnt't remember emotions connected to that event, that's why it's harder to hold a grudge.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Definitely do that. Nothing can replace your kids or take the loss away, but it's bloody good to know that I always ended each call and farewell with "love you" and he knew from my words and actions that I loved him. I have regrets but I'm glad that's not one of them.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
The pandemic might need its own special studies because a lot of adults have weird temporal experiences associated with it.
For me it also feels like pre-pandemic years were a lifetime ago, that life events around 2018/19 happened to someone else. But I don't think I have SDAM as I do have good recall for personal experiences, though it feels like it's getting weaker as I get older and the frequency of novel experiences wanes.
The other confounding factor is I moved to the opposite side of the world after completing my education, which meant a lot of those really foundational memories didn't get reinforced as much as they did for my peers. Because they got to hang out frequently and relive those tales together, while I felt them slipping away like sand from my fingers.
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.
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.
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.
There's really no way to know this, as it's all based on subjective experiences in which two people could easily describe the same sensation differently.
That's a bold claim! Actually, there are plenty of scientific experiments that show actual differences between people who report aphantasia and those who don't, including different stress responses to frightening non-visual descriptions, different susceptibility to something called image priming, lower "cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
So we know that at least the people who claim to see nothing act differently. Could it just be that people who act differently describe the sensation differently, you might ask?
No, because there are actual cases of acquired aphantasia after neurological damage. These people used to belong to the group that claimed to be able to imagine visual images, got sick, then sought medical help when they could no longer visualize. For me, at least, that's pretty cut and dry evidence that it's not just differing descriptions of the same (or similar) sensations.
I really don't think so. I can't visualize with perfect clarity, but I can do pretty well, especially if I try. It tends to shift, so "count the stripes on the tiger" doesn't quite work, but I can do the exercise of visualizing a ball on a table and then saying what color it is.
There is no possible way that anyone could honestly describe this experience as "I don't visualize," any more than someone with working ears could describe their experience as "I don't hear anything."
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).
> 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...
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).
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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).
I really relate to this. A few months ago, during my performance review, my manager asked me to list some of my achievements in the past year. I was stunned. I knew I had done a lot, but at the time, the only answer that came to my mind was "I had a lot of meetings." That night, I looked through my emails and project records and found that I actually led an important system migration. But at that moment, it was not considered a "story worth telling" by me.
Now I will jot down some things that make me feel like progress, even if it is just a small breakthrough. Sometimes all it takes is a sentence to bring back the whole memory.
First performance review? The dog and pony show should be proceeded with a trawl through the emails and an early summary emailed to the manager. You will be thanked, but it’s your best chance to “remind” the boss of all the great things you’ve done.
You struggle to remember? The manager will struggle more. Unless you always want to be judged on the last couple of weeks you’ve worked, this prep makes a big difference. Get in quick before the manager forms an opinion difficult to shift.
Thanks for the tip I’ve actually started doing that recently, and it’s been working really well. Just having everything written down ahead of time makes a big difference.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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."
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This makes a lot of sense to me in a not good way. Thank you for writing it.
I thought about this more on my commute home from work, and I'm starting to suspect that "SDAM" might essentially be the long-term effects of alexithymia or interoceptive blind spots, which are fairly common in neurodivergent people with ADHD, autism, or both.
For context, alexithymia is a significant difficulty in recognizing, sourcing, and describing one's own emotions. Interoception is the sense of your internal bodily state.
You can likely relate to being so deep in a flow state that you don't notice how badly you need to use the restroom, or how hungry you are, until the feeling becomes so overwhelming it finally breaks through your focus. That's an interoceptive blind spot in action.
So, to further elaborate on my theory: If alexithymia raises the required signal strength for an emotion to be consciously recognized as significant, our brains - which strive for efficiency - will only tag and store memories that cross that unusually high threshold of "important." All the "little things," even the nice ones, get dropped because they never registered with enough emotional weight at the moment they happened.
The brain prioritizes emotionally significant information for memory storage. If an event doesn't trigger a sufficiently strong or clearly identifiable emotional response at the moment it occurs - because your baseline emotional processing is affected - it might get stored as just factual information rather than a rich, emotionally resonant autobiographical memory. It becomes "a thing that happened" rather than an "experience I had that affected me emotionally."
This explains my memory pattern perfectly: I remember most big family holidays - Christmas, birthdays, weddings - because those come with heightened emotional anticipation and distinct social components. But I'm already struggling to piece together what we did on Easter this year, and have absolutely no idea what we did last year. The quieter, more routine positive events apparently don't meet that higher "emotional importance" threshold for deep encoding.
It's like having a filter that's calibrated too conservatively - it's protecting you from information overload. Perhaps that's why it's so common in neurodivergent people, both ADHD and autism heavily affect how we take in and process external sensations. If there's any positive spin to this theory, that I will agree with you, makes sense in a not good way, it might be that. But, unfortunately, it's also discarding experiences that others would naturally encode as meaningful memories.
Oh yup. The way I've always described myself is I have extremely "muted" emotions, bordering on none the overwhelming vast majority of the time. I only very rarely feel extreme emotions of any kind.
> This explains my memory pattern perfectly: I remember most big family holidays - Christmas, birthdays, weddings - because those come with heightened emotional anticipation and distinct social components. But I'm already struggling to piece together what we did on Easter this year, and have absolutely no idea what we did last year. The quieter, more routine positive events apparently don't meet that higher "emotional importance" threshold for deep encoding.
I don't remember hardly anything about my own past outside of factual information, and that tends to fade rather extremely with time. Even times when I was quite literally sobbing I don't remember the emotional impact of, just the fact that it happened, sometimes not even the cause.
On the other hand, I have extremely good factual memory about random shit and can usually build up a solid approximation for how something works from first principles on demand for an extremely broad array of things. Trade-offs, I guess.
It's what I imagine being an AI would feel like from the perspective of the AI.
I've been 100% immersed in AI all of 2025, and I think it's impacting my communication skills -- especially the way I write.
Wouldn't it be amusing if after the disruptive period of AI's rise is over, people with ADHD end up being highly sought after for our ability to communicate clearly with them?
I remember infuriating my mother almost every day after school when she'd ask "How was it?" and I would just shrug and say, "I don't know."
She thought I was being evasive or something, but I was being completely honest. I genuinely didn't have an answer because my internal state was, as you describe perfectly, muted. Most of the time, I just felt... like a neutral, warm grey. Well - still do. There was no data to report.
> I don't remember hardly anything about my own past outside of factual information, and that tends to fade rather extremely with time. Even times when I was quite literally sobbing I don't remember the emotional impact of, just the fact that it happened, sometimes not even the cause.
I think remembering the fact of sobbing but not the feeling is the perfect distinction between semantic memory ("a thing that happened") and autobiographical memory ("an experience I had"). The factual data point was recorded, but the emotional qualia wasn't encoded for retrieval.
> On the other hand, I have extremely good factual memory about random shit and can usually build up a solid approximation for how something works from first principles on demand for an extremely broad array of things. Trade-offs, I guess.
I wouldn't even necessarily call it a trade-off so much as a logical consequence. If the brain's system for storing rich, first-person experiential data is impaired, it makes sense that it would rely on and strengthen its system for storing third-person factual data. The "what" gets stored efficiently because the "how it felt to be me when it happened" isn't taking up much space on the hard drive.
> It's what I imagine being an AI would feel like from the perspective of the AI.
Sounds about right to me. I feel the same. I have access to the facts, like my I'd argue objectively fairly impressive achievement I described above, but I don't seem to have the emotional data. So, I can reason myself into knowing that I achieved something - but I'm not feeling it.
However, I would challenge the premise that SDAM is entirely unrelated to emotional processing. It's important to distinguish between the conscious feeling of an emotion and its subconscious role in the mechanics of memory formation. There's significant evidence that emotional salience is a crucial part of how the brain tags and consolidates strong autobiographical memories. A disruption to this process doesn't have to be a consciously felt emotional deficit; it can be a mechanical one operating below the level of awareness.
We can look at this as two distinct points of failure in the memory pipeline:
Failure at the input stage: If the emotional signal required to "tag" an event as important for rich autobiographical encoding is never met, the memory is formed, but only as a semantic fact ("a thing that happened"), not a re-experiencable episode. The processing can't happen because the right input was never provided.
Failure at the retrieval and re-experiencing stage: For someone with aphantasia but no issues with alexithymia (like you, I'd assume), the initial emotional tagging might function perfectly well. The disruption happens later. The core deficit of SDAM is the inability to "mentally time travel" and re-experience the past. Aphantasia, by definition, removes a primary tool for this: visual imagination. The brain processes and integrates emotions by revisiting them. If you cannot truly "re-live" a moment because the visual data is inaccessible, then the episodic, first-person quality is lost.
This second point matters beyond just losing access to nostalgia. We process and regulate emotions by mentally revisiting experiences, integrating them into our broader life narrative. If you have greater difficulty "re-living" moments of joy, achievement, or connection because you lack the tool of visual imagination, your ability to extract meaning from them and build emotional understanding is compromised.
Both mechanisms effectively lead to the same subjective experience: a past that feels like "someone else's life" that you know facts about but can't emotionally (re)connect with. The specific pathway might vary between individuals, but I now strongly believe that the underlying issue remains the disrupted relationship between emotional processing and autobiographical memory formation.
Does this potential explanation align more with your personal experience?
I might have to spend some time over the long weekend to explore this a bit more, and to properly back it up with studies.
I feel my emotions strongly as I live through them(as much as one can say, we can't feel others' feelings), but feel them not at all when I relive them (because I cannot relive them). My emotions are a guide for me, but after the initial feeling of them, they guide me semantically (why was I feeling anger during a particular conversation? maybe I need to reconsider my position).
Incidentally, I generally think of this as being able to "let go" of emotions/grudges/etc that I might otherwise spend unnecessary time worrying over. It does set me up for being an "especially boilable frog" in that I can quickly acclimate to conditions that others might have trouble with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When these things are vital things like feeding yourself, going to work, of driving, this absolutely does not apply. Without treatment, I often cannot even get myself to do things I want to and are fun. ADHD isn't "I can't pay attention to a boring movie", it's executive dysfunction.
Need data one this one. I don't believe anyone has starved because they didn't have the executive function to feed themselves.
there's a world of difference between literally starving and being unable to break focus on something to feed yourself and maintain a healthy weight and ensure that you're getting all the vitamins and nutrients your body needs to operate beyond a minimal level (especially as you age). i've definitely skipped multiple meals before while caught up in something and it ruins the rest of my day, my sleep, and impacts me moving forward beyond that til i can reach more of an equilibrium.
edit: i see from your other comments that you're not really willing to accept that some people have issues with their brains that make them behave differently from the idealized version of yourself that you hold in your head. so whatever. i hope you grow some empathy for others.
I understand where you're coming from -- but you should also know how crazy it is to read this about ADHD as a 41-year-old that spent from ages 19 to 22 unable to function as an adult due to executive function disregulation.
Can you give me more info about being unable to function? Were you truly unable to live or did you just make a ton of bad decisions that you now regret?
this isn't a real standard
Although I was suspended from community college, I had no problem teaching myself linear algebra or diff eq. I eventually was able to get a job as a software dev, it took me until age 28, when someone else perhaps could have reached it right out of college. I'm now trying to finish a dual math and comp sci degree in my spare time, and even now I've still failed trivial courses.
I was among the brightest students in my class growing up, but willfully chose to stop taking my ADHD meds in 8th grade. I was a stellar student until then. I've resumed them only very recently, but I have complete confidence that had I chosen to remain on the meds the whole time, I wouldn't have faced all the same challenges.
I don't think the evidence aligns with your understanding.
So it's not even a disabling disorder. You struggle with formal education (me too!), so maybe formal education is the problem. "Formal education" as we know it today is not a solved thing. We don't actually know the best way to spread knowledge, we just happen to be doing it this way at this moment in history.
If you want to take medication to be good at that, I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE you to do so, and I'm very happy for your current successes.
It is a terrible standard by which to create a medical diagnosis and feed children medications.
>An individual with a disability is defined by the ADA as a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment.
People with ADHD have all sorts of recorded impairments including things like being more likely to cause traffic accidents.
It's currently popular in some progressive circles to insist that neurodivergencies are "not disabilities" and I don't like it.
Sure, the accommodations are pretty simple: Stimulants, awareness, some help with forming good habits and training on project management and life management. But it exists.
My friend is a dwarf. His chemistry accommodation is also simple. It's a stool, and an understanding that he won't be lifting large, filled flasks anywhere. He does very good chemistry other than that, and most of his work time is spent doing statistics on the chemistry he does. But pretending he isn't different is doing him a disservice. (He also dislikes "little person" and prefers dwarf because he's a LOTR fan).
>it's probably not actually even real at the scale that it is currently diagnosed (15% of boys!). Certainly should not be so heavily medicated at that scale
This is FUD. Worse, it's the exact FUD that is the reason I was not diagnosed as a child ("he's doing well in school, can't possibly have ADHD, we can't be giving kids stimulants, they'll bounce off the walls!) and why my sister was "tested" for ADHD in the 90s and found to "not have it" despite very definitely having it and being trivially diagnosed decades later.
Your disbelief that psychologists are able to do their job is responsible for the exact spike of adult ADHD diagnosis that people point to as "can't be real".
Meanwhile, giving stimulants to children with ADHD is demonstrably effective and has lasting, proven effects on long term life success. There's even evidence of physiological improvements in brain development.
US numbers are in the same ballpark as other countries. Even countries like South Korea with a significantly more regimented and constricted view of society.
Why is it so surprising that actually, human brains arrange themselves in very different ways? The idea that the "normal" brain is actually normal is just a wrong assumption. Neurodivergencies are significantly inherited, so it's more like "There's a couple lineages of humans whose brains are wired differently and have different ways of working. The percentage of people with neurodivergencies are just the percentage of the human race descended from those lineages.
My brain is built different man, stop insisting that smart people who have demonstrated that shouldn't be trusted about dealing with that. The only people you hurt are the exact people who have to go through hell to get very necessary medication that improves their lives because people like you cast us all as pill seekers even though stimulants do not have that effect for people with ADHD and a tiktok self diagnoses is not even close to enough to get a prescription for medication! Pushing amphetamines on anyone who contacts you is exactly what got a bunch of pill mills shut down during COVID, and also got BetterHelp slapped and it's still controversial to advertise them.
Understand, getting medicated requires jumping through hoops like keeping several appointments. It's harder to keep a stimulant prescription than it is to keep an Oxycontin prescription even after the opioid epidemic.
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!
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
The not recognizing people in unexpected locations is something I just mark down to "page fault" and move on. Nobody expects total recall anyway.
1- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5398751/
“It is also possible for a non-disjunction to happen after fertilization (about a 1-2% chance). In this case, some of the patient's cells are normal and some contain the extra chromosome. This is called mosaicism. Patients with this type of Down syndrome have milder symptoms.”
https://www.medschool.lsuhsc.edu/genetics/down_syndrome.aspx
Whether this means that you are wrong about when prosopagnosia is a continuum, or whether it means we should characterize how things work for me in terms separate from prosopagnosia (and thus perhaps in terms separate from face-blindness), I do not think it is productive for you to basically insult me and everyone like me by attributing our behavior to not trying hard enough. I've tried quite hard.
It's very socially bad not to be able to recognize people. I pay high costs for this inability and I would love to eliminate it if I could. I think (as the OP suggests) being aphantasiac might make it difficult for me to remedy this inability, because having a visual memory might be the best (the only?) way to record features of faces well enough to recognize people you know mildly well. I am aphantasiac and that too is something I cannot remedy. I would appreciate not being lumped in with assholes.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Isn’t just living and thinking preparing for questions like this? They’re not that hard.
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.
I have to keep a list of everything in a doc of some sort or I can't remember anything I've "accomplished"... and I when I tell my coworkers that my memory resets every weekend and half of Monday is spent rediscovering what it is I'm supposed to be doing all week, they think I'm joking.
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.
In the performance review you now need to say "On this Tuesday I needed to get from the salon to the baker so I initiated by motor neurone and walked out of the salon. This made me get there in 5 minutes which had the impact of my mum getting her cinnamon scroll" and you have to remember that happened. For those with worse memory this is an extra job. If you don't do it you get discriminated against.
"Tell me about a time when you tripped over while commuting."
"Tell me about a time when your feet touched each other during a walk."
"Tell me about a time when you were facing north-east and a bus passed in front of you." [follow-up question] "What type of bus was it? [suburban, long distance, etc] You say you saw it, so walk me by your visual experience."
If you have lived your life as a walking person, as you seem to imply by your comment, you surely have done these things multiple times, right? Failing to respond in a truthful and satisfactory manner will be counted heavily against you.
Yes, that's the problem
Though, as someone who's done a number of those interviews over the years, I'd replace the word truthful with manner that the interviewer regards as truthful
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_resul...
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.
I'm convinced neurotypical people just lie through their teeth in these STAR interviews. It'd be so easy to just tell them some bullshit story. It sure seems like they only want to hear some absolute bullshit.
Companies absolutely will lie and cheat if they can get away with it, for example by saying their hiring budget is only X amount for the role when the recruiter knows full well the real budget is X + 20,000. They will absolutely lie about things like PTO and flexibility. So there's no reason for you not to also engage in it, because you're really only screwing yourself over if you don't. It's unfortunate, but that's the system we've built.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Despite aphantasia I have always been able to conceptualise spatial relationships, but it feels much less like trying to visualise it, and much more like "understanding" the fundamental properties connecting each thing.
To this day, one of the things that comes to mind when I think of a "door" is the way I conceptualized it before I knew there was a word. The best I can describe it is a combination of the act of reaching for a doorknob, followed by a plane hung vertically, pivoting inward from the right side. It seems to come from the act of opening a door... but the weirdest part is that while I was an infant in my memories of that type of internal dialogue, the conceptual representation I described describes the motion an adult would use to open a door.
I don't have aphantasia, have a very strong spatial sense, and ADHD-PI is a huge part of my life.
If I tell you to draw a (low detail, toy, 2d) car, you probably would be able to - and quickly so.
However, if I ask you to describe the shape of the car, you would certainly take a lot more time to think of a description anywhere near as accurate as what you've drawn.
So what did you draw? Clearly not a description, as you do not have that available. Instead, you drew the image you have in your mind.
Since I see so many people talking about having aphantasia, I assume my thinking is wrong somewhere. Can you tell me where I went wrong in this thought process? Do you, contrary to my assumption, actually have an accurate description of all the shapes you could draw (a car, a tree, a circus tent) readily available?
- you assume the outcome of your experiment which is not a given
- even if the outcome is what you assume it is: there's the possibility of other explanations: for example having a pen paper to draw the car serves as an aid that helps them draw the car without having to imagine it. Just like having pen and paper can help me compute the square root of 4572847 without having to imagine the computation in my mind.
Things like cars or airplanes, I could draw well enough to impress friends as a kid. That was partly partly due to constant classroom doodling. And, this was only for certain iconic types that I really studied. E.g. the round headlights of a classic Porsche 911 or the front view of an F4 Phantom II fighter yet from a Vietnam war movie. Even then, I couldn't really picture them directly, but I could _feel_ their 3D topography and use that almost like a surface model to feed into my hand acting as a 3D rendering pipeline. I don't see the image and reproduce it. I somehow feel the spatial model projecting onto the page and then try to pencil in that feeling before it dissipates. Yet, I can't do that for everyday items like my own car, laptop computer, or toothbrush. I can draw a generic representation, but can't remember and then reproduce any of the distinguishing characteristics that make my own possessions unique compared to the generic concept.
Similarly, I'm not face-blind, but I cannot remember and reconstruct any of the faces I know. I know them when I see them. I can also feel a lot of "this person looks a lot like that person", which sometimes helps me realize the specific expression features, angles, proportions, or even dynamics that are triggering my recognition. But I can't really recite any of that to tell you what I recognize.
I'm a bit like someone else said earlier in the thread. Imagining a bouncing ball, it's a feeling of the diminishing parabolas in 3D. You might sketch it the way a cartoonist shows a trace in the air behind something to indicate movement. But that's already more visual than my own imagining of it, which is more like a faint echo of that cartoon trace. And, it is somehow both dynamic and static. I feel the linked chain of parabolas all at once, but also somehow feel the movement vectors.
If you told me to imagine a particular type of ball, I could even imagine different trajectories and deformations, e.g. a hard rubber "superball" vs an old tired tennis ball vs a big squishy dodgeball from elementary school. But just asked to imagine a ball, I wouldn't select such details. It would just be the abstract path. And even when specialized, I still don't really see the ball or any color, just a feeling of the spatial scene that it traverses.
For me, this aphantasia is all about my waking/voluntary mental mode. I can have completely vivid lucid dreams which can sometimes be mundanely realistic and sometimes surreal. If I'm very tired, I might also get some imagery right as I near the hynogogic threshold. This is true for imagined vision, hearing, proprioception, and touch senses. They are all very "abstract" when awake and take form as the waking world slips away.
Not sure it is relevant, but I also have no internal monologue whether awake or in dreams. I can think about words or speech, but it is abstract and a bit like composing them in an editing buffer (which, due to aphantasia I can't really see!). Thinking is not at all like talking nor like listening.
My wife and I have very different navigation skills. She can almost always tell me the compass direction and she's very good at relative directions. If she's in the house, she can instantly point in the correct direction of our children's school. I've got to stop and think through the steps I'd take to get there. I have to "reason" it out and she can just "see" it. It's almost like she's looking at a map of places and I'm dealing with a graph of nodes. I can walk the graph and understand how places are connected. But I can't really step back and see the bigger picture like she can. And I've got a lot of gaps in my graph because I only add nodes when needed. I could drive by a church a hundred times and not be able to tell you it exists. But when my daughter has a girl scouts meetings there, the graph gets updated.
I can tell apart a strawberry from a pineapple, but I can't re-experience a taste later. If I want to compare two things, I need to taste them back to back. Or I need to write down what I think to compare with next time.
But I have no problem remembering things like: how crunchy or floppy the pizza was. That's not taste.
Similarly, I can't hear a particular song in my head even if it's an earworm. Instead, I hear a rough approximation of it as if I were trying to describe it to someone else (instruments as mouth sounds, bad falsetto, and so on)
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!
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.
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.
I couldn't draw a detailed 3D technical drawing of a derailleur, but I can draw a sketch of a bicycle without needing a photo reference!
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?
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.
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.
I could do a decent job a drawing a bicycle and know the names of the parts because I’ve done a lot of the maintenance on my bike so I’m pretty familiar with it mechanically.
In some cases, it very well may be familiarity, but for some of us, it's just memory and visualization.
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.
I'm pleasantly surprised that this thread has multiple threads about loved ones and grieving.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is wild!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
And, then you might recognize that all of our personalities are constructed out of these scars, it's just that most of them we're not aware of and most of them aren't painful to think about. A time comes, when you notice that your association with a given negative memory becomes more neutral, there's a bit more distance between you and it.
I can say for myself that every experience I labeled as negative, I was haunted by, turned out to have a positive outcome at the end. There are hardships that "haunt" me now, and I don't know how it will have been a positive influence on me, but I believe that it will, and that helps.
I hope I don't come across as pushy with my viewpoints. I resonated deeply with what you said, and felt the need to share.
By the way, a practical tip, I find that if I prompt an LLM with something like:
> I'm going through [a difficult time]. Help me reflect. Ask a question or give me a prompt, I'll respond, and so on. Act like a friend.
That has been for me surprisingly effective for releasing debilitating emotional stress.
This is a rhetorical question... No need to answer for you situation but I wonder.
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.
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.
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.
Good luck with the wild ride of parenthood!
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.
I believe this is the stuff people with aphantasia struggle with.
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.
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."
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.
For me it also feels like pre-pandemic years were a lifetime ago, that life events around 2018/19 happened to someone else. But I don't think I have SDAM as I do have good recall for personal experiences, though it feels like it's getting weaker as I get older and the frequency of novel experiences wanes.
The other confounding factor is I moved to the opposite side of the world after completing my education, which meant a lot of those really foundational memories didn't get reinforced as much as they did for my peers. Because they got to hang out frequently and relive those tales together, while I felt them slipping away like sand from my fingers.
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.
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.
So we know that at least the people who claim to see nothing act differently. Could it just be that people who act differently describe the sensation differently, you might ask?
No, because there are actual cases of acquired aphantasia after neurological damage. These people used to belong to the group that claimed to be able to imagine visual images, got sick, then sought medical help when they could no longer visualize. For me, at least, that's pretty cut and dry evidence that it's not just differing descriptions of the same (or similar) sensations.
There is no possible way that anyone could honestly describe this experience as "I don't visualize," any more than someone with working ears could describe their experience as "I don't hear anything."
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...
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).
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
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.
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.
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).
You struggle to remember? The manager will struggle more. Unless you always want to be judged on the last couple of weeks you’ve worked, this prep makes a big difference. Get in quick before the manager forms an opinion difficult to shift.
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.
Do you really want to work for people like that?
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.
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.
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.
Related : People with no internal monologue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u69YSh-cFXY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqjrILPwIoo
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.
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.
- 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.
Same goes for tragic and happy events: I can't remember their details, but I remember my emotions.
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?
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.
What a blessing.
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.
> 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.