101–110 of 244 posts
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."
Same goes for tragic and happy events: I can't remember their details, but I remember my emotions.
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 t…
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.
Also while describing their inability to remember specific episodes they describe specific episodes. > There are many memories there, but most of them can't be retrieved with convenient keywords like "a time when X happened". In a paragraph about "times when I couldn't recall specific episodes" and describing a job interview from the past.
> "Write about a time during your university studies in which you faced a difficult problem, and what you did to overcome it." I assume these are difficult for anyone who hasn't prepared for them. I've always attributed this to the fact that we usually never categorize/conceptualize events in these terms in the first place.
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."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean “hasn’t prepared for them”? Isn’t just living and thinking preparing for questions like this? They’re not that hard.
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 befor…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
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 be…
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)
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.…
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.
> 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…
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 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 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean “hasn’t prepared for them”? Isn’t just living and thinking preparing for questions like this? They’re not that hard.
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 befor…