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I do not remember my life and it's fine

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Re: I do not remember my life and it's fine

#181

Post by 542354234235 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #45

> 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…

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.

Re: I do not remember my life and it's fine

#182

Post by aidenn0 »

Kichererbsen wrote: post #140
Tor3 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 als…

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…

I didn't consider it might be myopia; I was diagnosed around 10, but already -3.5

Re: I do not remember my life and it's fine

#183

Post by packetlost »

sReinwald wrote: post #162
OptionOfT wrote: post #10

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…

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 ina…

... huh.

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

Re: I do not remember my life and it's fine

#184

Post by [deleted] »

OptionOfT wrote: post #10

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…

[deleted]

Re: I do not remember my life and it's fine

#185

Post by tstrimple »

andoando wrote: post #2

> "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.

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.

Re: I do not remember my life and it's fine

#186

Post by whatevertrevor »

aniviacat wrote: post #174
1d22a wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

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…

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.

Re: I do not remember my life and it's fine

#187

Post by fishtoucher »

ralfd wrote: post #170
fishtoucher wrote: post #98

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…

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

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.

Re: I do not remember my life and it's fine

#188

Post by tstrimple »

aniviacat wrote: post #174
1d22a wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

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…

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.

Re: I do not remember my life and it's fine

#189

Post by wat10000 »

jaggederest wrote: post #111
quectophoton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in a job interview "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…

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.

Re: I do not remember my life and it's fine

#190

Post by wat10000 »

mkfs wrote: post #26

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.…

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?
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