I do not remember my life and it's fine

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."

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.

I mean I remember tripping when I was 5, 15, and 25, and I'm 42 now so I don't trip that often, I just remember everything.

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.

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.