51–60 of 244 posts
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 j…
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.
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. > "Wr…
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.
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 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.
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 shoesI have aphantasia, and today I learned that I also have SDAM. There are benefits. For example, I find that I have no issue forgiving people. It's more work for me to harbor a grudge. I don't relive the burden of that initial pain of betrayal when someone close to me harms me, so it's easy to forgive and literally forget. Fun fact: My dreams are very rarely visual.
This is a rhetorical question... No need to answer for you situation but I wonder.
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.
I have aphantasia, and today I learned that I also have SDAM. There are benefits. For example, I find that I have no issue forgiving people. It's more work for me to harbor a grudge. I don't relive the burden of that initial pain of betrayal when someone close to me harms me, so it's easy to forgive and literally forget. Fun fact: My dreams are very rarely visual.
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.
> 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.
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.