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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
Good luck with the wild ride of parenthood!
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, 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
“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
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.
Do you really want to work for people like that?
- 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.
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> 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.
Same goes for tragic and happy events: I can't remember their details, but I remember my emotions.
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.
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.
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.
I'm pleasantly surprised that this thread has multiple threads about loved ones and grieving.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Related : People with no internal monologue
andoando•16h ago
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.
paulcole•15h ago
Isn’t just living and thinking preparing for questions like this? They’re not that hard.
numeri•15h ago
malwrar•15h ago
sh34r•10h ago
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.
sensanaty•4h ago
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.
1xdevnet•15h ago
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_resul...
stephen_g•15h ago
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.
cstrahan•15h ago
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.
imetatroll•12h ago
miriam_catira•11h ago
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.
jaggederest•11h ago
masternight•14h ago
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.
bravesoul2•14h ago
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.
quectophoton•14h ago
"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.
masternight•13h ago
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
jaggederest•11h ago
kaashif•11h ago
jaggederest•13m ago
wat10000•1h ago
jaggederest•13m ago
sensanaty•4h ago
bravesoul2•3h ago
bravesoul2•14h ago
khazhoux•12h ago
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.
scythe•13h ago
iamflimflam1•10h ago
neilv•11h ago
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."
InsideOutSanta•4h ago
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.
tstrimple•1h ago
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.