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"inability to vividly recollect personally experienced events from a first-person perspective" I don't understand that... There is no perspective to my memorie

"inability to vividly recollect personally experienced events from a first-person perspective" I don't understand that... There is no perspective to my memories of events, they're just things I know happened. For instance, I went for a run this morning. I know where I went, I know what the weather was like, etc. Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter?

aesh2Xa1 7y ago
Can you recollect the scenery? There is a condition where one cannot process memories visually, but can still use other semantics to recollect. It's called aphantasia.
kibibu 7y ago
I wonder if this is related to Aphantasia, which popped up a while ago. I struggle to visualize things, and often only remember my experiences if people remind me of them.
- tomrod 7y ago
  I can see memories, but struggle to remember words I heard. Coping strategies: lots of notes!!!
  - cableshaft 7y ago
    Oh yeah, what people said is so hard for me. I'm terrible about telling personal anecdotes, because I just don't remember what people said, so it just sounds like me describing a series of facts. I get amazed when people like my late grandfather could tell a story about himself 40 years in the past and tell back and forth conversational dialogue that happened. Even if it's not 100% remembered (and I doubt it was) or embellished, or reinforced by telling the same stories over and over again over the years, it still impresses me. I can forget all but the broad strokes of what people said only a week later. The only conversations I "remember" about my past is what I've explicitly put into my poorly kept up journal entries.
Adverblessly 7y ago
Apparently, different people have different capabilities of imagination. Not strictly about this, but you might be interested in http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-ca... which briefly mentions this specifically. Relevant quote: "In the first, Francis Galton discovered that some people didn’t have visual imagination. They couldn’t see anything in their “mind’s eye”, they couldn’t generate internal images. None of these people knew there was anything “wrong” with them. They just assumed that everyone who talked about having an imagination was being metaphorical, just using a really florid poetic way of describing that they remembered what something looked like."
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  I think this is very difficult to convey in words. Sometimes I think I have aphantasia because I definitely cannot "visualize" things in color "HD", anywhere nearly similar to the quality of actual vision. At least not when I'm awake. Rarely, I do have dreams (lucid or not) that have the exact same visual quality as usual awake vision. On the other hand, I also cannot empathize with the parent comment that is surprised about first-person memories. My memories are sort of first person and evoke a feeling of the spatial and semantic layout of the scene. Like I remember and can "feel" that Joe was sitting to the left of me, even if I don't see his face in high-definition or maybe cannot even remember if he had glasses on or what clothes he was wearing. Sure, I could also transform it and imagine the situation from a different vantage point (still not really a visual rendering), but by default I recall it from first-person view. I believe that people do metaphorically exaggerate the quality of their visual memories. I recall some experiments that reveal that when these people are poked about specific details of their visualizations they do realize that those parts just were "undefined" and were not actually seeing a "rendered image".
  - pharke 7y ago
    That's interesting, my default view in memories is usually third person, often from above and to the side or some other perspective view. I have to concentrate on recalling detail in order to view my memories from a first person perspective. The third person recollection always seems to be more about the spatial relationships between people and things and is certainly not photographic, more like a conceptual understanding with images. Almost a diorama or a scene acted out on a stage. Weirdly this also shows up in my dreams although I do dream in the first person frequently.
dmd 7y ago
Not everyone can do this, but many people (like me) certainly can play an event back like it were a film. I don't find that kind of memory as useful as an actual encoded set of facts, though, and it tends to fade after a few years.
- reportingsjr 7y ago
  Wow, this is astounding to me! I always assumed people could replay events they had lived, just like watching a video. On top of this I can see and move around in the landscape around me in these memories.
  - atemerev 7y ago
    What I “see” is a brief flash of an afterimage, something like when you see for a brief second when you close your eyes. This is the limit of my visual capacity to remember. I always assumed everybody is like that. :)
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - copperx 7y ago
    I can "replay" events, but honestly I'm not sure I'm recalling or reconstructing an event; that is, I'm not sure if the images are memories or I'm creating them on the fly, as I can come up with "movies" in my head very easily, actors, sfx, and all.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      There's not much difference with regards to the article, where the problem is the inability to come up with "movies", not whether they are 100% accurate on some source material...
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Recall is reconstruction. The act of remembering something can change the way the memory is recalled next time. You can erase or modify someone's memory by engaging in appropriate chemical or behavioral interventions while they recall the memory.
Iv 7y ago
I do first-person recollection when I try to find an object I forgot. "I was having my wallet at the restaurant, I remember looking for coins in it."
mikelevins 7y ago
It's not a matter of "supposed to", but yes, that's part of the capability that is being discussed. There seem to be a couple of different dimensions of variation in how human memory and imagination work. One is what is discussed here: the ability to "vividly" reconstruct remembered events "from a first-person perspective". Apparently, some people can do it, and others cannot. Presumably, there's a range of abilities in between. At one end of the spectrum are people with hyperthymesia, who appear to be able to instantly reconstruct every tiny detail, including visual details from a first-person perspective, of everything they've ever experienced. At the other end are people like those discussed in this article. Another dimension is how vividly and comprehensively people can construct, manipulate, and experience sensory models in their imaginations. Again, the spectrum seems to run from aphantasia at one end (that's the inability to construct mental imagery at all) to someone like Stephen Wiltshire, who appears to have an eidetic visual memory that enables him to draw large, detailed landscapes with roughly photographic accuracy after briefly seeing a scene a single time. People with aphantasia generally seem to assume that when others describe mental imagery, they are being metaphorical; that they don't mean that they actually experience mental imagery in a literal sense. Contrariwise, I do actually experience mental imagery in a literal sense. In my late teens I became fascinated with a series of exercises devised by Aleister Crowley, in which you practice constructing increasingly elaborate assemblies of colorful 3D shapes moving in different ways. The goal was to see how many shapes you could manage at once and keep all of the shapes, colors, textures, and movement patterns stable for as long as possible. I assume an aphantastic person would think Crowley was joking or bullshitting, until they learned that some people can indeed construct and manipulate detailed mental images. Further complicating the subject, we also know from experiments in psychology of perception that the brain tends to edit memories, altering their content over time. I'd be interested to know how this tendency interacts with the variables mentioned above. I'm somewhere in the middle on both axes discussed above. I experience memories in the first person, and I remember and dream in color. When navigating, I rely on a 3D model of where I am and where I'm going, and if asked to go somewhere I haven't been before, I want to see a map that I can use to refresh and supplement that mental model. By contrast, my mother navigates procedurally. She wants a sequence of operations to perform: "turn right here; go a certain distance looking for such and such a building,..." and so on. I _can_ navigate that way, but I find it much more difficult and error-prone than just constructing the 3D model. From what my mother says, I'm not sure she can construct a model like that at all. Signs of the difference show up in, for example, the kind of information each of us wants when being directed to a new place. She wants detailed step-by-step instructions; I want coordinates in space and some identifying information (like the street address) to confirm when I've arrived at the right place. She will follow directions to the letter. I'll just pick a route that points in the right direction and improvise until I'm close enough to look for the confirming data.
marcinzm 7y ago
>Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter? Apparently many people can. I mostly can't. Interestingly, I learned this while reading a comic where a plot point was certain memories being visualized in black-and-white versus color. The fact that the author took it as given that you could visualize memories in such detail that color could be discerned was mind blowing. I wonder how many other things we take as given based on our own mental experiences but which aren't close to universal.
- ALittleLight 7y ago
  I learned of my own aphantasia while watching an episode of House with my roommate. In the show they had a machine which let them view a rough picture of what a subject was thinking of. I observed to my roommate that this was an especially dumb plot point as people don't actually think in images but only in words. My roommate was quite confused and claimed that he did think in visuals and we had an interesting conversation and Google search thereafter. I still am slightly torn between thinking that there is some disconnect in explanation versus believing that some or even most people can actually visualize things in their mind. When I think of a "square", for example, I have access to all the facts I know of squares (polygon with four equal length edges) and I could draw a square or trace one in the air with my finger, so I obviously know what one looks like, but I have no visual experience of a square and it's difficult to imagine that other people do. One reason it's difficult to imagine other people have the visual imagination they think they do is because I so rarely see people just sitting and imagining things for long stretches - which I assume would be borderline irresistible if you had the kind of fantasy machine to show you whatever you wanted. Perhaps people do this in private and don't talk about it much?
  - mistersys 7y ago
    When I imagine a yellow square, for example, I definitely visualize it. I can re-shape it, combine it with other shapes, rotate it, and visualize it moving. But it's not like it's replacing my vision, it's more of a secondary display that you can only see individual thoughts for a split second. If I close my eyes, I can do this better, and I actually have spent hours visualizing places I've been, or creating new ones. When I visualize my old homes and cities I've lived, it's like I have super speed and I can dash anywhere, but it's like a video with a very low frame rate, I see individual pictures and they combine with my spatial awareness to give my the feeling of moving. The frames are also very "low resolution", but it doesn't feel fuzzy but more like the frames are so quick that you can't pick out many details. In terms of words, I'm often thinking about memories I see on the "memory film", but the pictures themselves aren't words at all, my internal dialog vs. my visualization are 2 separate processes.
umvi 7y ago
I can. Perhaps you have Aphantasia[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
jandrewrogers 7y ago
I am similar, most experiences are reduced to a set of facts in a pretty short period of time. I realized early on that this is not the way most people remember and the facts that I do remember tend to be more reliable than most people with vivid memories, which is useful. Developmentally, I have always wondered if the fact that I had a voracious appetite for reading books, spending most of my time doing that from a very young age through early adulthood, is either correlated or causative -- to this day my cognition is very text optimized. Anecdotally, there seems to be quite a bit of cognitive diversity in terms of how the brain processes reality. For example, I have extremely good spatial memory and ability to fluidly manipulate complex spaces, real or synthetic, in my head. When I was a young I assumed everyone had this ability and it took until well into adulthood for me to realize that I was a far outlier in this regard and most people simply lacked any similar facility. I lean on this all the time to achieve complex things in my life, which has real advantages in certain contexts, but people clearly get on in life without it and frequently have compensatory skills. You have to wonder the extent to which the distribution of these cognitive artifacts influences performance and interest in various occupations, which leverage or rely on these cognitive functions to varying degrees.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Facts are digital, narrative experiences are analog. Facts are high precision but very expensive, while narrative memory packs far far information but is less accurate (error prone) and precise (memories change with each recall).
- meowface 7y ago
  It would be especially interesting if we could retrofit some of these abilities into existing neural architectures with the help of technology. For example, one could imagine an implant or indirectly connected device which increases your "L1 cache size" (working memory capacity), or provides supplementary "GPUs" to offload spatial reasoning. They could change the way the brain itself works, or perhaps just act as external modules with fast data lanes which your brain eventually starts to treat as extensions of itself, like it can with prosthetic limbs (or even imaginary "virtual" limbs, like with a mirror box). It may not actually ever be possible to do it without direct, messy biological/genetic engineering, but if it is possible, I think it would have an incredible impact.
coldtea 7y ago
>Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter? Yes, especially since unlike an "imaginary first-person shooter" this was real (with the added real-world sensory input this implies) and actually happened to you... It's like asking "Am I supposed to see a real world landscape in color, like some sort of imaginary landscape painting?" -- when paintings get their colors from our real world experience of them (modern artistic license aside)...
- lonelappde 7y ago
  A computer screen is real. The images are symbolic of non real things, but the images are real. And especially to the point, since you are (controversially) claiming that raw sensory input is the core of memory, not interpretation of it, it's incoherent to claim that a visual artwork is less memorable than whatever the art represents.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >A computer screen is real Which is neither here, nor there. >The images are symbolic of non real things, but the images are real. They are still not tied to touch, smell, sense of being in place, temperature, wind, and several other things. In fact they can actively fight your environmental cues. E.g. you can watch a man drink coffee in the African heat on your screen while sitting in a room with no smell of coffee at all while freezing cold. The real world intermix of sensory inputs tied to each environment work together and help make the scene, and eventually the memory, even more concrete. >it's incoherent to claim that a visual artwork is less memorable than whatever the art represents. Would you remember more being in a sea with huge waves rocking you, or having seen some artwork of such a scene? Do you remember better a car accident you had, or pictures of random car accidents presented to you?
- meowface 7y ago
  Think about an actual first-person experience you recently had, though. Do you really see a full and clear image, as if you were looking at a true photo or video? If you really try to parse out the small details, can you say exactly what every shade of color was, how the lighting was, where every single thing was located, everything you heard and smelled? I doubt many people have such an extremely vivid memory. I do think my memories of first-person experiences are in the first-person (if I'm understanding it right), but I feel like I just retain the general impression of "scenes", with details for the important things and vague, "smeared" descriptions for everything else. The information is sort of compressed, and more of it can be decompressed if I correlate the events with other things that happened at the time or do other things to jog my memory, but I think it's still a lossy compression. I kind of figured that's what memory is like for most people.
darkerside 7y ago
I wonder if there's a connection between memory and creativity here. Perhaps vivid recollections aren't perfect fidelity, it's just that some people devote their creativity to storytelling about their past. Those memories may or may not be accurate, but vividness of memory is used as a proxy for accuracy.
berberous 7y ago
Yes. For all of you posting that you lack this capability, what are your dreams like? Do they not have a visual component? When I dream, I see the things that are happening ; recalling memories or daydreaming has a similar visual component.
- JshWright 7y ago
  I don't recall dreaming much at all. Once every few months, maybe (I'm sure I'm dreaming, I just have no memory of it. When I do have a memory of a dream, it's the same as any other memory (just a thing that I know "happened"). It wouldn't surprise me if there was a visual component to dreaming though, even for those of us that can't generally visualize things. Dreaming is a very different regime for your brain, where it is _actually_ engaging the bits that get engaged when you're awake and doing things, it just suppresses the actual motor output.
- benrbray 7y ago
  I too have noticed that I rapidly forget experiences I had even just a few days ago. Personally, I only have maybe one or two dreams per year (that I can remember). I have a hunch that a lot of my own memory issues are related to lack of quality sleep as a student. I tend to dream more when life is less stressful.
- NateEag 7y ago
  I am strongly aphantasiac but do on rare occasions get momentary flashes of visual imagery, so I'm not all the way on the end of the spectrum (though my mind was still blown when I realized many people think primarily in visuals - cannot fathom what that would be like). I rarely remember dreams, and when I do they fade quickly. They are visual, however, usually first-person though not always. Other sensations are sometimes strong, too - I've had one or two nightmares involving physical trauma, physical shock, and excruciating pain.
yariik 7y ago
Welcome to the SDAM club friend. It was very difficult for me after I found that I have that, hope it won't be like that for you, or better, that you don't actually have it.

aesh2Xa1 7y ago

Can you recollect the scenery? There is a condition where one cannot process memories visually, but can still use other semantics to recollect. It's called aphantasia.

kibibu 7y ago

I wonder if this is related to Aphantasia, which popped up a while ago. I struggle to visualize things, and often only remember my experiences if people remind me of them.

tomrod 7y ago
I can see memories, but struggle to remember words I heard. Coping strategies: lots of notes!!!
- cableshaft 7y ago
  Oh yeah, what people said is so hard for me. I'm terrible about telling personal anecdotes, because I just don't remember what people said, so it just sounds like me describing a series of facts. I get amazed when people like my late grandfather could tell a story about himself 40 years in the past and tell back and forth conversational dialogue that happened. Even if it's not 100% remembered (and I doubt it was) or embellished, or reinforced by telling the same stories over and over again over the years, it still impresses me. I can forget all but the broad strokes of what people said only a week later. The only conversations I "remember" about my past is what I've explicitly put into my poorly kept up journal entries.

Adverblessly 7y ago

Apparently, different people have different capabilities of imagination. Not strictly about this, but you might be interested in http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-ca... which briefly mentions this specifically. Relevant quote: "In the first, Francis Galton discovered that some people didn’t have visual imagination. They couldn’t see anything in their “mind’s eye”, they couldn’t generate internal images. None of these people knew there was anything “wrong” with them. They just assumed that everyone who talked about having an imagination was being metaphorical, just using a really florid poetic way of describing that they remembered what something looked like."

bonoboTP 7y ago
I think this is very difficult to convey in words. Sometimes I think I have aphantasia because I definitely cannot "visualize" things in color "HD", anywhere nearly similar to the quality of actual vision. At least not when I'm awake. Rarely, I do have dreams (lucid or not) that have the exact same visual quality as usual awake vision. On the other hand, I also cannot empathize with the parent comment that is surprised about first-person memories. My memories are sort of first person and evoke a feeling of the spatial and semantic layout of the scene. Like I remember and can "feel" that Joe was sitting to the left of me, even if I don't see his face in high-definition or maybe cannot even remember if he had glasses on or what clothes he was wearing. Sure, I could also transform it and imagine the situation from a different vantage point (still not really a visual rendering), but by default I recall it from first-person view. I believe that people do metaphorically exaggerate the quality of their visual memories. I recall some experiments that reveal that when these people are poked about specific details of their visualizations they do realize that those parts just were "undefined" and were not actually seeing a "rendered image".
- pharke 7y ago
  That's interesting, my default view in memories is usually third person, often from above and to the side or some other perspective view. I have to concentrate on recalling detail in order to view my memories from a first person perspective. The third person recollection always seems to be more about the spatial relationships between people and things and is certainly not photographic, more like a conceptual understanding with images. Almost a diorama or a scene acted out on a stage. Weirdly this also shows up in my dreams although I do dream in the first person frequently.

dmd 7y ago

Not everyone can do this, but many people (like me) certainly can play an event back like it were a film. I don't find that kind of memory as useful as an actual encoded set of facts, though, and it tends to fade after a few years.

reportingsjr 7y ago
Wow, this is astounding to me! I always assumed people could replay events they had lived, just like watching a video. On top of this I can see and move around in the landscape around me in these memories.
- atemerev 7y ago
  What I “see” is a brief flash of an afterimage, something like when you see for a brief second when you close your eyes. This is the limit of my visual capacity to remember. I always assumed everybody is like that. :)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- copperx 7y ago
  I can "replay" events, but honestly I'm not sure I'm recalling or reconstructing an event; that is, I'm not sure if the images are memories or I'm creating them on the fly, as I can come up with "movies" in my head very easily, actors, sfx, and all.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    There's not much difference with regards to the article, where the problem is the inability to come up with "movies", not whether they are 100% accurate on some source material...
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Recall is reconstruction. The act of remembering something can change the way the memory is recalled next time. You can erase or modify someone's memory by engaging in appropriate chemical or behavioral interventions while they recall the memory.

Iv 7y ago

I do first-person recollection when I try to find an object I forgot. "I was having my wallet at the restaurant, I remember looking for coins in it."

mikelevins 7y ago

It's not a matter of "supposed to", but yes, that's part of the capability that is being discussed. There seem to be a couple of different dimensions of variation in how human memory and imagination work. One is what is discussed here: the ability to "vividly" reconstruct remembered events "from a first-person perspective". Apparently, some people can do it, and others cannot. Presumably, there's a range of abilities in between. At one end of the spectrum are people with hyperthymesia, who appear to be able to instantly reconstruct every tiny detail, including visual details from a first-person perspective, of everything they've ever experienced. At the other end are people like those discussed in this article. Another dimension is how vividly and comprehensively people can construct, manipulate, and experience sensory models in their imaginations. Again, the spectrum seems to run from aphantasia at one end (that's the inability to construct mental imagery at all) to someone like Stephen Wiltshire, who appears to have an eidetic visual memory that enables him to draw large, detailed landscapes with roughly photographic accuracy after briefly seeing a scene a single time. People with aphantasia generally seem to assume that when others describe mental imagery, they are being metaphorical; that they don't mean that they actually experience mental imagery in a literal sense. Contrariwise, I do actually experience mental imagery in a literal sense. In my late teens I became fascinated with a series of exercises devised by Aleister Crowley, in which you practice constructing increasingly elaborate assemblies of colorful 3D shapes moving in different ways. The goal was to see how many shapes you could manage at once and keep all of the shapes, colors, textures, and movement patterns stable for as long as possible. I assume an aphantastic person would think Crowley was joking or bullshitting, until they learned that some people can indeed construct and manipulate detailed mental images. Further complicating the subject, we also know from experiments in psychology of perception that the brain tends to edit memories, altering their content over time. I'd be interested to know how this tendency interacts with the variables mentioned above. I'm somewhere in the middle on both axes discussed above. I experience memories in the first person, and I remember and dream in color. When navigating, I rely on a 3D model of where I am and where I'm going, and if asked to go somewhere I haven't been before, I want to see a map that I can use to refresh and supplement that mental model. By contrast, my mother navigates procedurally. She wants a sequence of operations to perform: "turn right here; go a certain distance looking for such and such a building,..." and so on. I _can_ navigate that way, but I find it much more difficult and error-prone than just constructing the 3D model. From what my mother says, I'm not sure she can construct a model like that at all. Signs of the difference show up in, for example, the kind of information each of us wants when being directed to a new place. She wants detailed step-by-step instructions; I want coordinates in space and some identifying information (like the street address) to confirm when I've arrived at the right place. She will follow directions to the letter. I'll just pick a route that points in the right direction and improvise until I'm close enough to look for the confirming data.

marcinzm 7y ago

>Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter? Apparently many people can. I mostly can't. Interestingly, I learned this while reading a comic where a plot point was certain memories being visualized in black-and-white versus color. The fact that the author took it as given that you could visualize memories in such detail that color could be discerned was mind blowing. I wonder how many other things we take as given based on our own mental experiences but which aren't close to universal.

ALittleLight 7y ago
I learned of my own aphantasia while watching an episode of House with my roommate. In the show they had a machine which let them view a rough picture of what a subject was thinking of. I observed to my roommate that this was an especially dumb plot point as people don't actually think in images but only in words. My roommate was quite confused and claimed that he did think in visuals and we had an interesting conversation and Google search thereafter. I still am slightly torn between thinking that there is some disconnect in explanation versus believing that some or even most people can actually visualize things in their mind. When I think of a "square", for example, I have access to all the facts I know of squares (polygon with four equal length edges) and I could draw a square or trace one in the air with my finger, so I obviously know what one looks like, but I have no visual experience of a square and it's difficult to imagine that other people do. One reason it's difficult to imagine other people have the visual imagination they think they do is because I so rarely see people just sitting and imagining things for long stretches - which I assume would be borderline irresistible if you had the kind of fantasy machine to show you whatever you wanted. Perhaps people do this in private and don't talk about it much?
- mistersys 7y ago
  When I imagine a yellow square, for example, I definitely visualize it. I can re-shape it, combine it with other shapes, rotate it, and visualize it moving. But it's not like it's replacing my vision, it's more of a secondary display that you can only see individual thoughts for a split second. If I close my eyes, I can do this better, and I actually have spent hours visualizing places I've been, or creating new ones. When I visualize my old homes and cities I've lived, it's like I have super speed and I can dash anywhere, but it's like a video with a very low frame rate, I see individual pictures and they combine with my spatial awareness to give my the feeling of moving. The frames are also very "low resolution", but it doesn't feel fuzzy but more like the frames are so quick that you can't pick out many details. In terms of words, I'm often thinking about memories I see on the "memory film", but the pictures themselves aren't words at all, my internal dialog vs. my visualization are 2 separate processes.

umvi 7y ago

I can. Perhaps you have Aphantasia[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

jandrewrogers 7y ago

I am similar, most experiences are reduced to a set of facts in a pretty short period of time. I realized early on that this is not the way most people remember and the facts that I do remember tend to be more reliable than most people with vivid memories, which is useful. Developmentally, I have always wondered if the fact that I had a voracious appetite for reading books, spending most of my time doing that from a very young age through early adulthood, is either correlated or causative -- to this day my cognition is very text optimized. Anecdotally, there seems to be quite a bit of cognitive diversity in terms of how the brain processes reality. For example, I have extremely good spatial memory and ability to fluidly manipulate complex spaces, real or synthetic, in my head. When I was a young I assumed everyone had this ability and it took until well into adulthood for me to realize that I was a far outlier in this regard and most people simply lacked any similar facility. I lean on this all the time to achieve complex things in my life, which has real advantages in certain contexts, but people clearly get on in life without it and frequently have compensatory skills. You have to wonder the extent to which the distribution of these cognitive artifacts influences performance and interest in various occupations, which leverage or rely on these cognitive functions to varying degrees.

lonelappde 7y ago
Facts are digital, narrative experiences are analog. Facts are high precision but very expensive, while narrative memory packs far far information but is less accurate (error prone) and precise (memories change with each recall).
meowface 7y ago
It would be especially interesting if we could retrofit some of these abilities into existing neural architectures with the help of technology. For example, one could imagine an implant or indirectly connected device which increases your "L1 cache size" (working memory capacity), or provides supplementary "GPUs" to offload spatial reasoning. They could change the way the brain itself works, or perhaps just act as external modules with fast data lanes which your brain eventually starts to treat as extensions of itself, like it can with prosthetic limbs (or even imaginary "virtual" limbs, like with a mirror box). It may not actually ever be possible to do it without direct, messy biological/genetic engineering, but if it is possible, I think it would have an incredible impact.

coldtea 7y ago

>Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter? Yes, especially since unlike an "imaginary first-person shooter" this was real (with the added real-world sensory input this implies) and actually happened to you... It's like asking "Am I supposed to see a real world landscape in color, like some sort of imaginary landscape painting?" -- when paintings get their colors from our real world experience of them (modern artistic license aside)...

lonelappde 7y ago
A computer screen is real. The images are symbolic of non real things, but the images are real. And especially to the point, since you are (controversially) claiming that raw sensory input is the core of memory, not interpretation of it, it's incoherent to claim that a visual artwork is less memorable than whatever the art represents.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >A computer screen is real Which is neither here, nor there. >The images are symbolic of non real things, but the images are real. They are still not tied to touch, smell, sense of being in place, temperature, wind, and several other things. In fact they can actively fight your environmental cues. E.g. you can watch a man drink coffee in the African heat on your screen while sitting in a room with no smell of coffee at all while freezing cold. The real world intermix of sensory inputs tied to each environment work together and help make the scene, and eventually the memory, even more concrete. >it's incoherent to claim that a visual artwork is less memorable than whatever the art represents. Would you remember more being in a sea with huge waves rocking you, or having seen some artwork of such a scene? Do you remember better a car accident you had, or pictures of random car accidents presented to you?
meowface 7y ago
Think about an actual first-person experience you recently had, though. Do you really see a full and clear image, as if you were looking at a true photo or video? If you really try to parse out the small details, can you say exactly what every shade of color was, how the lighting was, where every single thing was located, everything you heard and smelled? I doubt many people have such an extremely vivid memory. I do think my memories of first-person experiences are in the first-person (if I'm understanding it right), but I feel like I just retain the general impression of "scenes", with details for the important things and vague, "smeared" descriptions for everything else. The information is sort of compressed, and more of it can be decompressed if I correlate the events with other things that happened at the time or do other things to jog my memory, but I think it's still a lossy compression. I kind of figured that's what memory is like for most people.

darkerside 7y ago

I wonder if there's a connection between memory and creativity here. Perhaps vivid recollections aren't perfect fidelity, it's just that some people devote their creativity to storytelling about their past. Those memories may or may not be accurate, but vividness of memory is used as a proxy for accuracy.

berberous 7y ago

Yes. For all of you posting that you lack this capability, what are your dreams like? Do they not have a visual component? When I dream, I see the things that are happening ; recalling memories or daydreaming has a similar visual component.

JshWright 7y ago
I don't recall dreaming much at all. Once every few months, maybe (I'm sure I'm dreaming, I just have no memory of it. When I do have a memory of a dream, it's the same as any other memory (just a thing that I know "happened"). It wouldn't surprise me if there was a visual component to dreaming though, even for those of us that can't generally visualize things. Dreaming is a very different regime for your brain, where it is _actually_ engaging the bits that get engaged when you're awake and doing things, it just suppresses the actual motor output.
benrbray 7y ago
I too have noticed that I rapidly forget experiences I had even just a few days ago. Personally, I only have maybe one or two dreams per year (that I can remember). I have a hunch that a lot of my own memory issues are related to lack of quality sleep as a student. I tend to dream more when life is less stressful.
NateEag 7y ago
I am strongly aphantasiac but do on rare occasions get momentary flashes of visual imagery, so I'm not all the way on the end of the spectrum (though my mind was still blown when I realized many people think primarily in visuals - cannot fathom what that would be like). I rarely remember dreams, and when I do they fade quickly. They are visual, however, usually first-person though not always. Other sensations are sometimes strong, too - I've had one or two nightmares involving physical trauma, physical shock, and excruciating pain.

yariik 7y ago

Welcome to the SDAM club friend. It was very difficult for me after I found that I have that, hope it won't be like that for you, or better, that you don't actually have it.