3 ms·

Without even digging into the paper, let's be clear. They didn't find "they have memory trouble." They found, "they have trouble recalling sensations." > "Our

Without even digging into the paper, let's be clear. They didn't find "they have memory trouble." They found, "they have trouble recalling sensations." > "Our data also showed that individuals with aphantasia not only report being unable to visualise, but also report comparatively reduced imagery, on average, in all other sensory modalities, including auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, taste, olfactory and emotion," the team wrote in their paper. I, for instance, am not aphantasic, but I fall quite close to that end of the spectrum. But I don't use mental imagery to store memory. When I am attempting to encode memories, I do so in the form of a narrative - narratives stick very effectively for me, and I have a pretty good memory (no one without a good memory survives medical school.) It's true, I can't just "remember" the image of relevant anatomy, but I'm fine with other mental models for encoding and retrieving information.

Cactus2018 6y ago
> "they have trouble recalling sensations." On plus side, almost everytime I eat sushi it's the best sushi ever.
abathur 6y ago
I think there's some accidental synecdoche here. At least for those of us endowed with the gift/curse of forming memories as life rushes by, they can appear to be composed of details our senses perceived around us enmeshed with details about how our wetware experienced that moment. Sometimes, we even have false memories of things that didn't happen, or that happened differently than we remember. There's a separate world of practice where people develop mnemonic devices (spaced repetition, narratives, memorable nonsense phrases, memory palaces, songs/rhyme/prosody, hand gestures) to help memorize things better than we could do by accident, or just by thinking "remember X". I would guess most people who are able to form memories can find a mnemonic device that works for them when they need to remember things. The very idea of a "memory palace", however, is so absolutely foreign to my experience of the world that I don't think I could have invented it on my own. Once someone describes it, I have an abstract understanding that the ability to arrange things in visual space could be a powerful mnemonic. I can, after all, remember at least a few things about many thousands of physical places I've been at some point in my life, even though I can't really picture any of them vividly. But, as a mnemonic, it's useless to me--I can't conjure it. My partner can remember things like what shirt she was wearing when we went to a specific restaurant a decade ago. I have abstract knowledge that we have been to that place, but I couldn't tell you anything else about it. For her, memories like this are a springboard into conjuring many other details about the event. Sometimes her recall injects enough context to jog my own. Sometimes it's all lost in the fog. Whether you are "good" or "bad" at memorizing things in an intentional way, unless you have infinite time to creative narrative mnemonics as life rushes by, I suspect aphantasia impacts your ability to recall daily life.
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  I've found memory palaces need at least some upkeep. I only ever used it once to memorize some silly list of matrix properties for extra credit on a test and it worked really well, going along a chain of symbolic objects placed along a location I know very well (the first homeworld of Spyro 3), but it faded over time and now I only remember one thing from it.
- throw1234651234 6y ago
  I think a huge part of mnemonic devices is that it's "just" active memorization - something a lot of people do. Iirc, when researched, people using these tricks did not do any better than people using flashcards and repetition. Thought that might be different for memory competition with people memorizing a 1000 places of pi, a carddeck, etc.
bnt 6y ago
Interesting, I on the other hand remember things “geographically”. It’s like I have precise GPS locations in my head attached to memories. In order to recall something, I usually try to remember where the memory “happened”, once I figure out the associated location - there comes the vivid memory as well.
- rachelbythebay 6y ago
  Do you get the music or conversation too? Or vice-versa, from a song or topic back to a spot?
- jnwatson 6y ago
  This sounds like the method of loci [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
jabofh 6y ago
Much what I was about to comment. My mother passed away some 35-odd years away, and it really took me by surprise when I found out my little sister could visualise her and describe her from memory. I, on the other hand, could m and can recognise photos of her, but when describing her soul resort to learned facts: she was very pretty, slim, had brown hair and eyes, etc., etc. Where the story turns, though, is how I remember things, as opposed to my academic (research professor) and artistic (painter/sculptor, and thus extremely visually oriented) wife. She continually misplaces her keys or glasses, for example. I have learnt to notice items, like them them amongst other things, and link them narritively (glasses on lounge table, keys on dishwasher, mask on sink…) and can then recall that without any real effort at a later stage. It also fascinates her that I can read something like a programming manual like a story book and recall enough of it afterwards to put it into practice using the same manual only as a reference afterwards. Horses for courses, I suppose.
- thomas536 6y ago
  I can do this as well (recall where a stray phone is), but don't understand why I notice and remember better than others. Do I remember more "that's out of place" instances, am I more predisposed to prefer things be in a certain place? Not sure.
toby 6y ago
I assume I have aphantasia, since I've never been able to "visualize" in the way that other people seem to be able to. It seems to be strictly limited to visual imagery however. I remember lyrics / poems / quotes better than most people I know and I do pretty well on those wine-training smell tests. I can easily hear music in my head. I've never really thought of it as a disadvantage, I assumed that I just had a different kind of imagination.
buss 6y ago
Incorrect. If you did actually dig in to the paper they found: Aphantasic participants scored significantly lower than control group 2 on all outcomes of the imagery and episodic memory questionnaires (all p < 0.0002, all r > 0.52, all BF10 > 1.42e8) with the exception of the factual memory component of the SAM. So aphantasics (like myself) do have poor episodic memory. Paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65705-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65705-7

Cactus2018 6y ago

> "they have trouble recalling sensations." On plus side, almost everytime I eat sushi it's the best sushi ever.

abathur 6y ago

I think there's some accidental synecdoche here. At least for those of us endowed with the gift/curse of forming memories as life rushes by, they can appear to be composed of details our senses perceived around us enmeshed with details about how our wetware experienced that moment. Sometimes, we even have false memories of things that didn't happen, or that happened differently than we remember. There's a separate world of practice where people develop mnemonic devices (spaced repetition, narratives, memorable nonsense phrases, memory palaces, songs/rhyme/prosody, hand gestures) to help memorize things better than we could do by accident, or just by thinking "remember X". I would guess most people who are able to form memories can find a mnemonic device that works for them when they need to remember things. The very idea of a "memory palace", however, is so absolutely foreign to my experience of the world that I don't think I could have invented it on my own. Once someone describes it, I have an abstract understanding that the ability to arrange things in visual space could be a powerful mnemonic. I can, after all, remember at least a few things about many thousands of physical places I've been at some point in my life, even though I can't really picture any of them vividly. But, as a mnemonic, it's useless to me--I can't conjure it. My partner can remember things like what shirt she was wearing when we went to a specific restaurant a decade ago. I have abstract knowledge that we have been to that place, but I couldn't tell you anything else about it. For her, memories like this are a springboard into conjuring many other details about the event. Sometimes her recall injects enough context to jog my own. Sometimes it's all lost in the fog. Whether you are "good" or "bad" at memorizing things in an intentional way, unless you have infinite time to creative narrative mnemonics as life rushes by, I suspect aphantasia impacts your ability to recall daily life.

jimmaswell 6y ago
I've found memory palaces need at least some upkeep. I only ever used it once to memorize some silly list of matrix properties for extra credit on a test and it worked really well, going along a chain of symbolic objects placed along a location I know very well (the first homeworld of Spyro 3), but it faded over time and now I only remember one thing from it.
throw1234651234 6y ago
I think a huge part of mnemonic devices is that it's "just" active memorization - something a lot of people do. Iirc, when researched, people using these tricks did not do any better than people using flashcards and repetition. Thought that might be different for memory competition with people memorizing a 1000 places of pi, a carddeck, etc.

bnt 6y ago

Interesting, I on the other hand remember things “geographically”. It’s like I have precise GPS locations in my head attached to memories. In order to recall something, I usually try to remember where the memory “happened”, once I figure out the associated location - there comes the vivid memory as well.

rachelbythebay 6y ago
Do you get the music or conversation too? Or vice-versa, from a song or topic back to a spot?
jnwatson 6y ago
This sounds like the method of loci [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

jabofh 6y ago

Much what I was about to comment. My mother passed away some 35-odd years away, and it really took me by surprise when I found out my little sister could visualise her and describe her from memory. I, on the other hand, could m and can recognise photos of her, but when describing her soul resort to learned facts: she was very pretty, slim, had brown hair and eyes, etc., etc. Where the story turns, though, is how I remember things, as opposed to my academic (research professor) and artistic (painter/sculptor, and thus extremely visually oriented) wife. She continually misplaces her keys or glasses, for example. I have learnt to notice items, like them them amongst other things, and link them narritively (glasses on lounge table, keys on dishwasher, mask on sink…) and can then recall that without any real effort at a later stage. It also fascinates her that I can read something like a programming manual like a story book and recall enough of it afterwards to put it into practice using the same manual only as a reference afterwards. Horses for courses, I suppose.

thomas536 6y ago
I can do this as well (recall where a stray phone is), but don't understand why I notice and remember better than others. Do I remember more "that's out of place" instances, am I more predisposed to prefer things be in a certain place? Not sure.

toby 6y ago

I assume I have aphantasia, since I've never been able to "visualize" in the way that other people seem to be able to. It seems to be strictly limited to visual imagery however. I remember lyrics / poems / quotes better than most people I know and I do pretty well on those wine-training smell tests. I can easily hear music in my head. I've never really thought of it as a disadvantage, I assumed that I just had a different kind of imagination.

buss 6y ago

Incorrect. If you did actually dig in to the paper they found: Aphantasic participants scored significantly lower than control group 2 on all outcomes of the imagery and episodic memory questionnaires (all p < 0.0002, all r > 0.52, all BF10 > 1.42e8) with the exception of the factual memory component of the SAM. So aphantasics (like myself) do have poor episodic memory. Paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65705-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65705-7