I’ve often reflected on how much and how fast I’ve forgotten the experiences of my own life (even though I don’t think of myself as having bad memory more generally), and SDAM finally explained it. It took a few more years and the r/Aphantasia subreddit to learn about something called SDAM, which again deepened my self-understanding. A crude scale of visualization ability (aphantasia spectrum).
Or why I can go somewhere 100 times and still not know how to get there unless I memorize the facts of each turn. At the time, learning about this helped explain a lot of things for me, such as why it takes work to remember what I did today (and I’m often stumped by the simple question of what I did over the weekend) even though I can recite extensive details about the arcana of technical systems. Like Blake, I too made it to 30 with no idea seeing things in your mind’s eye (or the equivalents for other senses) was anything more than colorful language. I’m 30 years old and I never knew a human could do any of this. I thought “counting sheep” was a metaphor. I can’t “see” my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom or the run I went on ten minutes ago. I have never visualized anything in my entire life. Some of you can’t hang onto the canvas for long. Some of you have to work harder to paint the canvas. Some of you can make it up, others only “see” a beach they’ve visited. Some of you see a photorealistic beach, others a shadowy cartoon. If I ask for a red triangle, your mind gets to drawing. If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand and turquoise waves. Here’s the fantastic and hilarious article by Blake Ross that led me to this discovery: Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind. The inability to do so, I learned, is called aphantasia. By comparing to the mental imagery extremes of aphantasia and hyperphantasia, you might just understand your own abilities better.įive years ago, I learned that you have a superpower I don’t-you can see things in your mind. It turns out that most people’s thoughts and memories work at least a little differently.