Reading the article, I think I can do what the author can't, but I also think he probably imagines what he lacks to be more clear/detailed than it is for people without the issue. I can recall specific events from many years ago from my perspective, but it's tidbits, and the info feels lossy. The question he struggled with about past challenges is difficult for most people, I'd guess, but I do not think his issues are fake/normal because of that.

I think you're assuming more people are like you than actually are.

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 think you're assuming more people are like you than actually are.

What I'm trying to say is that from his perspective, how he imagines people with more "normal" memory recall things, might be a bit exaggerated. He doesn't know what he's missing exactly so he might imagine it to be better than it really is. I'm not trying to say that everyone else is like me or that he's like me. Like if he can't imagine an apple in his mind at all and he hears other people can, he may imagine it's as clear as staring at an apple in real life or a picture of an apple on a computer screen, while the reality is somewhere in the middle. I do believe his claims about himself, but his claims about me or people like me don't seem entirely accurate.

When describing qualia, all words are metaphors. This subject is an unscientific minefield.

I suspect I'm close to the SDAM side on the autobiographical memory spectrum, since reading this my immediate thought was, wow. But you make a good point. So I have a question for you, which is, do you remember acquaintances from a few years ago who you haven't seen since?

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.

>do you remember acquaintances from a few years ago who you haven't seen since?

This is tricky, because the first couple people I think of are people who sort of "exist" in some sense online. Maybe I haven't seen them physically in 5-10 years, but I see their handle on a friends list or maybe I've messaged them in that time. I can remember things from back when I did see them in person, but perhaps their presence in some form since then has kept things more active. (Maybe they're more friends than acquaintances, admittedly it's hard for me to draw a line there without a clear definition)

I'm leaning toward "yes", though. I can remember old people who I fixed computers for once or twice and never really talked to again otherwise. They weren't related to me or anything, it was purely business, but I can remember things like them offering me a drink or asking certain questions or that they pronounced a word in an unusual way.

The pandemic might need its own special studies because a lot of adults have weird temporal experiences associated with it.

For me it also feels like pre-pandemic years were a lifetime ago, that life events around 2018/19 happened to someone else. But I don't think I have SDAM as I do have good recall for personal experiences, though it feels like it's getting weaker as I get older and the frequency of novel experiences wanes.

The other confounding factor is I moved to the opposite side of the world after completing my education, which meant a lot of those really foundational memories didn't get reinforced as much as they did for my peers. Because they got to hang out frequently and relive those tales together, while I felt them slipping away like sand from my fingers.

I can picture my wife's dead grandfather in my head. When I do, I can almost hear his gruff voice and the mannerisms with which he spoke. My mind also immediately conjured up an image of his garden full of cacti, and the yellow wooden chair that sat beside it.

I believe this is the stuff people with aphantasia struggle with.

Im always confused about this. I think my brain has rewritten memories to a large extent.

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.

I feel like a lot of responses here are lecturing about aphantasia rather than SDAM. I learned of SDAM from this article, but it resonates with my own experiences.

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.

I'm somewhere in between. I mostly learn a lot like the author of the article says, just incorporating things into my worldview. I am terrible at remembering things like "so and so's" theorem/algorithm/historical proclamation. But when I absorb the idea, it becomes part of my own operating model. I'm terrible at citation.

Despite aphantasia, my autobiographical memory is a weird mixture of gaps and some very solid vignettes/moments where I remember a lot of detail. It's never a long-running scene. Many of these memories are pinned at some traumatic or surprising moment, but some seem to be much more mundane and yet somehow were recorded as if they were pivotal.

I have a pretty high ACE score. Ironically, some of my pivotal memories are meta-moments when I had a sudden veil lift from previously repressed memories. I'm remembering not the original traumatic moments, but the moment of realization that my memory had these decade-plus gaps or eras to it.

That's the thing, some people do see things in their mind that clearly. It's about as rare as full aphantasia, but it's absolutely a spectrum.

There's really no way to know this, as it's all based on subjective experiences in which two people could easily describe the same sensation differently.

That's a bold claim! Actually, there are plenty of scientific experiments that show actual differences between people who report aphantasia and those who don't, including different stress responses to frightening non-visual descriptions, different susceptibility to something called image priming, lower "cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

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.

If you recall, I prefaced my original comment with "Half the time,"

I really don't think so. I can't visualize with perfect clarity, but I can do pretty well, especially if I try. It tends to shift, so "count the stripes on the tiger" doesn't quite work, but I can do the exercise of visualizing a ball on a table and then saying what color it is.

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."

Hard to tell though - I don't have aphantasia, but I can't visualise images very vividly. I'm happy to accept that many people can "see" their visualisations much more vividly than I can though, because I can visualise sound, voices and music almost as well as actually hearing them, and maybe that comes at the cost of not being able to visualise images as well as others can (but visualising sound better perhaps).