Aphantasia

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I tend to remember faces better than names.

I have trouble identifying a person out of uniform when I see this person in uniform a lot.

I once forgot a girl’s name while we were making out on her first date. She found that funny.

I’m not very good with names, either. I’m much better with faces.

I need to work on getting better with names because it’s really important in my current job.

Just out of curiosity, for others with aphantasia, do you enjoy vacations and travel?

I'm completely blah on vacations and travel. Part of it is that I tend to get anxious when I go anywhere, even to another nearby town, and can't wait until I go home again. The only times I've been 200 miles from home in nearly two decades was for medical reasons.

I used to be able to travel without anxiety and I did enjoy the trip. But when I got back, I could remember the trip but to me it wasn't any more real that if I had read about it in a book or magazine article. Essentially, to me, any travel I did in the past is very flat.

For example, I can remember riding the Alaskan inland ferry, the Malaspina, from Bellingham, Washington to Skagway, Alaska and then hiking the Chilcoot Trail to Lake Bennett in British Columbia, but my memories of the trip are no more than what can be written as paragraphs in a book. That was in 1977 -- when we got to Ketchikan, Alaska, the newspaper headlines were about Elvis's death -- he was still alive when we got on the boat.

In other words, I don't really retain much in the way of memories of what it was like on the trip.

Do others have the same issues? When you go on a vacation, how well can you remember the feeling of what you experienced in the vacation?

Interesting. A fellow engineer who I suspect is also on the spectrum disagrees with me ehen I joke about Radio having the best picture quality because the picture is generated in the Listeners' mind. He asserts he needs the picture from the television.

Is there a connection between aphantasia and difficulty in being hypnotized?

I can not form detailed images at all. I have very rich fantasy but piss poor resolution.

It is like this:


I can appreciate art and I have ideas regarding it but I can not execute. I can not follow movements in real life. My visual memory is poor because I have brain damage. I can not really feel my body hence I have causally related imagination combined with cognitive disorganization and parallel symbolization.

I also cannot visualize images in my mind. I have no visual, audio, emotional or other sensory experience when imagining something. Instead, I can only hold a vague, fleeting "impression" (much like the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon) about the subject in my mind, and mentally list its characteristics and relationships to other subjects.

It does not matter if it is something created purely by my imagination, something I recall from seeing every day, or even something I am currently looking at. However, the impression is stronger if it is something that I have touched a lot.

I do not see or hear anything in my dreams. I do not see and recognize familiar people/places in my dreams; I simply "just know" who/where it is. Other than that, I only remember a sequence of plot points about things that happened. When reading fiction, I skip descriptive language entirely and, again, focus only on plot points. I spell, draw, and play music, not by visualizing it, but by using muscle memory.

Because I cannot visualize it, I cannot remember multi-step directions for procedures or navigation. Because any information stored in my working memory for complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension is not a solid image that I can refer to throughout the task, it is forgotten as soon as I try to recall a second piece of information to use with it. I need to constantly refresh all information in my mind to continue the complex task. Because I cannot re-visualize it, I cannot remember things I have done in my life, even earlier that same day. I remember facts about my life the same way people studied facts in history class, and then when asked questions about my own personal history, I answer with a script. But it is a constant struggle to remember things I have already done, and therefore, what things I still need to do, in a day.

It affects my executive functioning, including setting and following goals, organization, planning, and working memory.

_________________
31st of July, 2013
Diagnosed: Autism Spectrum Disorder, Auditory-Verbal Processing Speed Disorder, and Visual-Motor Processing Speed Disorder.

Weak Emerging Social Communicator (The Social Thinking-­Social Communication Profile by Michelle Garcia Winner, Pamela Crooke and Stephanie Madrigal)

"I am silently correcting your grammar."

Much of my life, I've heard of references to "undressing a woman with your eyes".

Obviously, with aphantasia, I can't actually visualize a woman in my mind as if she has no clothes. I've often wondered about the phrase because I've never visualized a clothed woman as if she had no clothes on. Is that what the phrase means or does it mean something else?

Similarly, I've heard people say that if you get nervous giving a talk in public, then you should visualize the audience as being nude and that will make it somewhat funny to you can you can proceed with much less nervousness.