I have a very very strong episodic memory.

I have a very hard time "selling myself". I've added solid stuff to my resume in the last year simply recalling what I've done from an outsider's view. From my perspective, I was just messing around. From another perspective, I was building "impressive" "successful" things.

Learning to give myself credit for my accomplishments is what I think made me the difference between a senior engineer and a staff engineer, as silly as that sounds.

As I read this I thought “this sounds a lot like having ADHD”. Sure enough…

Feeling like a spectator in your own mind is a very difficult phenomenon to deal with and to explain to people who don’t experience it. In a sense, sometimes it almost seems like other peoples lives are more real than mine, because I experience my own from such a peculiar lens. The experience of others seems much less adulterated by that interference. Of course, this is far from true, and only another illusion produced by my weird brain.

Like you I can’t sell myself at all. Not only is the recollection poor, but I give equal weight to my success and failures. I’m far too objective about myself in settings where I’m not supposed to be.

I think it is about adopting the right framework. A mix of Clayton Christiansen and 5 whys works for me (similar issues).

I start by writing down the big things: In this year I worked at/for/with ....

WHY was I there: I think about the major projects I did.

WHY was I there: I think (and try to verify) the impact #s/%s those projects had.

WHY was I there: I think about the technical and soft skills needed to make that happen.

WHY do I care: I consider if there is any configuration of things that would make me consider doing the project again.

Having to track past performance as a business made this much clearer -- I adopted the above approach to expand out CV, then developed a similar approach for business development templates to explain recent past work.

I sometimes will drop these templates into an LLM and have it work with me to define or identify ways to better communicate.

I can relate to this very strongly. The difficulty in 'selling yourself' by recalling specific achievements for interviews or performance reviews is a challenge I know all too well.

Like you and the author, I have aphantasia (and possibly SDAM), but through self-reflection and quite a bit of therapy, I've come to believe this specific issue lies more firmly in the domain of ADHD. For me, the problem isn't just an inability to recall achievements, but a failure to feel a sense of achievement for almost anything in the first place.

A very recent example from my own life illustrates this perfectly: For context, I struggled through university for about 12 years without a degree before receiving my ADHD diagnosis. Afterwards, I decided to switch careers and applied for an apprenticeship as an IT specialist for system integration, essentially a helpdesk/support role. Because of my self-taught skills, I was hired directly, skipping the apprenticeship. Intellectually, I know this was a very good outcome. In the 8 months since, I've taken on tasks far beyond my initial role - automating reports, working on internal tooling and a local AI solution, and developing customer-facing tools. Just yesterday, I was officially promoted to Test Automation Engineer with a 50% salary increase.

And I know intellectually that going from applying for an apprenticeship to an engineering role in 8 months is a significant achievement. But I don't feel it as such. My dominant feeling is that, at 35, I'm finally just starting to catch up to my peers. To an outside observer, that probably sounds absurd.

My working theory for this is that it's a mechanism very similar to the common ADHD experience of misplacing keys. The issue isn't a failure to recall the memory of where you put them. The problem is that the memory was never properly encoded in the first place, because your attention was already split between several other thoughts at that moment. You can't retrieve a memory that was never saved.

I suspect something similar happens with achievements. If an event doesn't register emotionally as an "achievement" at the moment it happens, the brain doesn't file it under that tag. It just gets stored as another factual event - 'a thing that happened' - which makes it incredibly difficult to retrieve when a prompt like "tell me about a time you solved a hard problem" specifically asks for something from the 'achievements' file.

>This is exactly what I experience, and for me, this is a huge issue when it comes to 'selling myself', whether it is in an interview, or writing a self-assessment for a review.

I wonder if this is genetic. I have had a significant number of interviews with people from a couple specific geographic regions that cant relay to me details of a situation where they did XYZ. But given the question simply tell me how they would deal with it.

It made me super curious, because you could see in their job history that they definitely had those experiences but could not recall them.

I do not have ADHD but also struggle to "sell myself". It's something I had to work on. My view is that the industry can be kind of obsessed with these kind of stories. It's kind of like the "great man of history" world view, but in the small. A common challenge for me is in companies that have a "cultural" interview where they want you to talk about some conflict that happened and how you resolved this, either I'm incredibly naive or I just don't see conflict in this way that makes it a story. I just try to treat people with respect, I try to talk to them in a way that makes them feel open to talk to me. If I have hit conflict it didn't strike me as a moment where I had to think about it in that or it never escalated to being a problem. And it can be the same for programming. I don't have a cool story about the "hardest bug I ever solved" because it's just the same iterative process as any other challenge I have and it feels the same to me in the moment and after, just sometimes it takes longer. And I am no way trying to imply this represents some exceptional behaviour on my part, it's just by nature or nurture how things work, I didn't choose it.

> And just like the author, I couldn't answer questions about hard problems that I've solved,

I have a giant Markdown-formatted list that I occasionally add to that has all of the random technical junk I've done in it. I add to it occasionally and reference as necessary.

Aphantasic here and this article describes my experience perfectly too. I've wondered a lot about why my brother is able to recall entire sequences of memory from our childhoods and I've got, at best, snapshots that aren't exactly mental images, just stuff I think I know happened.

In the same boat, also with ADHD.

Ask people you worked with who have a good impression of you for a list. Better yet, book an hour of video chat and talk through it with them. They will have a lot of examples. Write them down.

I mostly blundered my way through this through this recent round of tons of interviews, and by the end of it, my "Tell me about a time when…" doc is actually what it should/could have been at the start!

If you have excellent spatial memory, have you heard of memory palaces? Might be interesting to try and construct an "achievements" memory palace for when you need to answer similar questions in the future. (This isn't a problem for me, just thought it might be an interesting avenue to pursue).

You were LABELED with ADHD by people without our condition. "Having" it is accepting the label and it's definitions. The school system (counselors) tried to label both my kids as having ADHD and suggested medication. Instead of giving my kids amphetamines, I told them to stop trying to force everyone at the school to learn using methods that require memorizing images, which neither one of them do.

Our brains are workhorses of indexing things. Of course we have varying attention, especially when we already "get" what was shown to us. When others have to practice it over and over, we just "get it" and move on to something more interesting (and worthy of indexing). Taking medication to "address" this active attention mechanism is going to affect our ability to form good indexing habits.

I don't quite get the connection between ADHD and feeling like a spectator.

If you don’t mind me asking, what was the situation between your parents?

I've only just clued on to how my ADHD-PI has actually affected me. It was hard to tell because I'm evidently "smart enough" to work around the issues. Put simply, my "executive function" sends me a ton of inputs that I manage to juggle, but it takes effort, and so I look for ways to reduce my effort. So I'm not too good at recalling things like jokes, because I've put 0 effort in to remembering them. Part of the reason why is because I've been "shy" since childhood (because if you dont talk then you cant say something dumb or be rude - so problems solved), and so if I'm not talking, then there's no point in knowing jokes (and thus, potential effort is avoided). Just this afternoon I had a worked out that the reason why I don't "listen" to lyrics is likely because it requires "focusing" through the music, but I like the music, so I just listen to the vocals as if they were an instrument (and every now and then I'll just randomly hear some words, which gives the jist). I actually embody most of this meme: https://ifunny.co/meme/the-nooticer-the-37-year-old-nooticer...

Anyway, no more about that. Below is a very fresh "nooticing" — straight from my brain to ChatGPT to you;

Child 1) Me, male, left handed, ADHD-PI, aphantasia, strong spacial ability. Child 2) Female, right handed, ADHD-PI, good mental imagery, dyslexia, long time smoker. Child 3) Female, right handed, ADHD-PI, good mental imagery.

That's all of us, born around late-80's. I didn't dump that all that in to chatGPT (more of a drip-feed), but a pattern emerged quickly regardless; FYI: ADHD is in the Prefrontal Cortex (front of brain), whilst Dyslexia is in the Left Temporal Lobe (~mid left).

> Some studies suggest that fetal development could influence handedness. The position of the baby in the womb and the amount of hormonal exposure (such as testosterone levels) may have an impact on whether a person becomes left-handed or right-handed. Some theories propose that exposure to higher levels of testosterone during pregnancy may increase the likelihood of a person being left-handed.

> Spatial abilities are often tied to the right hemisphere of the brain, which might explain why some people with ADHD-PI (especially left-handed individuals) can develop enhanced spatial reasoning skills, even though their challenges with focus and attention are more prominent.

> Aphantasia, the inability to create mental images, has been linked to differences in how the brain processes and integrates visual information, particularly in the right hemisphere, which is responsible for spatial and visual processing.

> ADHD-PI and Dyslexia often co-occur, and research has shown that people with ADHD are at a higher risk of developing dyslexia or other learning disabilities, particularly dyslexia.

> Testosterone plays a critical role in fetal development, particularly in sexual differentiation (deciding whether a fetus develops as male or female). However, higher-than-normal levels of testosterone exposure during pregnancy can influence brain development, potentially affecting handedness, as well as behavioral tendencies (like aggression, risk-taking, and cognitive development).

> Elevated testosterone levels in utero have been linked to prenatal androgen exposure (often associated with more male-like traits), which may influence cognitive abilities and behavior: - Some studies suggest it could lead to enhanced spatial abilities and higher aggression. - On the flip side, it may increase the risk for neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD or dyslexia, depending on how it affects brain regions involved in attention, language, and executive function.

> There are a few reasons why a mother might have elevated levels of testosterone during pregnancy: - 1. Maternal Health Conditions (e.g., Polycystic Ovary Syndrome - PCOS) - 2. Stress During Pregnancy: Stress—especially chronic stress—can increase the levels of certain hormones, like cortisol. However, there is also some evidence suggesting that stress can lead to altered hormone balance, which might include an increase in testosterone levels. - 3. Maternal Obesity - 4. External or Environmental Hormone Exposure: Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are substances that can interfere with the body's hormonal systems. Some EDCs mimic or disrupt normal hormone functions, potentially leading to higher levels of testosterone in the body. These chemicals can be found in a variety of products, from plastics to pesticides.

Testosterone is the common thread there, and so the question is: why did mum have so much? She was both a stress-head and smoker, but I can't ask her any specifics, because she's dead. So in hind-sight I would say that she had ADHD as well, and so she must have been internalising many things that would then lead to overthinking, which would cause stress and anxiety ("over-worry" sort of thing).

Her and dad also smoked cigarettes forever since I can remember, but they would always go outside. I'm not sure if she smoked whilst pregnant, but I would have thought so, because the advice to quit may not have been common? My sister reckons she didn't though - so I don't know. Regardless, dad would have been smoking, but even when smoking outside, it's well known that 2nd and 3rd hand smoke can affect kids.

So I already suspected the smoking link (the nicotine to dopamine connection), but I didn't realise my left-handedness, spacial reasoning and aphantasia would all be implicated.

Maybe try writing things down?

I genuinely hate to be that guy lol, but I've found LLMs great for this.

I've been updating my resume lately and I've had some LLMs create scripts to call Jira + Linear APIs to fetch all tickets I've had any involvement in and to analyze it. It hallucinates details all the time of course, but I can at least get a rough idea of the things I worked on, cause I'm the same as you and forget immediately what I worked on last week.

I also have problems with faces, if they've changed slightly or I see them in unfamiliar places. I don't have aphantasia, or problems recalling my past - quite the opposite, I have strong visual memories from before I was three.

On the other hand I'm extremely good at recognizing people from their gait. I can see someone in the far distance and know who they are, even if we haven't met in years. For some reason I also recognize people from how they place their shoes.. as when I walked in somewhere and saw a pair of shoes and immediately knew that it was one of my cousins I hadn't seen in ten years.

My partner has this pretty significantly. One interesting byproduct is that for most of her life, she didn’t really understand that other people could just recognize and recall faces. So when a bartender would recall her by name when she had been to a place 3 or 4 times in the last month, she thought they were a creepy stalker and not just someone that automatically recalled her. Because for her it is a deliberate and active process of picking out distinctive traits (glasses, beard, bald, gaunt face, small nose, haircut) to “learn” someone’s face. Or thinking she was just completely anonymous if she went to the same club, on the same nights each week, stood in the same place, and people watched. She was horrified when I told her that everyone that worked there definitely remembered her and probably a bunch of the other regulars too.

I have a strong memory. I can cluster memories of a particular vibe (e.g. rainy atmosphere) on demand. But it hurts my brain if I do it too much.

This happened to me yesterday. Sorry Wolfgang.

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Yeah, this is mostly an interview prep thing. It's not nearly as bad and soul-sucking as Leetcode, but they both mostly answer the question of, "How much time did you spend preparing for interviews?"

For those of us who sometimes have trouble with "tell me about a time..." interview questions, but have no trouble recalling relevant examples when discussing an actual real-world question... I wonder whether part of the problem is the interview context is activating different thinking, and maybe you just need to trick yourself with a mental prompt, like:

"The interview is a colleague who is having trouble with a situation like this, and what advice would you give them, and what relevant supporting examples pop into mind? Great, now change gears, remember you're in a bad interview for some company that apparently does bad interviews, but don't tell the interviewer that, and instead carefully speak the most straightforward and uncontroversial example you thought of, in unhelpful STAR format. So that the interviewer can checkbox that you used STAR format. Bonus points if you can twist it to hit a Leadership Principle, and you should mention the Leadership Principle by name, so the interviewer doesn't miss it."

I think what I find hardest about that kind of question in particular is that the first clause prompts me to think of problems that I didn't handle very well, but obviously I want to tell a story that makes me look good. Eventually I will probably think of the right story, after I throw out five or six of the wrong stories.

Yes, I think this is more of a retrieval issue than a memory issue. I have memories of most of the things I did in my work and studies, but I can't retrieve them based on an abstract query like "a difficult problem."

When I get a question like this, I have to find a more concrete approach to retrieve things I did (e.g. "what kinds of problems did I work on together with Sarah in the Compiler Design class"), and then filter them for difficult things that had interesting solutions.

At some point I'd expect these questions to have come up enough for you to have some basis on which to speak. By the tenth interview asking a similar question, are you still trying to come up with something brand new on the spot? I have a lot of the issues mentioned in the article from face blindness to a general lack of memory around events. But I've talked about the time I accidentally ran "rm -Rf /." instead of "rm -Rf ./" on a production system on one of my first jobs and the lessons I'd taken away in probably over a dozen interviews during my life. I don't have to try to remember it.

One of my favorite managers comes across as a very charismatic person who always had great stories to tell about his life and work. After working with him for years, it became clear he had half a dozen decent stories he could tell well and rotated through them. Enough new people were introduced and others enjoyed his stories so would encourage it "Tell them about the time you worked for the Canadian Mafia!" They were crafted by that point. He didn't have to "remember" them so much as they were tools in his belt that he could pull out on demand. I'd guarantee some of those stories come out when he interviews somewhere.

Pretty much and I think this is the most normal thing!? In fact most of what the author describes is exactly the same for me. Do you guys just remember everything clearly as you need it?? I am inclined to believe that if you can do that you are the one who’s not “normal “

What do you mean “hasn’t prepared for them”?

Isn’t just living and thinking preparing for questions like this? They’re not that hard.

I don’t think this really has much to do with fidelity/clarity, so much as accuracy. One could have an extremely high fidelity visual of a bike that is incorrect and you wouldn’t say they had aphantasia as a result.

I have aphantasia, I have no voluntary visual component to my mind as far as I can tell. I also have quite a good memory. If I were to draw a bike from memory I suspect I would make similar mistakes as those.

One thing I have noticed in the threads that come up about aphantasia is comments either directly or indirectly calling into question its validity. I want to share a test I got from another HN comment, so I won’t take credit, that I have found to be the easiest way to explain to people how completely absent the visual component is for me.

Close your eyes and imagine a ball bouncing across a table. Imagine the sound it makes as it goes. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. What colour is it?

Most people I ask answer this question without hesitation. It’s easy, because they were just looking at it, maybe still are. I have asked this question of various friends tens of times, and I still don’t know what colour the ball is for me because it doesn’t exist. I know what a bouncing ball looks like, I know the sound it makes. I know what colour it could be. But I’ve never seen it.

That is aphantasia. It’s not foggy, or blurry, or “low fidelity”, it’s just nothingness.

I must respectfully challenge this interpretation on phenomenological grounds.

To presume knowledge of another's mind's eye is to commit a fundamental epistemic error. Having conducted extensive interviews with hundreds of subjects, I've discovered that visualization manifests along a vast spectrum of human experience, each with its own unique phenomenology and nomenclature. For some, the mind's eye is void; for others, it blazes with such intensity that it eclipses physical sight itself.

The bicycle-drawing analogy fundamentally misconstrues the relationship between mental representation and motor expression. These are orthogonal cognitive faculties—one need not be a sculptor to possess perfect proprioceptive knowledge of one's own face.

The eyewitness testimony example actually undermines the original argument. The critical factor isn't visual recall but temporal-causal sequencing—the who, what, and when of events. My research suggests that aphantasics demonstrate superior accuracy in reconstructing factual sequences, unencumbered by the distortions of visual reconstruction. Indeed, one might argue that the ideal witness would be someone who processes experience without the intermediary of visualization.

This points to a deeper truth about cognitive diversity: what some dismiss as deficit may in fact represent an alternative—and in certain contexts, superior—mode of engaging with reality. The visualizer's mind performs an act of creation with each recall, reconstructing and thereby potentially corrupting the original experience. The aphantasic mind, conversely, may preserve information in a more pristine, unrendered state—accessing facts without the degradation inherent in repeated mental imaging.

This is not merely a neurological curiosity but a profound philosophical distinction: between those who remember through representation and those who remember through direct apprehension. Each mode carries its own epistemic advantages, and our insistence on privileging the visual may blind us to entirely different ways of knowing.

How could people possibly be this bad at drawing a bicycle!?

Was this study done on aboriginals living in a rainforest that have never gone to a paved part of the world where people use bicycles?

Sure, I'd get a bit flustered if asked to draw a modern mountain bike with rear suspension. Err... there's a spring back there... somewhere?

But an ordinary road bike? How could you get that wrong?

I have hyperphantasia, and only realized within the last decade or so that most people are not walking around with a detailed virtual overlay on the whole world.

This bicycle example really helps me appreciate the difference between how things are in my mind compared to most people's, and I appreciate your sharing it!

This seems like people who aren't thinking about the problem at all and don't even think about the mechanical problem.

I have no doubt that many of my recollections are bad, but I can imagine essentially every detail of a bicycle, all the mechanical components and how they interact.

So I read your comment before following the link and drew a bicycle perfectly.

I find it absolutely inconceivable that someone could be unable to draw a bicycle in Liverpool or a similar city.

I am not sure this is related to what OP is talking about.

Those seem like totally different things. If someone can visualize things in perfect detail, why would that necessarily mean they can remember the configuration of a bicycle?

Memory uses lossy compression where sometimes the compression is terribly inaccurate or leaves nothing at all. C'est la vie.

You'd be surprised how developed these skills are in people that are in visual arts.

What helped me when I was grieving is to remember the feeling of the loved one's presence. At first it's subtle, then as you start enjoying the visualization it becomes more pronounced. Like imagine you're sitting alone and then that person walks in, and that "changes the room", probably in a different way than if any other person walked in. That wonderful feeling that comes over you when you remember the person's presence allows you to maintain a connection even when the person is not there physically. Or, at least, it did for me. This developed in me the sense that the person is still with me and always will be.

I'm pleasantly surprised that this thread has multiple threads about loved ones and grieving.

I have this anxiety for sure. I cant even picture her face.

Touching objects for me doesnt help, though looking at pictures does. Ive tried to get her to make scrapbooks for every year we have been together with explanations and stories, but no luck so far.

She remembers what we both were wearing the day we met.

This is uncanny, I was going to write almost this exact comment. I've been told mine is due to a deficiency in working memory, which can then lead to the brain not converting to long term memory. something that ADHDers present commonly with.

> and I told them that I did just had a quiet one at home, then later I'm reminded I actually went skiing or something

This is wild!

> I do get anxiety about not remembering people once they pass away.

Have you tried remembering how their presence felt/feels? Consciously identifying the feeling that a loved one "carried" was an important part of a recent grieving I went through.

I have aphantasia now and I miss being able to visualize anything at all.

I have the opposite of face blindness and subconsciously process every face but I have lethonomia (cannot remember people's names). Years ago, I was once riding my bicycle from campus at probably 21 mph / 30 kph and recognized the brother of a lab partner when they were completely to the side of me and 75' / 22 m away in profile after seeing a photo of them once. I'm probably not as good as I once was due to a TBI.

How about the pain of reliving old memories? I could do with a little less of that right now.

How do you know you have emotionally forgiven (as in let go) even if you have forgotten?

This is a rhetorical question... No need to answer for you situation but I wonder.

Same for me. I can visualize fine, but the author’s description of their memory, or lack thereof, is exactly what I experience. The thing about spatial memory especially. I could draw a decent floor plan of every place I’ve lived since the age of about 4. Some of those places I’d struggle to tell you about any concrete events I experienced there.

It isn’t something I’ve thought about too much. I’ve noticed that other people seem to remember events better, but it didn’t seem too remarkable. But the author’s presentation of this as anomalous really reframes it.

They do say that only half of people who have this also have aphantasia, so we’d expect plenty of people without aphantasia too.

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Our 23-year old son died two and a half years ago and while I'm sure SDAM helped me to get through the horrible immediate times, it's quite sad to be without a lot of detailed memories and events that I can look back on to relive the good times. On the whole, I'd rather have had a functioning episodic memory. (and my son)

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 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.

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.

Half the time when people describe aphantasia, I want to say something like "you realize that most people don't 'see' things in their mind as clear as open eye visuals, right?" but I keep quiet because I know that the worst thing you can do with something like this is make them feel as though you've invalidated something that has become a core pillar of their identity by that point.

I've always attributed this to feeling that I truly don't care about some moments or scraps of information. Holding onto them is an entirely pointless chore for the mind, so we forget them by default. Mapping of physical space must be a very different form of memory, however. This doesn't seem to degrade very much over decades and decades of time.

As someone with aphantasia and SDAM, this is what I've literally done for the past 4-5 years. I've kept a log of every single work day so that I could refer back to what I've done over whatever period as otherwise there is literally no chance I'd be able to recollect much of anything.

Those tire kickers are looking for any reason not to hire people. Trying to prepare for their mind-games is a fool's errand. They've almost always made up their mind when they see your face and decide whether you're fuckable or not.

Do you really want to work for people like that?

I wonder if this is one of the causes of hoarding. I hate to throw away stuff because for me it's like erasing memories from my brain.

This is a fairly normal aspect of recall where our minds need some help to recall further memories.

It's why if you forget something you were thinking or going to do, go back to where you were and do the thing that lead to that thought and often it will come back to you.

Aphantasia I think is different, because this type of thing you describe happens for all types of recall not just visual imagery.

Also, I think I read in one of Sacks' books that he did not have any visual imagery either? I think it was in the chapter about himself in the "Mind's Eye" book

What nobody says is that, face blindness is a protection mechanism from our brain for protecting ourselves from losing our minds. When you see your friends growing up and don't remember when you were kids, or when you see the kids at school and you think 'they are younger than I were when I was in there', that's your brain using this mechanism. Forgiving all the faces that we had back then, so we don't feel so much like growing and getting old. That's why your family will always look like they are right now, and you need to make an effort to remember them when you were kids, and remember them in their kid form.

I typed my intrusive thoughts in to a document and analysed them. It turns out I had a hundred of them.

It really helped to write up why they don't matter now, such as "I was a child when that happened, I'm now an adult who knows how to handle that."

My brain thinks that a physical piece of paper is much more authoritative than a thought in my head and makes less effort to remember things that are documented so having twenty page booklet that I can get out if I need it seemed to help.

Fellow aphantasiac here: it's not so much a memory of that very situation happening, for me at least, but the feeling of it happening and some of context around it.

Same goes for tragic and happy events: I can't remember their details, but I remember my emotions.

For me, something like that is saved as a "data point" in the "facts folder", and thus is readily accessible. For example, I've got a big beard, and lots of people make compliments about it in public: at least once a month for over 5 years now. I know this as fact. But if you want me to recall a recent example of it happening, then nothing just springs to mind. As I probe my mind trying to find an example, one has come to mind, but it's not recent (from Jan this year). It occurred in the context of a notable event, so like other people have said elsewhere, it must be because I associated some importance with that event (and it was a novel event, which explains that), and that this beard-compliment has tagged along with it (the whole event has come to mind at this point too).

And just now in the process of writing all this, a quite recent example has come to mind, which may be the most recent, and it was when I was on walk and just crossed a corner when a car arrived at the corner to turn, and the male passenger already had their window down, and so he yelled out something like "cool beard", and the driver was female and didn't really pause turning or anything, and I didn't acknowledge the bloke at all (because fuck off, dont yell out at me from a car window). I'm not confident, but I think the car was a small-ish SUV. Anyway, apart from where it happened, I can't think of anything else. I don't know what clothes I was wearing, what they looked like (besides being ~30yo and white), what color their car was, what his voice sounded like, which direction they turned (it was a roundabout), etc.

* By probe my mind: in my case I am constantly "talking" in my head. It's as if someone is sitting over your shoulder going "uhh, you go to the shops often, maybe check that folder. nothing? uhh, what about ..." Eventually something will just pop-up. (I don't really say folder in my head, more like "maybe at the shops, maybe on the outside, maybe walking inside, whilst at the checkout? nothing? uhh..."

* By spring to mind: It's kind of like an email arrives in my inbox with all the details in it. All I can do is probe my mind a bit, then "check the inbox", then probe, etc. Whilst listening during conversation, events relevant to the conversation can just appear in the inbox. I don't know if the talkers words can trigger it, or if it's because my inner-voice is reviewing/breaking-down* what they are saying as they are saying it, and that's the trigger. This is also what happens when I am reading. Things can just appear whilst I am talking too, because my inner-voice is usually planning ahead in the conversation (and it also monitors tempo, audience response, etc), but I think it might be the same part of the brain that does speech, so it can only work at like half speed. Sometimes I will forget the word I was going to say or muddle a moment of speech, which is probably the inner-voice using too many resources. And of course, I can just "get distracted" and fork the convo at any moment (the classic "speaking of which"). My inner voice also plans ahead whilst I am writing, and it makes similar mistakes. Sometimes I will miss a word, or even just skip ahead a whole sentence (to the point where it was planning). It's particularly easy to "lose a sentence" if the word I'm typing is similar in letters to the one that's just been planned.

* Because my inner-voice is talking whilst they are talking, it can notice something interesting said in the conversation, or it could trigger an idea (I haven't pondered this before, but perhaps a 'new idea' notification just arrives in the inbox too...), and at the point my focus can drift as my mind explores that idea/topic (I think this is the ADHD "Predominately Inattentive" aspect at play).

* PS- Because I ponder so much, I have pondered something pretty "meta" before, like in the way that the universe could be a simulation. So yes, I have wondered if the voice in my head is me (it sounds like me), or if it's an entity that has "taken control of the wheel". On the rare occasion that it's not talking, I get the sense that it's still there, waiting. After a few moments there might be a "hmmm...".

Also my inner voice can do very accurate impressions, and sing just like the real singers it copies. There is a strange distinction between "singing lyrics" and "hearing a song with lyrics" in my head. It can even make sounds with my voice that are quite impressive, and I get the impression that it is possible for me to make those sounds. It tries for a moment to convince me to do it, before it chuckles and says "there's no way".

* PPS- As I was typing that last part, a memory popped up! I was at the strip club one time talking to a girl, and out the blue she goes "you've got a good voice, i reckon you would be a good singer", which made me think "fkn what". lol

* Update: I was just in the kitchen making a coffee, and thinking about how good this post was. A few things popped up; 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mj2fVcyVkU 2) https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/hurlburt-heavey-kelsey-201... — "The median inner speech frequency of the participants in the Heavey and Hurlburt (2008) and Mihelic (2010) studies was 20 percent." 3) On the last project I was on, I think the engineer I was working with ended up with PTSD from all my ideas, lol. But still, they all liked it when the reviews from construction came back as "this is the best ever!"

As I was gathering those links — 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5bJvo_THvg When people without inner voices watch a scene like that, I wonder what they think is happening. The TV show Peep Show is another example. Do they think the person is "first person" is actually saying those things? It would make no sense!

First performance review? The dog and pony show should be proceeded with a trawl through the emails and an early summary emailed to the manager. You will be thanked, but it’s your best chance to “remind” the boss of all the great things you’ve done.

You struggle to remember? The manager will struggle more. Unless you always want to be judged on the last couple of weeks you’ve worked, this prep makes a big difference. Get in quick before the manager forms an opinion difficult to shift.

Same.

That is a hot take but it doesn’t really line up with research nor my anecdotal experience discussing the topic with close friends that have aphantasia.

Also while describing their inability to remember specific episodes they describe specific episodes.

> There are many memories there, but most of them can't be retrieved with convenient keywords like "a time when X happened".

In a paragraph about "times when I couldn't recall specific episodes" and describing a job interview from the past.