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Comment by caenn | Hacker News Reader

I have aphantasia (hate the name, no phantasia my ass) and I wonder what kind of: 'color blind are people with better contrast' type of stuff there is. I remember reading that there is a significant amount of extra resilience for traumatic experiences due to not being able to get the memory visualized again, again and again which makes it easier to cope. If anyone has more info about other positive aspects I'd appreciate it.

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Memory tends to be poor among folks with aphantasia, but supposedly whatever details we do actually remember may have less of a chance to have been morphed over time through re-visualization. So we'd make for better eye witnesses.

I can vouch for this. I have it too, and a few years ago my partner died. I was the one who found her dead, but because I can't remember any visual aspect of it, I'm sheltered somewhat from flashbacks of the trauma. I also hypothesise that it's the reason why I very rarely ever remember dreaming, and this is probably also helpful as I suspect I'd otherwise have nightmares about the event.

It has a double edged effect though: I also can't really visualise her face, and that really depresses me at times because it feels like I'm forgetting her memory (I have to remind myself that I'm not really).

Obviously there's a lot of variance as everyone's different, but here's a list of benefits at least some people with aphantasia report:

* Being more in the moment. An example of this is being better at mindfulness, as well as simply not living in the past or worrying about the future as much.

* Less prone to trauma. You've already mentioned this, but not remembering scenes with full sensory information appears to provide a level of protection in some people when it comes to traumatic memories that are otherwise relived and unable to be processed.

* Being better at abstract thought. Lots of people's memory is largely a kind of first person chronological narrative, made up of scenes on a timeline. Some people with aphantasia report they remember in a far more abstract structural manner, not merely confined to the visual. This is obviously also somewhat of a double-edged sword when it comes to remembering say past events.

* Thinking faster on your feet. Without the added visual element, it seems possible to be be more linguistically dexterous and witty because there's less delay between thought and words.

I hasted to add this is all a generalisation, and more about a propensity to be better than you'd personally otherwise be at these things as opposed to a superpower. I don't think it's coincidental that in Francis Galton's original paper on this, he found people with aphantasia are disproportionately represented in what we'd now call STEM.

I have an aphantasia and I'm a programmer, and I've personally found I'm much more able to reason about complex systems than average, and the way I think about them seems markedly different.

I am a paramedic with very limited visual imagery. I hadn't really put two and two together until you mentioned it, but I suspect this is a significant advantage.

It would be interesting to study vividness of visual imagery and PTSD in first responders.

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