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Comment by JaimeThompson | Hacker News Reader

Are you able to form mental images in your head? I'm wondering if people who can't have more trouble with such things.

Not GP, but I experience the same thing. Wife remembers everything, I only remember extremely significant events, and not that much about the fine details.

My capability for creating visual scenes is great, I really enjoy books because of the vivid scenes they paint in my mind.

My visual memory of events is often literally fuzzy and in the third person(out of body, spectating myself in the scene).

There is a study here which looks at that: https://t.co/xYJvPJRUCj ( "Memories with a blind mind: Remembering the past and imagining the future with aphantasia").

I assume I have aphantasia, and I have bad episodic memory -- so to me linking the two makes sense. However, I don't remember (hah!) if the study linked above was able to establish that link as well.

I have a very vivid imagination (and utilize it professionally), but my time/date/name recollection is quite poor. I also score quite high on imagistic/spatial thinking, fwiw.

I believe that deficiencies in Episodic Memory can be related to Aphantasia.

My hypothesis is that when people with high mental image visualization recall an event, they are re-experiencing it in a sense, and therefore reinforcing its details (or details as remembered, at least!). A person with aphantasia recalling that event does not re-experience it in a way that triggers this feedback loop, not as efficiently or completely at least.

I have very detailed memory about facts, places that I've been and seen, including spatial models; but how many times I've visited a place, who I was with on which trip, which events occurred on which visit, these details quickly become obscured and lost.

From personal experience, I don’t think aphantasia and lack of episodic memory are related. I have a poor memory for personal experiences as far as what was said or how I felt and often don’t remember things from a first person view but I have very strong visual mental imagery and spatial reasoning. This results in most of my memories of experiences being 3rd person or “fly through” where I can clearly picture the environment I was in, the people who were there, and myself but seen from other perspectives as if observing a scene. I realize that my memory of all the details isn’t perfect and that they are largely filled in by my prior knowledge or even imagination but it is still accurate enough for the important things. It’s not very useful though and I often wish I could remember what people say or even what I said.

If you have "very strong visual mental imagery", then by definition you have no personal experience with aphantasia.

Yeah I was saying I didn’t but I also don’t have good episodic memory so my point was that they aren’t directly connected at least for me.

As a counterexample: I have good mental image capabilities, but have a terrible episodic memory.

I am aphantasic, and have virtually zero memory of my past beyond a few fragments here and there.

I’ve often wondered if the two are connected.

To offer a counterexample, I have aphantasia, but have very detailed memories of my childhood. I have no problem recalling details like the full names of all my elementary school teachers, when I met most of my friends in school, and details about field trips we took.

That being said, I only have visual aphantasia, so it may be that remembering these peoples' voices or what places smelled and sounded like may be helping those memories.

I dated someone without aphantasia who was amazed at my childhood recall compared to her own. It turned out she later discovered she had SDAM.

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