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.
And just like the author, I couldn't answer questions about hard problems that I've solved, until someone pointed out a moment where I did something they would call an achievements.
Now, at that moment I have the right references. It is still hard to talk about it as an achievement, but at least the recollection is there.
And just like the author, I have an excellent spatial memory, remembering roads and direction, and the ability to use that to recall other details.
I wonder how much of this is related with having ADHD, which often makes things feel like you're merely a spectator in your own mind. While I was never hungry as a child, and had access to a good education, the situation with between my parents had a lasting impact on me.
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.
The trick to jump from the “messing about” to the “impressive” perspective lies in big picture view and a few rounds of “why”. Ideally, you do it before you start (when it comes to the innermost whys you may encounter resistance, bad faith answers, or answers you don’t like), but if that ship has sailed you can still do it as a post-mortem.
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.
The way I've interpreted conflict in these contexts is more of a "You have ticket X, but it can't be done because Y. How did you communicate about that to your PM/Team/Manager/Relevant Stakeholders?", not literally "How did you handle a fiery argument in the office". It also doesn't hurt to ask the interviewers directly to define "conflict" for you, though.
I think using the word "conflict" is idiotic, but it helps to rephrase it. Because indeed, like you, I've never in my life had "conflict" with anyone in a work setting, I've had plenty of disagreements though and that's just part of the job/life.
I tend to just make something up here on the spot honestly, because as you said, I'm not keeping a book of grudges where I record every single disagreement I have with a colleague. I'll say something like "On Project X (which I've been talking about during the interview) we had a disagreement on how to do Y. I resolved this by gathering the facts on the pros and cons of method FOO vs method BAR, and we sat down as a team and discussed the approach we preferred to take". The anecdote is usually completely made up, but there's been enough situations during my career where the approach has definitely made sense.
I really hate some of these questions too. I'm going to talk at the hypothetical interviewer a lot so "you" isn't you.
Name a time I had an angry customer? Lol, like, all the time forever? I almost feel like this one must be a trick question designed to catch people who can't deal with the job. I forget about such customers as immediately as possible. As a matter of fact, over the years I've relied on my ability to not reflect other people's temperature or allow their demeanor to take up a lot of space in my field of attention in the first place. I'm not sure if anyone with good chances of coping in this line of work [IT/support/sysadmin was the context when I originally posted this self-quote elsewhere] should really have any honest answers to this question readily available.
I can only name one time I had an angry customer, but obviously I've had countless angry customers. I can name that time because he left a voicemail like four minutes long ranting about how unacceptable it was that we had a full call queue and that he was asked to leave a voicemail, and demanding to be put in touch with various executives. I keep that one in the toolkit because it's easy to twist into inspiring stories about above-and-beyond customer service, or taking ownership, or whatever.
How do I explain something technical to a customer in simpler terms? It's not just me, is it? These seem patently ridiculous, like if they had bothered to do some kind of trial run or think for 30 seconds about how they might answer them, they would have realized...
Or is it just me? Does everyone else have an overt methodology for doing this that they can articulate on demand? I would probably come off like some kind of idiot in that interview. Uh, I dunno. I guess I, like, you know, use the context of the interaction so far to gauge their likely understanding of the salient points? And I audit the explanation for unnecessary tangents and jargon and opaque concepts? I then tailor the explanation to what they need to know and what I think they'll understand in the most useful way in that context? So I guess, in a nutshell, I would say that I explain something technical to a customer in simpler terms by just, like, doing it. This is, like, a bespoke service, sir, perhaps you should try the TJ Maxx down the way.
How do I deal with different personality types? I just, like, do it? This feels like another one where having an answer is a red flag. I've never needed to handle this overtly/consciously either, and I think that's a good sign.
Can I give an example of a situation where I had to go above and beyond for a user? No, and I don't think you grasp the core concept of "above and beyond". If you want some stories about times I didn't have to, let me know.
Edit: Actually, you know what, I do have one of when I "had to go above and beyond" but probably not in the way they're hoping for: https://i.vgy.me/7ZAwjj.jpg
Where do I rate my office suite skills on a scale of 1-10? I'm terribly sorry, I must be in the wrong interview, have a nice day
> 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.
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!
Before leaving any job, or when updating the CV. I look at my sent folder (comms app) and completed tickets.
List everything and grab the high level doc/ticket summary for each. Remove any business strategy and now you have a list of achievements that can jog the memory
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.
>and move on to something more interesting (and worthy of indexing).
I have had an ADHD diagnosis in the past and I am 100% on board with this. Maybe the things I can't pay attention to aren't worth paying attention to and I should be working on something else.
>Taking medication to "address" this active attention mechanism
I also noticed that when taking medication I became really good at boring, non-creative work, but I struggled with deep or innovative thinking. I decided I'd rather be good at deep/innovative things, even if it costs me my ability to do some mundane things for hours at a time.
This is blatant misinformation. There is ample evidence that ADHD exists and is detrimental to all aspects of life. It is not some quirky different way of thinking, it's a disability. My life was made significantly harder without
medication, and it's the only thing that allows me to function on a day to day basis. Your kids may end up resenting you down the road for preventing them from accessing one of the only proven treatments that can help with this nuerodevelopmental disorder.
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.
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.
> For example, I think I may also have mild face-blindness, the difficulty in recognizing faces and linking them with names. Usually, it doesn't cause major issues, and with some effort and repetition, I can learn to recognize people. But the face-blindness really rears its head when I meet someone not-so-familiar in an unexpected place, like random encounters on a train. Since I don't have the usual contextual cues to help me, in these cases I find it very hard to pin down who they are. They go "hey Marco, what's up?" and all I get is the vague sense that I know this person from somewhere. Only when they mention names or other contextual information do I have a chance of allocating them in their rightful place in my mental social network.
Oh man, I don't have aphantasia (though I do have unusually poor autobiographical memory), and things like this happen to me all the time. Even more embarrassing is when I introduce myself to someone and they say "we've met several times before."
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.
I have a similar thing about the gait and I think it might have to do with me needing glasses, but it being mild enough (-1.0, -2.0) that I didn't wear them as a teenager and in my early twenties - so my NN just trained on the data it had ready access too: Gait, preferred colors, movement patterns etc.
The not recognizing people in unexpected locations is something I just mark down to "page fault" and move on. Nobody expects total recall anyway.
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.
Last year I switched to a local mom&pop pharmacy from CVS. It was a really strange experience when the owner greeted me by name after seeing me twice over a month apart. Almost startling and somewhat offputting.
I just kind of forgot that some people are just that good at recognizing others. It's something I can't relate to at all, so it's a concept that just slips away from my mental models. But I suppose that's always how it is when you try to conceptualize how another being experiences the world.
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.
The ones you didn’t handle well are actually the most useful ones - it’s what you learned from that experience that the interviewer will find valuable. What did you change about your approach so that next time you face a difficult problem you’ll handle it well?
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 “
I often can’t remember what I did the previous week / weekend before that. I’m 36, and this is how I’ve been for as long as I can remember (our high school had alternating daily class schedules, and I very often forgot if the day before was an A schedule or B schedule, as I could recall some random moments in class from the past handful of days but I couldn’t tell if one recollection was of yesterday or the day before, or the day before that — it’s all a jumble).
To expand on that: questions about travel are my Achilles heel when it comes to dating. “So, where have you been, and what did you do while there?” Well, I took a trip to Iceland with my ex-girlfriend, and I’ve been all over the place with my family, but… I don’t remember the names of the places, and I don’t remember all that much of historical sites and such. Probably doesn’t help that I’m not all that engaged with the names of places / things to start with (vs simply experiencing the thing itself), so that’s in one ear and out the other. What I do recall is conversation and feelings of connectedness, and a couple snapshots of particularly picturesque scenery. But which cities? Which museums/sites/regions? What did I do while there? No idea. I actually rehearse such scenarios before dates to avoid an awkward first impression.
I’m great at remembering how things are connected, why something is the way it is, and how things work. But I couldn’t remember individual facts (names, numbers, the chronological order of independent experiences, etc) to save my life. But most of life is made up of individual, isolated details — which then means that most of life isn’t very memorable for me.
They're hard for me because the events that a lot of people consider achievements don't really stand out in my memory. Often I tend to forget they happened.
I've solved some programming problems that I considered quite mundane and unremarkable, yet others think it was some great achievement.
While it might have been hard at the time, in hindsight the events seem unremarkable and just me doing my routine duties.
> "Write about a time during your university studies in which you faced a difficult problem, and what you did to overcome it."
I guess the university example I could spin a story about how I failed a subject and had to repeat it and got high marks the second time round. The thing is I probably won't remember the event if I'm in an interview and under pressure.
When I started writing this post, I couldn't think of anything difficult that I had to overcome in my CompSci degree. It took me a while to even remember failing that subject, and in hindsight I don't have any emotional attachment to the event. It just doesn't stand out in my memory as remarkable or interesting or even difficult. I did change up my tactics the second time around and did quite well in the subject, so I have material for a story.
The problem is most of the time I don't even remember failing that subject. Even if I did remember, I'd probably dismiss it as I don't remember it being difficult.
Presumably for interviews - specifically STAR[0] format. And no, "just living and thinking" isn't preparing for this. Not everyone thinks in that manner.
I'd have to think for a few minutes to really come up with good examples because it's basically going over a huge number of random memories and re-categorising them into a framework that's completely different to how they're stored in my memory. This is even with me having (I believe) pretty good autobiographical memory with not really any of the deficiencies talked about in the article.
Off the top of my head without really stopping and thinking for a while I can often only come up with some boring and generic examples.
I don’t think about my life and experiences that way. It’s hard for me to just reach into my past and pick some specific instance of an arbitrary experience category in a portable story form. I have to prep, or otherwise just hope I don’t do bad enough that it damages my prospects.
They're definitely quite hard for me. I bet my colleagues, friends or family could answer them for me better than I can without prep (which would involve chatting with my wife). Many of the experiences in this article resonate with me, but it's definitely not quite as extreme.
Unlike you, many of us do not have instant recall of good stories to tell from our previous experiences.
I have jobs I've spent four years at that right now I can only account for what might be 2 months of work. If I stop and think hard, I might squeeze out another 2 months of recollections.
To some degree, mind's eye clarity is an illusion, with many overestimating the fidelity of their mental imagery. One of the better, more recent examples is the "draw a bicycle" experiment: https://road.cc/content/blog/90885-science-cycology-can-you-...
Granted, many can't draw at all, but people's inability to reproduce from memory an object of some complexity that they see (and likewise, use) every day is telling.
Also the well-documented inaccuracy of eye-witness testimony.
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 think I have aphantasia, and there's two interesting things about this to me.
One, I couldn't tell you what sound a ball makes when it bounces on a table. I've never thought about absence of other senses but, thinking about it a bit, I can't really think of what a glass feels like or a fire smells like either. I have descriptions for all of them, like a glass is hard or a fire smells like.. smoke? Not really the best description. But in all of these cases, I instantly know I'm touching a glass or smelling a fire when it happens.
Two, I only thought of the ball in terms of the parabola it makes. When I read the color question, I can assign a color to it, but nothing in my "imagination" changes. There's just another word, blue or whatever, associated with it.
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.
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.
> I can imagine essentially every detail of a bicycle, all the mechanical components and how they interact.
As I understand it, this is extremely uncommon, perhaps you might be categorized as hyperphantasia. How's your memory? They're commonly linked attributes, as per the article, some people with hyperphantasia have hsam - highly superior autobiographical memory, apparently from being able to conjure such accurate mental images.
I've seen a lot of bikes (and ridden thousands of kilometres), but when I had reason to draw a bike I felt the need to look up some photos to refresh my memory. I'm pretty sure I would have made some basic structural mistakes without that visual reference.
If you find this inconceivable, IMO you're assuming other people's minds work more similarly to yours than they actually do!
In my case (not aphantasic, but I think my visual imagination is significantly weaker than average), the information just didn't seem to be filed in full detail. The image was weak, as are most of my mental images, and I guess I had never paid that much attention to the concept (i.e. how the parts of the bike fit together as a whole; when I had had to pay attention, it had been to specific things like how the brakes work, how to reattach the chain, etc.), so it was all a bit of a muddle.
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?
My experience is nearly identical to this, except that I’m not aphantasic. I’m not trying to minimize the effects of aphantasia, but I also don’t think the thrust of the article is about aphantasia nearly as much as it is about SDAM.
The map view in Google photos / Apple photos is often my key to looking up the date of a memory. Well... really is that I know I’ve been to certain places, but have no actual memory of being there, so I look up the locations in the map view of Photos, see the photos, and that triggers actual memories.
I’m sentimental about objects for a similar reason. I don’t recall lots of memories with people, but when I see or touch an object that is associated with an extant-but-inaccessible memory, the memory comes back to me in living color, so to speak.
My late wife passed way six years and six days ago, and I’m still in the process of giving her clothes and things away to charity / finding new homes for them. It’s extremely difficult for me, because I don’t have much recall of particular memories of the 12 years we were married or the 8 years we were together before that, and I worry that losing access to these totems will cut off even the tenuous access to the memories I have of her.
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.
I met someone with SDAM who described it in a more striking way.
He said he doesn’t have any “first-person” memories. Most people, even if they forget most things they do day-to-day, and don’t have great “indices” of their memories, can think back on certain times where they remember being there, doing a thing, probably with some visuals associated with that, which can be played back. This person said that none of the things they remember that they did, they can remember personally doing, if that makes sense.
For me, I have scattered samples, like once in a while throughout my life, my brain sort of takes a snapshot and forms a memory. I can imagine myself back in each place I lived, for example, or each place I worked, or graduating from college, or walking on the beach.
I think I have a fairly similar experience to the author. Different in some respects, I'm not aphantasic, but I resonate strongly with the lack of autobiographical memory and feeling like an observer in my own history.
I can't describe how many times someone's asked me what I did last weekend 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 notable that I completely forgot. Not just passing conversations with strangers either, this happens with family just as much.
I take a more pessimistic view on how it affects my life than the author does though. He handwaves the downsides even saying that he '... had learned my lessons from them [trials in university], even though I forgot how they unfolded.' I understand the desire to think that but I'm not sure how you can really justify it. The brain definitely learns to compensate in other ways and I have really unbalanced cognitive tests I took as a kid as evidence, but memory deficiencies are undoubtedly a disadvantage.
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.
I'm in the opposite camp - I also have poor working memory, but instead I have extremely good episodic memory. Good enough I have to remind other people about our shared experiences routinely. I never claim to have eidetic memory but I've only met a couple other people who have memory like mine (one is my mother, so that's kind of cheating)
It's interesting though because I associate with a lot of what the article is talking about with spatial and knowledge memory too. I often have to remember where something was to "step into" the memory again.
It's a ridiculous and extreme example but it actually did happen. I was going skiing quite often at the time though so maybe it didn't have the sticking power it would've normally.
In general, without some kind of trigger my ability to remember specific episodes is nonexistent. The OP talks about this too but those times when you have to give 3 fun facts about yourself or when someone asks my hobbies are moments of of existential dread because I genuinely have no idea what to say.
I realised recently that there are whole years of my life I'm basically missing when I think back. Like I know where I was living, what job I was working, and my general circumstances, just not anything specific I actually did.
I have come back from week long international trips, having arrived by plane on Monday or Tuesday, and by Thursday someone will ask me what I did last weekend, and I'll draw a blank, and the social pressure of not having an answer and not wanting to pause for a whole minute to exercise my memory to reconstruct the last week will make me say something like, "nothing much, you?". It's that by the second or third day of being back in my routine, I forget what it was like outside of that routine, feel so immersed in it day-to-day, so unless I remember that I did have a disruption I won't really remember anything...
Like the author i rely on mental models (I wrote a book called visual models for software requirements), Im good at getting to the heart of things and am constantly organizing information so I can remember the principle.
I do get anxiety about not remembering people once they pass away. I might only remember a few things about them. But when I look at pictures I can often times remember all kinds of details. I think some of the information is there, it just isnt retrievable.
Im bad at networking, when I go to events lots of people know me, but I have no idea who they are. Im waiting for glasses with cameras that will identify people for me and go over their background.
Aphantasia is supposed to be rare, but I think many engineers have it. At least at my company it seems more prevalent than it is supposed to be in the general population.
In some ways it is a gift. I barely remember traumatic events, but unfortunately I dont really remember amazing events either.
> 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.
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And just like the author, I couldn't answer questions about hard problems that I've solved, until someone pointed out a moment where I did something they would call an achievements.
Now, at that moment I have the right references. It is still hard to talk about it as an achievement, but at least the recollection is there.
And just like the author, I have an excellent spatial memory, remembering roads and direction, and the ability to use that to recall other details.
I wonder how much of this is related with having ADHD, which often makes things feel like you're merely a spectator in your own mind. While I was never hungry as a child, and had access to a good education, the situation with between my parents had a lasting impact on me.
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.
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 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.
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 makes a lot of sense to me in a not good way. Thank you for writing it.
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 think using the word "conflict" is idiotic, but it helps to rephrase it. Because indeed, like you, I've never in my life had "conflict" with anyone in a work setting, I've had plenty of disagreements though and that's just part of the job/life.
I tend to just make something up here on the spot honestly, because as you said, I'm not keeping a book of grudges where I record every single disagreement I have with a colleague. I'll say something like "On Project X (which I've been talking about during the interview) we had a disagreement on how to do Y. I resolved this by gathering the facts on the pros and cons of method FOO vs method BAR, and we sat down as a team and discussed the approach we preferred to take". The anecdote is usually completely made up, but there's been enough situations during my career where the approach has definitely made sense.
Name a time I had an angry customer? Lol, like, all the time forever? I almost feel like this one must be a trick question designed to catch people who can't deal with the job. I forget about such customers as immediately as possible. As a matter of fact, over the years I've relied on my ability to not reflect other people's temperature or allow their demeanor to take up a lot of space in my field of attention in the first place. I'm not sure if anyone with good chances of coping in this line of work [IT/support/sysadmin was the context when I originally posted this self-quote elsewhere] should really have any honest answers to this question readily available.
I can only name one time I had an angry customer, but obviously I've had countless angry customers. I can name that time because he left a voicemail like four minutes long ranting about how unacceptable it was that we had a full call queue and that he was asked to leave a voicemail, and demanding to be put in touch with various executives. I keep that one in the toolkit because it's easy to twist into inspiring stories about above-and-beyond customer service, or taking ownership, or whatever.
How do I explain something technical to a customer in simpler terms? It's not just me, is it? These seem patently ridiculous, like if they had bothered to do some kind of trial run or think for 30 seconds about how they might answer them, they would have realized...
Or is it just me? Does everyone else have an overt methodology for doing this that they can articulate on demand? I would probably come off like some kind of idiot in that interview. Uh, I dunno. I guess I, like, you know, use the context of the interaction so far to gauge their likely understanding of the salient points? And I audit the explanation for unnecessary tangents and jargon and opaque concepts? I then tailor the explanation to what they need to know and what I think they'll understand in the most useful way in that context? So I guess, in a nutshell, I would say that I explain something technical to a customer in simpler terms by just, like, doing it. This is, like, a bespoke service, sir, perhaps you should try the TJ Maxx down the way.
How do I deal with different personality types? I just, like, do it? This feels like another one where having an answer is a red flag. I've never needed to handle this overtly/consciously either, and I think that's a good sign.
Can I give an example of a situation where I had to go above and beyond for a user? No, and I don't think you grasp the core concept of "above and beyond". If you want some stories about times I didn't have to, let me know.
Edit: Actually, you know what, I do have one of when I "had to go above and beyond" but probably not in the way they're hoping for: https://i.vgy.me/7ZAwjj.jpg
Where do I rate my office suite skills on a scale of 1-10? I'm terribly sorry, I must be in the wrong interview, have a nice day
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.
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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!
List everything and grab the high level doc/ticket summary for each. Remove any business strategy and now you have a list of achievements that can jog the memory
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 have had an ADHD diagnosis in the past and I am 100% on board with this. Maybe the things I can't pay attention to aren't worth paying attention to and I should be working on something else.
>Taking medication to "address" this active attention mechanism
I also noticed that when taking medication I became really good at boring, non-creative work, but I struggled with deep or innovative thinking. I decided I'd rather be good at deep/innovative things, even if it costs me my ability to do some mundane things for hours at a time.
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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.
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.
Oh man, I don't have aphantasia (though I do have unusually poor autobiographical memory), and things like this happen to me all the time. Even more embarrassing is when I introduce myself to someone and they say "we've met several times before."
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.
The not recognizing people in unexpected locations is something I just mark down to "page fault" and move on. Nobody expects total recall anyway.
I just kind of forgot that some people are just that good at recognizing others. It's something I can't relate to at all, so it's a concept that just slips away from my mental models. But I suppose that's always how it is when you try to conceptualize how another being experiences the world.
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I assume these are difficult for anyone who hasn't prepared for them.
I've always attributed this to the fact that we usually never categorize/conceptualize events in these terms in the first place.
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."
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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.
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.
Isn’t just living and thinking preparing for questions like this? They’re not that hard.
To expand on that: questions about travel are my Achilles heel when it comes to dating. “So, where have you been, and what did you do while there?” Well, I took a trip to Iceland with my ex-girlfriend, and I’ve been all over the place with my family, but… I don’t remember the names of the places, and I don’t remember all that much of historical sites and such. Probably doesn’t help that I’m not all that engaged with the names of places / things to start with (vs simply experiencing the thing itself), so that’s in one ear and out the other. What I do recall is conversation and feelings of connectedness, and a couple snapshots of particularly picturesque scenery. But which cities? Which museums/sites/regions? What did I do while there? No idea. I actually rehearse such scenarios before dates to avoid an awkward first impression.
I’m great at remembering how things are connected, why something is the way it is, and how things work. But I couldn’t remember individual facts (names, numbers, the chronological order of independent experiences, etc) to save my life. But most of life is made up of individual, isolated details — which then means that most of life isn’t very memorable for me.
I've solved some programming problems that I considered quite mundane and unremarkable, yet others think it was some great achievement.
While it might have been hard at the time, in hindsight the events seem unremarkable and just me doing my routine duties.
> "Write about a time during your university studies in which you faced a difficult problem, and what you did to overcome it."
I guess the university example I could spin a story about how I failed a subject and had to repeat it and got high marks the second time round. The thing is I probably won't remember the event if I'm in an interview and under pressure.
When I started writing this post, I couldn't think of anything difficult that I had to overcome in my CompSci degree. It took me a while to even remember failing that subject, and in hindsight I don't have any emotional attachment to the event. It just doesn't stand out in my memory as remarkable or interesting or even difficult. I did change up my tactics the second time around and did quite well in the subject, so I have material for a story.
The problem is most of the time I don't even remember failing that subject. Even if I did remember, I'd probably dismiss it as I don't remember it being difficult.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_resul...
Off the top of my head without really stopping and thinking for a while I can often only come up with some boring and generic examples.
I have jobs I've spent four years at that right now I can only account for what might be 2 months of work. If I stop and think hard, I might squeeze out another 2 months of recollections.
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Granted, many can't draw at all, but people's inability to reproduce from memory an object of some complexity that they see (and likewise, use) every day is telling.
Also the well-documented inaccuracy of eye-witness testimony.
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.
One, I couldn't tell you what sound a ball makes when it bounces on a table. I've never thought about absence of other senses but, thinking about it a bit, I can't really think of what a glass feels like or a fire smells like either. I have descriptions for all of them, like a glass is hard or a fire smells like.. smoke? Not really the best description. But in all of these cases, I instantly know I'm touching a glass or smelling a fire when it happens.
Two, I only thought of the ball in terms of the parabola it makes. When I read the color question, I can assign a color to it, but nothing in my "imagination" changes. There's just another word, blue or whatever, associated with it.
Thanks for making me think!
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.
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?
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!
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.
As I understand it, this is extremely uncommon, perhaps you might be categorized as hyperphantasia. How's your memory? They're commonly linked attributes, as per the article, some people with hyperphantasia have hsam - highly superior autobiographical memory, apparently from being able to conjure such accurate mental images.
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.
If you find this inconceivable, IMO you're assuming other people's minds work more similarly to yours than they actually do!
In my case (not aphantasic, but I think my visual imagination is significantly weaker than average), the information just didn't seem to be filed in full detail. The image was weak, as are most of my mental images, and I guess I had never paid that much attention to the concept (i.e. how the parts of the bike fit together as a whole; when I had had to pay attention, it had been to specific things like how the brakes work, how to reattach the chain, etc.), so it was all a bit of a muddle.
The map view in Google photos / Apple photos is often my key to looking up the date of a memory. Well... really is that I know I’ve been to certain places, but have no actual memory of being there, so I look up the locations in the map view of Photos, see the photos, and that triggers actual memories.
I’m sentimental about objects for a similar reason. I don’t recall lots of memories with people, but when I see or touch an object that is associated with an extant-but-inaccessible memory, the memory comes back to me in living color, so to speak.
My late wife passed way six years and six days ago, and I’m still in the process of giving her clothes and things away to charity / finding new homes for them. It’s extremely difficult for me, because I don’t have much recall of particular memories of the 12 years we were married or the 8 years we were together before that, and I worry that losing access to these totems will cut off even the tenuous access to the memories I have of her.
I'm pleasantly surprised that this thread has multiple threads about loved ones and grieving.
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.
He said he doesn’t have any “first-person” memories. Most people, even if they forget most things they do day-to-day, and don’t have great “indices” of their memories, can think back on certain times where they remember being there, doing a thing, probably with some visuals associated with that, which can be played back. This person said that none of the things they remember that they did, they can remember personally doing, if that makes sense.
For me, I have scattered samples, like once in a while throughout my life, my brain sort of takes a snapshot and forms a memory. I can imagine myself back in each place I lived, for example, or each place I worked, or graduating from college, or walking on the beach.
I can't describe how many times someone's asked me what I did last weekend 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 notable that I completely forgot. Not just passing conversations with strangers either, this happens with family just as much.
I take a more pessimistic view on how it affects my life than the author does though. He handwaves the downsides even saying that he '... had learned my lessons from them [trials in university], even though I forgot how they unfolded.' I understand the desire to think that but I'm not sure how you can really justify it. The brain definitely learns to compensate in other ways and I have really unbalanced cognitive tests I took as a kid as evidence, but memory deficiencies are undoubtedly a disadvantage.
It's interesting though because I associate with a lot of what the article is talking about with spatial and knowledge memory too. I often have to remember where something was to "step into" the memory again.
This is wild!
In general, without some kind of trigger my ability to remember specific episodes is nonexistent. The OP talks about this too but those times when you have to give 3 fun facts about yourself or when someone asks my hobbies are moments of of existential dread because I genuinely have no idea what to say.
I realised recently that there are whole years of my life I'm basically missing when I think back. Like I know where I was living, what job I was working, and my general circumstances, just not anything specific I actually did.
Like the author i rely on mental models (I wrote a book called visual models for software requirements), Im good at getting to the heart of things and am constantly organizing information so I can remember the principle.
I do get anxiety about not remembering people once they pass away. I might only remember a few things about them. But when I look at pictures I can often times remember all kinds of details. I think some of the information is there, it just isnt retrievable.
Im bad at networking, when I go to events lots of people know me, but I have no idea who they are. Im waiting for glasses with cameras that will identify people for me and go over their background.
Aphantasia is supposed to be rare, but I think many engineers have it. At least at my company it seems more prevalent than it is supposed to be in the general population.
In some ways it is a gift. I barely remember traumatic events, but unfortunately I dont really remember amazing events either.
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 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.