intersectional thoughts about sdam and aphantasia

introduction

A couple of years ago, I realised I had aphantasia, which is, for simple purposes of explanation, a lack of a mind’s eye. If you’ve not countered the term before, consider it from the perspective of closing your eyes and thinking about an apple. If you don’t have aphantasia, you’ll most likely see the apple in your mind, at least to some degree. Some will see an apple in pristine, clear detail, like they’re looking at one on a 4K monitor. Others might just see a round shape with some colour. For me, with aphantasia, I don’t see a thing. For want of a better description, I have a bullet-point list of things associated with appleness.

Now, it turns out my aphantasia is effectively full-spectrum. I don’t hear music or voices in my head, I’m unable to recreate senses of taste or touch, either. My ability to reconstruct, so to speak, across the entire sensory spectrum, is limited to remembering the details like I'm running through a bullet-point list very quickly.

More recently, I’ve also come to know that I have SDAM – Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory. I have a pretty good memory for facts and details across a broad spectrum of subject matter domains pertaining to my interests, but SDAM deadens my memory of events I’m personally involved in.

plotting the intersection

I’ve been trying to plot out to myself how SDAM works for some time – and hoping it would help, I bought “The Book of Memory” by Mark Rowlands. From the book blurb: “The Book of Memory is a mesmerising journey into how memories are made, lost and remembered, with important consequences for how we understand ourselves.”

Now, I’m still making my way through the book, but in addition to some elucidating content about the nature of different memories (and I’ll get to these in a moment — they’re vital also to what I want to talk about), Mark ended up having a chapter describing SDAM, and this created a big fireworks display of connection in my head that I want to get down.

Mark describes different categorisations of memories. These are broken into three broad categories. A procedural memory is all about knowing how to do something, like tying your shoelaces. A semantic memory is effectively a factual memory: knowing that an asteroid impact killed off the dinosaurs approximately 65 million years ago. Now, some semantic memories are autobiographical as well, but then Mark describes episodic memories – these are by nature autobiographical, but they are just memories you have of you doing things. In Mark’s words, “I don‘t merely remember that I used to do this. I remember doing it.”

This is now where I have the concept of aphantasia (particularly multi- spectrum) aphantasia go into a head-on collision with memory and particularly SDAM. As someone with multi-sensory aphantasia and SDAM, I'm going to make the contention that there is no difference for me between an episodic memory and a semantic memory. My recall works the same way.

It doesn’t matter whether I’m recalling that an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, that Scott Morrison, the then Prime Minister of Australia said “I don’t hold a hose, mate” in 2019 during one of Australia’s worst ever bushfire disasters, or my own wedding — the recall is the same in every case. A series of factual recollections. Indeed, the recall is the same regardless of whether it's a truly factual piece of information or a fictionally factual piece of information (like the Asgard being a highly advanced and benevolent race in the Stargate series). In every case, recollection is just a rapid-fire list of the things I know about the event. Like, if you will, a bullet-point list.

And that’s the interesting intersection for me for aphantasia and SDAM. Personal – autobiographical episodic — memories are competing with regular factual (semantic) memories for recall and attention because I have no mind’s eye presence associated with them. I recall being married, but I cannot summon visual recollection of it. I know the song that was played when my husband and I walked in (the theme song for The League of Gentlemen, a BBC dark comedy), but I don’t hear the song in my head. I remember friends and family were there but I don’t picture them there. For any of those details, I rely on external stimuli — photos and videos, etc.

My episodic memories are deadened by the lack of internal visualisation (regardless of spectrum) to the point that they are merely autobiographical factual memories, and so retaining them falls into the same competing whirlpool of retaining information about how deduplication works or just how instantaneous Discovery’s spore drive can be.

There’s a tangental discovery in this for me. In very heightened emotional states (usually high anger), my autobiographical memory practically reverses and becomes (as Mark describes it), hyperthymesia – the inability to forget anything. I’m not saying it’s literally that, but if I’m really angry, the emotional state seems to cause a lot of neural pathways to connect that are usually closed to me — I can recall in pristine detail events from 10, 20, 30 or more years ago with extreme clarity. The only other time I experience anything similar is when music sparks a memory for me. For instance, every time I hear the song Was It All Worth It by Queen, I have a distinct memory of sitting with headphones on listening to the song while reading (for the first time), the story in Raymond E Feist’s Magician of the magician, Pug, destroying the Imperial Stadium. That created such an emotional connection for me that decades (many decades) later, I still remember the exact circumstances of it.

For me at least, I think there’s a significant intersection between the nature of aphantasia and the nature of SDAM. And to be honest, I’m kind of glad. Suddenly a whole of of stuff makes sense.

The brain is a wonderfully weird thing.

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