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(Excerpted and updated from an old newsletter I used to write.)

Sometime in or around 2017 I read about a thing called "aphantasia". It's the inability to picture things in your mind; the absence of a "mind's eye." As with every medical thing, the human ability to conjure mental images exists on a spectrum. Some people are on the very-deficient end of that spectrum.

When people learn about aphantasia it often blows their minds. It blew mine, but for the less common reason: I didn't know that people could create and recall images in their minds! I always thought that stuff was metaphorical.

For me this was a discovery that other people could do something, and that this specific thing explained an enormous fraction of the parts of my life that had been hard or had led to interpersonal conflict. Here's what I learned about other people, and therefore myself:

Experiential memory -- memories wherein you can essentially "replay" a version of past events -- are rooted in visual memory for most people. Experiential memory is powerful -- it allows for re-feeling of emotions, and more strongly anchors memory in general than, say, isolated facts or emotion-free information and events. It's also a lot of what anchors interpersonal relationships: you have a version of other people in your mind, and that version in your mind is associated with all these experiences and feelings that you can recall and re-feel. Plus, shared experiences give you something to talk about with those with whom you shared those experiences, providing an easy mechanism to deepen and maintain those relationships.

Or at least that's how I understand it. I don't know because I don't have any of that. My memory is informational and largely non-emotional. Because it isn't experiential, I remember things very poorly. It's caused people to think I don't care, because if I cared how could I possibly forget those moments we all shared? It means I can't socialize effectively by reminiscing about past experiences. And it means that I have to make completely conscious efforts to keep in touch with people because I don't miss them and therefore have no emotional triggers (out of sight, literally out of mind). My social-emotional life is almost entirely in-the-moment.

There does appear to be a term for this: "Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory".

(Experiential memory isn't just about imagery. After all, presumably people who cannot see can usually create experiential memories. So it somehow goes deeper than that. I also can't associate any other senses, or any emotions, to memories. Is that all part of aphantasia, or is my form of aphantasia a subset of something even more far-reaching? I have no idea!)

To drive the point home: if I close my eyes and try to imagine my spouse, a person who I see literally every day and who I like more than anyone in the world, I cannot conjure up an image. I can't see her in my mind. I cannot recall the experience of our wedding, or any other events in our 20 years together. I can recall facts about many of those events, and even some vague image-like information representing them, but I cannot recall nor re-experience how I felt on those occasions.

I imagine some people are horrified by that idea. It's just how things are for me, so it's neither good nor bad. It does, however, make me feel extremely guilty because it feels like I'm doing something wrong.

The good news is that now that I have a name for this, and an understanding that how I work is not even close to how most other people do (along these particular dimensions), I've been able to slowly feel less guilty about it while simultaneously opening up dialogs with everyone in my life impacted by this difference.

It's probably harder for those on the other side than it is for me. Sure, I can explain to my family members that it isn't possible for me to remember things the same way they can and, more importantly, that I can't have emotional attachments to our shared experiences. I can explain that the reason I haven't called isn't because I don't like them, but because I don't think about them -- wait, no, that doesn't mean what you think it means -- uh -- I mean I don't think about anyone when they're not around because that's not how my brain works... crap that probably sounds bad too, doesn't it?

Fortunately the people around me are great and have allowed me to be open about the realities of how my brain works, so that we can collectively figure out how to meet somewhere in the middle with relationships that work well enough for everyone. It requires careful and sometimes-difficult conversations, but we're all better for it.

Here's my takeaway from this:

It took me 32 years of life to discover that my experience differed so fundamentally from other people's along this experiential-memory dimension. And then another three more years to discover that I have ADHD on top of that, again informing an enormous difference between my and others' experiences.

If it can take that long to discover something that makes a person so deeply and intensely different from others, it's a fair bet that you are not explicitly aware of almost any of the infinite things that make you different from those around you. No action, inaction, or belief means exactly the same thing to any two people. It's likely that you could pick any aspect of how you experience the world and, if you began talking through that with someone else (and with yourself!), you'd discover important differences that will help you understand how you and each other see the world differently.

It's also important to note that just because there is a label I can attach to this ("aphantasia"), that doesn't imply that my experience matches anyone else's even if they use the same label. Labels are an entrypoint, not a description.