Times Past and Times Future - Aphantasia and Memory

 One area in which the Aphant is at a disadvantage when compared to their image conjuring cousins is in dealing with time past and time future. We might be tempted to call this memory and forward planning but that would be to oversimplify. Lets take memory first, the Aphant can perform as well or even better when remembering dates, phone numbers, titles or other data driven memory recalls. Similarly the Apahnt has no trouble in plotting out a series of to do tasks on a chart or diary. The Aphant struggles though to remember detail about their past for example time spent at school, in a job or even a relationship. The general mood and outline of the time as well as key dramatic moments will be recalled but the latter may amount to only a few incidents in say a five-year period. The average visualiser will be able to recall considerably more of the day to day. 

 An anecdotal example - I recently joined a Facebook group for former members of my primary school. I have a fond memory of the school – its gardens and topography, the overall atmosphere one might even say the ‘vibe’ of the place (hence my joining the group), but aside from some certain signature moments I can’t recall very much of what actually happened in the almost 8 years I spent there. It soon became clear that other members of the group can remember all manner of day to day goings on at the school and have a rich and vivid recall almost (to an Aphant at least) as if they were at the school today and not forty or more years ago. 

 

Anecdotes aside I am not alone as an Aphant in having this experience of not being able to bring to mind much about the past. The ability to visualise past people, places and scenes as one might expect plays a strong role in this type of memory. This goes beyond the bringing forth of a stream of images into the conscious mind of a visualiser it seems they also have a wider ability to place or project oneself into situations? This becomes more apparent when we turn from the past to the future.

 

If you want to throw an Aphant of course simply ask then that old interview cliché “where do you see yourself in five years time”. If taken unawares the Aphant will struggle to answer. The Aphant may of course not be without ambition or preparation and if say applying for a job as a junior in a field would respond that they would like to see themselves in whatever a more senior version of that role but this is a bluff as the Aphant has trouble meaningfully ‘seeing’ themselves in five days time let alone five years. 

 

The visualiser unless clairvoyant cannot bring to mind an image of the future but it would seem that grounded in the flow of images they have of the past they are better placed to project or imagine themselves in(to) possible future scenarios. That this may prove to be wildly inaccurate as it is predicated on continuities and trajectories that may as life so often does depart from the plan, nonetheless creates a confidence in what is likely to come that is lacking in the Aphant. The Apahant can fall back on simple tools such as diaries to plot when and where forthcoming activities will take place but lacks a meaningful sense of what the future experience of these activities will be it is almost as if they are planning these activities for somebody else. We might say that the Aphant lives in the moment or is focussed in the present in a way that the visualiser is not. This has a number of consequences that will be explored and unpacked in a future post.