On Autobiographical Memory
Art Kavanagh is the reason I know the term aphantasia, after I’d blogged about discovering that unlike me many if not most people literally can visualize things in their mind’s eye. In that post, I’d referenced something I’ve used in my online “about” pages for many years.
If the events of one’s life were pictures and the emotions were sounds, his memories would play as silent movies.
Now I’ve got another one to grapple with, as Kavanagh reveals to me something called severely deficient autobiographical memory; there’s some indication that the two conditions might be related, and once again I feel like part of the experience of my own life might be bought into starker relief, and sharper focus.
Before I come back to Kavanagh’s latest, a brief sideways step to this Claudia Hammond piece about SDAM.
For many years, McKinnon had no idea she was different. We tend to assume our minds work in the same way. We don’t often discuss what having a memory feels like. McKinnon assumed that when people told in-depth stories about their past, they were just making up the details to entertain people. But then a friend who was training in medicine asked if she could try out a memory test on her as part of her of studies. This is when both of them realised McKinnon’s autobiographical memory was lacking.
McKinnon researched amnesia, but the stories of people who lost their memories as a result of illness or brain injuries didn’t seem to fit her experience. She could remember that events had happened; she just didn’t recall what it was like to be there. A little more than a decade ago, after breaking her foot and having little to fill her time, she began reading about research on mental time travel and made the decision to contact a research scientist working in the field.
I’m flabbergasted, again, to learn that the way my brain functions simply is not the way other people’s brains functions. Sure, I get the differences when it comes to things like degrees of mental illness, say, but it simply never occurred to me that in ways which I’d before have assumed were the fundamental ways in which minds behaved simply aren’t universal.
Both aphantasia and SDAM effectively describe my mental capacity—or, I guess, lack thereof—to visualize and remember.
So, this brings us back to Kavanagh, and a paragraph that to me was akin to much of what I read about being autistic after I was diagnosed as such, in that bells and whistles of recognition were set off.
My mental conception of the past is dull, unexciting, featureless and full of gaps. Eventually it dawned on me that this is equally true of my conception of the future. After all, there’s no reason why my prospective imagination should be any clearer or sharper than my retrospective one. I don’t “remember” the future any better than I do what has already happened. If most people have at least some vivid, replayable “episodic” memories, isn’t it reasonable to suppose that they view the future in an analogous way? That they can actually “picture” themselves, attending that college, going on holiday to that exotic location, searching for a new job, buying and living in that house? Of course, I’m not suggesting that these imagined glimpses of the future are accurate. I don’t kid myself that most visualizers have a precognitive faculty. What I am suggesting is that these pictures of an imagined future, however misleading they eventually turn out to be, can constitute a target and roadmap that remain stable and consistent long enough to support a sustained pursuit.
I feel like this gets at so much. Without the ability to effectively visualize, including an inability to truly remember what it felt like to actually have lived the moments of my own life—surely an inability to project oneself backward in one’s lived experience might be reflected in an inability to project oneself forward into an imagined lived experience still to come?
What this means for me going forward, certainly I can’t say. It’s just one more box I think I can check by way of explaining my own life to myself. In sense, I can only see and feel the present. I can think about the past and the future—but outside of how a more lizard-brain aspect of me can get caught spiraling into anxiety over what’s happened or what might happen, I can’t feel the past or the future.
One more thing to flag for my primary care physician and medical file. That makes aphantasia, dyspraxia, and now severely deficient autobiographical memory.
What’s next?
Addenda
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Sitting in my
to-considerqueue for quite awhile now is a book called Your Brain Is a Time Machine and I just wanted to tack on something from a New Scientist review.This ability to predict the long-term future is reliant on memory. In fact, that’s really the main evolutionary use for memory, as a storehouse of the information needed to predict the future. With memory and cognition, our brains became time machines – we could travel back and forth in time. This mental time travel is a human capacity, distinguishing us from other animals, hence the book’s title. Scrub jays, oddly, seem to demonstrate similar abilities, but proof of mental time travel in animals is hard to come by as yet.
In a real sense, my brain doesn’t time travel. It reads records of the past, but just as it can’t, say, literally visualize a school bus if you tell me to close my eyes and imagine a school bus, neither can it truly call up past events. And, so, whither my ability to imagine the future?