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Comment by Lambdanaut | Hacker News Reader

Even further-leaning on that spectrum, I have an acquaintance with complete Aphantasia.

He lives life with a complete inability to experience anything that is not happening at that moment. He cannot picture his mother's face. He can't recall his life. He can't get a song stuck in his head. He can't hear any words in his head at all.

And yet he's an incredibly talented musician, writer, and teacher. When he sits at his piano, the music just happens. He can only compose while working at the instrument.

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"He cannot picture his mother's face."

How common is the ability to picture people's faces in their heads? Is it more close to 60%, 90% or 99% of the population? I'm asking because I also don't have that ability. I think I lose the ability to picture people's faces a couple of seconds after seeing them, while preserving the ability to recognize them if I have seen them often enough.

"He can't recall his life."

What type of recall are you referring to? May I assume that factual recall is still present while visual, auditory and emotional recall is inactive?

I think it's curious how it's so common to have a hard time picturing someone's face in your mind actively, but we can still easily "picture" them in dreams.

Like, we have trouble when trying to accurately recreate an specific image from known data, but it's easy to recall scenes from memories. Which at the same time are so easy to misremember! I feel like I'm really bad at mentally creating still images, but can be easily fooled by mental scenes with movement. Should report as a bug in the issue tracker.

I can reproduce this. You'll get +1 from me on that bug report.

> What type of recall are you referring to?

He can tell you a story about his life, but he can't think about his life. If he's not actively hearing the words of his life story come out of his mouth, he can't think about it.

Some people call this “face blindness,” I knew somebody who identified as face-blind and he explained it caused a lot of social difficulty for him.

Mentioning mostly in case you haven’t heard the term, I guess sharing this info can help so they don’t take it personally.

Isn't face blindness the inability to recognize people? What about the case where you recognize people but you can picture no human face in your head?

Oh, I see, I misunderstood. Thank you for clarifying. That's very interesting! I wonder if these experiences would be have common brain pathways

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