SirRoderic

Speaking from experience as an aphantasic person, I think it is definitely possible to test objectively. For instance certain IQ tests will test the subject's ability to identify what a pictured object would look like if it were rotated in a certain way.

I have taken just such a test where spatial rotations, IIRC including multi-step ones, were a component, and I scored close to 99th percentile on every section except that one... where I scored 1st percentile. If that's not a strong sign of aphantasia I don't know what is!

Sure! Answers are broken up below.

> Is losing autobiographical memory inmediate, or could you remember a few seconds of what you see?

It's not that I "lose" memories per se, I think I just don't store them in terms of personal experience in the first place. There's no "buffer" in which I have normal autobiographical memory even in the short term.

I have very good short term memory. So for instance I have taken one of those kinds of tests where I'm shown an increasingly long sequence of things and I have to recall them in order — I perform extremely well on that — but the only data I "store" is the fact of what the sequence is, not anything about what it felt like sitting in the room being shown the cards, what emotional state I was in at the time, etc.

> Can you think in other languages?

Yes. My native language is English and I am fluent in Chinese. My husband speaks only Chinese, so between home/work/friends I speak about 50/50 of each regularly. My internal monologue switches between the two languages based on who I'm talking to and what topic I'm thinking about (usually related to which language I encountered it in first).

> Can you learn patterns like chess moves?

Yes, but I tend to recall patterns like that as a verbal description of the sequence, not a visualization. I think I am not fully aphantasic, but 95% or so. If I concentrate, I can imagine something as simple as "two squares up, one to the side" for a knight move for example; the very rough shape of a pawn, rook, etc., but I can only "summon" tiny pieces of each such thing into my mind at a time, almost like looking through a very blurry spyglass at maximum magnification. E.g. trying to imagine a pawn from top to bottom goes "circle, horizontally flat trapezoid, long vertical trapezoid, roundish base of some kind?".

> What is your oldest memory?

If by "memory" you mean something approximating a regular person's sensory-memory and not just a fact about a thing that happened, probably two days, and it's only an extremely vague/blurry still-frame or two from a moment that just so happened to be among the most emotionally charged I've experienced within the last ~year.

I have literally zero memories of being a child, for instance.

> Can you foresee events, like an accident about to happen?

I can anticipate them by logical inference, if that's what you mean, but I can't "see" them in my mind's eye or anything like that.

> Do you have olfactory memory?

None whatsoever. None for taste either. I do however have extremely good recall for music — e.g. I can "replay" an orchestral piece with multiple parts with reasonably high fidelity in my head — but not for non-musical sounds.

> Do you like any kind of puzzles?

I've never had any interest in visual puzzles, but I like verbal/logic related ones.

> Can you follow or find things with a map?

Only so long as (a) I'm pretty much constantly looking at the map and (b) the map's orientation is aligned with the terrain around me. For instance if I'm a passenger in a car looking at a standard "north-is-up" oriented road map, but the car is driving east and I'm trying to navigate, it is quite exhausting, figuring out each turn takes at least several seconds of full concentration, and I am likely to make many errors.

I don't read a lot of full-length books in recent years generally, but as a child I read tons of fiction... I was about to say "...so I don't think I have any trouble," but actually, come to think of it, most of the books I liked as a child were things like Redwall or Warriors, where all the characters were distinct species of animals and things like that.

If the characters are all humans, I think it's difficult to remember who's who because they're just random collections of syllables (names) tied to a set of facts — "Kirk, a human man, is a captain", etc. I think, though, that this may be more of an aphantasia/faceblindness thing (I have no "theater of the mind" and can't picture characters to distinguish them) than an autobiographical memory thing.

On the subject of memory, I will say, though, that perhaps I lack an interest in fiction books nowadays because no fond memories of reading them stick with me; even though I can recount the plot in excruciating detail, the most I might be able to say after the fact is "I liked/disliked that book" in a general sense, and that's just a memorized fact about my immediate feeling at the time. With a nonfiction book on the other hand I acquire information that can be useful to me afterwards.

My understanding is that most people remember past events in the context of their own experience of those events — when they remember, they recall into their minds some version of what they felt/saw/heard at the time, re-experienced from their own perspective. I've heard some people describe it like replaying a film, and they may even get a portion of the original emotional or sensory experience with it. I have none of that at all.

Not parent, but it sounds like I have a very similar neurotype — I am also autistic, aphantasic (I scored <1st percentile on the spatial-manipulation-in-your-head part of an IQ test at one point!), and have no autobiographical memory.

The best way I can explain the latter, at least in my own experience, is that I have no first-person memory of events I've experienced, but I still know the "bullet points" of what happened: the raw facts, if you will. It's like if another person experienced my life on my behalf and gave me a daily summary; I know that a set of events happened, but I feel no personal connection to them and don't recall them in any more detail than e.g. information I've read out of a textbook (often less). I can easily recall other information, not associated with time/place/experience, with higher-than-average accuracy, but accessing personal-history-type memories takes a lot of conscious thought. There seem to be some rare exceptions for memories that are tied to extremely intense emotional or physical experiences, both positive and negative, but even then the memories are fairly weak/fuzzy.

This has some funny side effects, for instance, innocuous small-talk questions like "what did you have for dinner yesterday" basically cause me to segfault because recalling information like that (plus the autistic compulsion to answer accurately) requires extreme cognitive effort. I also lack the ability to "miss" people because I have little to no personal memory of what it was like to have them around.

In short, it can be socially inconvenient, but doesn't affect daily functioning.