TIL about Aphantasia (Mental Blindness)!

So yesterday as I was hanging out with some high school friends of mine, they did a little bit reminiscing about our high school days. They talked for hours about the pranks we pulled back then, the techniques we used to cheat on our exams (heh!) and yada yada yada!

As they kept on talking about the past, I realized something: I have little-to-no memory to contribute to the talk. It's like I've forgotten about what happened during my high-school days. I can't remember any memory unless they talk about that memory first and I'm like: "Yeahhh I remember now" (well up to that point in the story they talked about lol). It felt like I have amnesia or something.

Image Source: Pixabay

And so later that night, curious as to what happened that afternoon I've consulted my good old friend Mr. Google, to which he pointed this article from BBC: Could you have this mental disorder?.

The gist of the link above is a condition called: SDAM or Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory or to put it simply the inability to mentally time travel. What caught my attention though was one of the possible cause for this, a term I just learned today and is called Aphantasia or Mental Blindness.

Apparently, if someone tells you to close your eyes and imagine something (or a scenario), most people can conjure that image in their head. They can mentally picture whatever someone tells them to. If someone says imagine you are in the middle of a forest they can at will feel that they are in the middle of a forest. If someone tells them to imagine holding an apple, again they can imagine that apple in their hand.

But for some people (and possibly me included!), we can't! I'm not really sure as to how common or uncommon this is but this is the first time I've heard about how people can really imagine/picture whatever people tell them to or what a book is saying. I've always thought that it should be taken figuratively or something. I didn't know people really imagine stuffs like this. Whenever I close my eyes all I see are darkness and that thing that looks like a galaxy of stars. Not things or scenarios.

Image Source: Pixabay

This might perfectly explain why many classmates of mine during elementary where crying during our retreat and I'm like: What are they crying about? Lol