Trying to find an answer...
2 min readByScott Jungling
Hello all! I'm an epileptic with a left insular focal dysplasia... I've been operating under the assumption that this is the root of my loss of ability to visualize things. After the epilepsy started and subsequent diagnosis of the lesion, I became hyper-interested in neurology, (because of an early background with adaptive heuristic algorithms) cognitive theory, and computational psychology. While working on attempting to better understand and construct models of internal qualia I recently came upon literature about aphantasia and was struck by some similarities to my own experience. While there are striking similarities to my experience, I'm not entirely sure it falls into this category, so I'm hoping a few other people here can chime in about things I've not yet been able to rectify.
What I'm dealing with is that I'm able to visualize things that are in my very recent experience... occurring within a month or so... but things that happened further back I remember more like I read about them somewhere; there's no visualization, emotion, sense memory... I just remember it as facts the same way I remember things about the Civil War or the events in Through The Looking Glass. I can tell stories about my wedding, but I don't remember it as a personal event (much to my wife's chagrin!). The strange thing is that on very rare occasion I'll get a flash of sensory memory of an event, but the more I try to hold onto it or re-visualize it after it's gone, the harder it is to keep that image and they fade away back into just general knowledge very quickly.
Does anybody else here have similar experiences, or am I just barking up the wrong tree entirely?
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