Sebastian Beßler

Oh yes, issues with left and right are known to me too and I often find that I have to look at my thumbs to get reminded what is left and what is right because I have a huge scar on my right thumb so I know that is the right one.

My orientation is really bad, and I have huge problems with following travel instructions, but if I travel myself I can create verbal location anchors in my mind that can later, be used when I travel the same route again. I can somewhat use those to find my way back, but that is often flawed and very unreliable. It works way better when I create a new set of verbal anchors in my mind for the way back, that's why I most of the time take a different way when I travel there and back again. Navigating in big buildings, or buildings in general, is a issue for me and it can happen very easily that I use a different exit because I can't find the one that I used to enter again (especially in really big buildings like malls or such).

I always had this, it was just completely normal for me and I never really thought about it. But I at the same time always had many issues with visual memory, remembering people by faces, in arts class, with describing places and things from memory. I never really had any kind of visual memory or memory of things that was experienced more or less visual only. Yes, I remember my school days, but only a few things that I have a strong emotional or acoustic connection with are really present in my mind (but not at all with any kind of visual representation, but I can play back the connected emotions or acoustic part and the information about the connected experience (without visual info) just fine. I never understood when people talked about the inner eye or when I someone said that they can picture it in their mind, for me it was always only a figure of speech and that was it for me, just something that people say. My non-existing visual memory I had put done as that, as a bad memory, as something that I just had. "Oh, I am just bad with faces and I don't care about most what I see all day so my brain filters it out. Nothing strange at all" That went this way until I was about 40, so 4 maybe 6 year ago, when on some of the many RSS feeds that I am subscribed to a article was published about aphantasia. The article was describing me, was describing how my mind, my memory worked and I was completely blown away. After that I started to read as many articles and publications about it as I could find. I had a name for how my mind was, how I was and I had published articles and even peer reviewed scientific papers as proof that it was real and something other people was experiencing too. That I am able to say "Oh, that I can't because I have aphantasia" is often such a relief, because it is no longer a "you don't try hard enough" but a "that is how my brain works, here read those papers if you don't belief me". It is no longer my "fault" but just how the combination of genes (or whatever factor else responsible for it) made me.