Robert Williams

"I haven't heard of SDAM before, but I seem to have many of the characteristics. My memories seem like lists of related items. I'm not reliving them and there's no emotions or other senses (with the exception of sounds). Many times, it seems my memories are more like static snapshots, almost from a third-person perspective. I do have "mental time travel", in the sense that I can mentally return to events in the past. I can't see or feel anything though (neither physical nor emotional). I can "assess my present emotions" and do not have a "disconnect" with my internal experiences, but I do have trouble recognizing my emotions and reading the emotions of others."

"From my perspective, religion is a basis for belief based on faith, and based on the definition of faith (which i hear that many people use an alternate definition). Faith - strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof. So from my view, religion is based on the foundation of belief without proof. If you remove the faith element, it cease to be a religion and become something else. Given these statements, from a rational stance, faith seems like insanity however i understand that faith is a common component of many human mental states but i do wonder if neurotypicals are more swayed by faith than atypicals. I'm not saying that one does and the other doesn't; i'm just wondering where the majority of each group lies."

"Do other people with aphantasia think religion is kinda silly for adults or is it just me?"

"Damn i've never heard an answer that made more sense than this. Great reply, and appreciate your point of view. More research definitely needs to be put into this specific part of processing religion/faith."

"In reference to your time traveled experience; my memories lack a time stamp, so i have to use logic to determine in which order memories occurred. "recent" events (say the past few years) are very difficult to determine because they lack identifiable differences, such as living in a different home, or while i was in school, etc. As an example, i know that i fell down the stairs at some point in the past few years, but have no idea if it was a few months ago, or 3 years ago."

"Interesting. People's lived experiences vary more than I thought possible. My memories do have a sort of time stamp, in the sense that I usually know which memories are older/newer than others and a general sense of how much time has elapsed since the event (memory) occurred."

""in my mind there is just a sense of what something looks like, nothing that could be considered visual" Me too (except for (rare) lucid dreams), I can sense that there's something "out there", but I see nothing but black. I describe it as a wall of black glass. Glass, because in lucid dreams I can sometimes punch holes in it. A wall, because (again in lucid dreams) I can place blobs of color (mostly dark colors in purple, blue, and green) on the wall and even move them around. It's nowhere near as good as a child's finger painting though. I can mentally trace the general shape of whatever is hiding behind the wall with my eyes (or draw it), even though I cannot see the "whatever". Can you trace the edges of an invisible "something"?"

"I am probably on my own here, but i feel that its highly probably that everyone with multi-sensory aphantasia can place themselves on the normal distributional chart for autobiographical memory issues, with SDAM on one end and "my memory is totally fine" on the other. its true that we may not all have SDAM, but it seems likely that some degradation of episodic memory is guaranteed. I think of memories like threads woven together; the more threads, the stronger the memory. Aphants are missing a few of those episodic threads. My largest hurdle to accepting my own alexithymia, was the definition itself; it was written for people who diagnose, not for the lived experience. Of course i feel emotions and interoception, so i must not have it. But the lived reality is not what I "can" experience, but what i'm "not" experiencing or the time it takes to recognize those sensations."

"I also believe i have sdam, but it doesn't help that it is so difficult to find any screening tests for autobiographical or episodic memory. at this point is is the only puzzle piece that seems to fit; i just wish there was a little bit more info to make accepting the label easier. have you heard of alexithymia? it might help explain why your own experience is one that is difficult to fully trust. google definition - Alexithymia is fundamentally characterized by an inability to identify, describe, and process one's own emotional states. This deficit often creates a profound "disconnect" that can make your own internal experiences feel unreliable or difficult to trust."