Linda Means

SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) is essentially a subset of Aphantasia.  The term SDAM was invented by Dr. Brian Levine at U. of Toronto, when he published his first research results of four people with aphantasia (I was one of his subjects). His paper was published in 2015, the same year as Adam Zeman's study of the guy who lost his mind's eye after a heart operation.  Since the condition (lack of mental visual imagery) had never been named before, they both came up with their own names.  Candace Pert, the neurobiologist, in her memoir Molecules of Emotion, talked about a conference where four neuroscientists were all reporting on a new topic, and all gave it a different name.  She remarked that scientists would rather use each other's toothbrushes than use each other's nomenclature! Levine's SDAM refers to the fact that he was studying memory in people with no visual imagery.  He had us doing memory tests while hooked up to EEG and in fMRI.  Zeman was studying the lack of imagination with no visual imagery.  Since his term "aphantasia" was sexier than SDAM, it got picked up by the New York Times, then went viral.  But if you have aphantasia, you have SDAM, and vice versa.  Both scientists did similar studies of brain activity and got similar results, in terms of brain activity in aphantasiacs vs. in neurotypical people.

Hi, thanks for your insights.  I've been a meditator for 40-some years, started studying with yoga teachers when I was a teenager and spent several years studying with Buddhist teachers. I am a total aphantasiac -- I have no sensory cognition whatsoever.  My impression after decades of mediation with aphantasia is that there may be a big misunderstanding in the Western world about the object of classical mediation -- or maybe it's just that I can't do classical mediation because of my neurological condition!  All of my studies have pointed to meditation as a practice of quieting the thinking mind and experiencing oneself in the present moment.  Which is very easy for me because I cannot experience any other moment.  I am a neurological Buddhist! My thinking mind consists of a dialogue, in words, with myself.  When I meditate, I just tell my thinking mind to stop talking for now.  Then I just exist without monkey mind intruding into my experience.  So it seems odd to me that many people equate meditation with creating experiences in the mind through visualization and imagination, instead of emptying the mind.  Visualization removes you from the present and takes you somewhere else, right? Maybe this derives from a semantic distortion where meditation teachers started replacing the word "meditation" with "visualization", in order to give students something to "do" mentally to distract their minds from monkey mind.  If I can't do that, does that make me a "bad" meditator?  I don't think so.  I think that maybe I'm a "good" meditator because I can so easily turn off my thinking mind and sit without pop-up ads coming in, and without needing to create visualization experiences in order to quell the monkey mind.

Hi, thanks for the article.  I didn't just recently discover that I have aphantasia.  I've been trying to talk to people, including psychotherapists, about this for a few decades.  It's hard! I realize that my way of connecting with this world, and with other people, is very diminished compared with neuro-normal people, because  they seem to evoke mental experiences among each other, and I cannot participate in this connection.  I've been depressed for decades, I think because of this lack of connectibility with other people.    I spent decades trying to talk to psychotherapists.  It has been such a disappointment. It seems like therapists have a toolbox full of tools that employ memory and imagination, and when your brain doesn't match their toolbox, they can't help you.  I've described my lack of sensory cognition to numerous therapists, whose consistent response has been, well I've never heard of anything like this, so I can't help you....  Except for the last therapist that I tried about ten years ago.  She actually took the time to hear me and grasped about what I was saying about my cognitive experience, and she started crying because she was an empathetic person.  I had to comfort her. Bottom line:  I would really like to be able to talk to a therapist about what it is like to live in a such a limited way cognitively among neuro-normal humans.  How can I locate a therapist who would be able to disengage from their traditional toolbox and actually talk to me about my personal experience?