[sReinwald]

I can relate to this very strongly. The difficulty in 'selling yourself' by recalling specific achievements for interviews or performance reviews is a challenge I know all too well.

Like you and the author, I have aphantasia (and possibly SDAM), but through self-reflection and quite a bit of therapy, I've come to believe this specific issue lies more firmly in the domain of ADHD. For me, the problem isn't just an inability to recall achievements, but a failure to feel a sense of achievement for almost anything in the first place.

A very recent example from my own life illustrates this perfectly: For context, I struggled through university for about 12 years without a degree before receiving my ADHD diagnosis. Afterwards, I decided to switch careers and applied for an apprenticeship as an IT specialist for system integration, essentially a helpdesk/support role. Because of my self-taught skills, I was hired directly, skipping the apprenticeship. Intellectually, I know this was a very good outcome. In the 8 months since, I've taken on tasks far beyond my initial role - automating reports, working on internal tooling and a local AI solution, and developing customer-facing tools. Just yesterday, I was officially promoted to Test Automation Engineer with a 50% salary increase.

And I know intellectually that going from applying for an apprenticeship to an engineering role in 8 months is a significant achievement. But I don't feel it as such. My dominant feeling is that, at 35, I'm finally just starting to catch up to my peers. To an outside observer, that probably sounds absurd.

My working theory for this is that it's a mechanism very similar to the common ADHD experience of misplacing keys. The issue isn't a failure to recall the memory of where you put them. The problem is that the memory was never properly encoded in the first place, because your attention was already split between several other thoughts at that moment. You can't retrieve a memory that was never saved.

I suspect something similar happens with achievements. If an event doesn't register emotionally as an "achievement" at the moment it happens, the brain doesn't file it under that tag. It just gets stored as another factual event - 'a thing that happened' - which makes it incredibly difficult to retrieve when a prompt like "tell me about a time you solved a hard problem" specifically asks for something from the 'achievements' file.

[packetlost]

... huh.

This makes a lot of sense to me in a not good way. Thank you for writing it.

[sReinwald]

That's pretty much what my therapist said when I first expressed this to him, so you're in good company there.

I thought about this more on my commute home from work, and I'm starting to suspect that "SDAM" might essentially be the long-term effects of alexithymia or interoceptive blind spots, which are fairly common in neurodivergent people with ADHD, autism, or both.

For context, alexithymia is a significant difficulty in recognizing, sourcing, and describing one's own emotions. Interoception is the sense of your internal bodily state.

You can likely relate to being so deep in a flow state that you don't notice how badly you need to use the restroom, or how hungry you are, until the feeling becomes so overwhelming it finally breaks through your focus. That's an interoceptive blind spot in action.

So, to further elaborate on my theory: If alexithymia raises the required signal strength for an emotion to be consciously recognized as significant, our brains - which strive for efficiency - will only tag and store memories that cross that unusually high threshold of "important." All the "little things," even the nice ones, get dropped because they never registered with enough emotional weight at the moment they happened.

The brain prioritizes emotionally significant information for memory storage. If an event doesn't trigger a sufficiently strong or clearly identifiable emotional response at the moment it occurs - because your baseline emotional processing is affected - it might get stored as just factual information rather than a rich, emotionally resonant autobiographical memory. It becomes "a thing that happened" rather than an "experience I had that affected me emotionally."

This explains my memory pattern perfectly: I remember most big family holidays - Christmas, birthdays, weddings - because those come with heightened emotional anticipation and distinct social components. But I'm already struggling to piece together what we did on Easter this year, and have absolutely no idea what we did last year. The quieter, more routine positive events apparently don't meet that higher "emotional importance" threshold for deep encoding.

It's like having a filter that's calibrated too conservatively - it's protecting you from information overload. Perhaps that's why it's so common in neurodivergent people, both ADHD and autism heavily affect how we take in and process external sensations. If there's any positive spin to this theory, that I will agree with you, makes sense in a not good way, it might be that. But, unfortunately, it's also discarding experiences that others would naturally encode as meaningful memories.

[packetlost]

> For context, alexithymia is a significant difficulty in recognizing, sourcing, and describing one's own emotions. Interoception is the sense of your internal bodily state.

Oh yup. The way I've always described myself is I have extremely "muted" emotions, bordering on none the overwhelming vast majority of the time. I only very rarely feel extreme emotions of any kind.

> This explains my memory pattern perfectly: I remember most big family holidays - Christmas, birthdays, weddings - because those come with heightened emotional anticipation and distinct social components. But I'm already struggling to piece together what we did on Easter this year, and have absolutely no idea what we did last year. The quieter, more routine positive events apparently don't meet that higher "emotional importance" threshold for deep encoding.

I don't remember hardly anything about my own past outside of factual information, and that tends to fade rather extremely with time. Even times when I was quite literally sobbing I don't remember the emotional impact of, just the fact that it happened, sometimes not even the cause.

On the other hand, I have extremely good factual memory about random shit and can usually build up a solid approximation for how something works from first principles on demand for an extremely broad array of things. Trade-offs, I guess.

It's what I imagine being an AI would feel like from the perspective of the AI.

[Ancapistani]

> It's what I imagine being an AI would feel like from the perspective of the AI.

I've been 100% immersed in AI all of 2025, and I think it's impacting my communication skills -- especially the way I write.

Wouldn't it be amusing if after the disruptive period of AI's rise is over, people with ADHD end up being highly sought after for our ability to communicate clearly with them?

[sReinwald]

> Oh yup. The way I've always described myself is I have extremely "muted" emotions, bordering on none the overwhelming vast majority of the time. I only very rarely feel extreme emotions of any kind.

I remember infuriating my mother almost every day after school when she'd ask "How was it?" and I would just shrug and say, "I don't know."

She thought I was being evasive or something, but I was being completely honest. I genuinely didn't have an answer because my internal state was, as you describe perfectly, muted. Most of the time, I just felt... like a neutral, warm grey. Well - still do. There was no data to report.

> I don't remember hardly anything about my own past outside of factual information, and that tends to fade rather extremely with time. Even times when I was quite literally sobbing I don't remember the emotional impact of, just the fact that it happened, sometimes not even the cause.

I think remembering the fact of sobbing but not the feeling is the perfect distinction between semantic memory ("a thing that happened") and autobiographical memory ("an experience I had"). The factual data point was recorded, but the emotional qualia wasn't encoded for retrieval.

> On the other hand, I have extremely good factual memory about random shit and can usually build up a solid approximation for how something works from first principles on demand for an extremely broad array of things. Trade-offs, I guess.

I wouldn't even necessarily call it a trade-off so much as a logical consequence. If the brain's system for storing rich, first-person experiential data is impaired, it makes sense that it would rely on and strengthen its system for storing third-person factual data. The "what" gets stored efficiently because the "how it felt to be me when it happened" isn't taking up much space on the hard drive.

> It's what I imagine being an AI would feel like from the perspective of the AI.

Sounds about right to me. I feel the same. I have access to the facts, like my I'd argue objectively fairly impressive achievement I described above, but I don't seem to have the emotional data. So, I can reason myself into knowing that I achieved something - but I'm not feeling it.

[vonunov]

> Even times when I was quite literally sobbing I don't remember the emotional impact of

This is possibly touching on the problem I'm trying to navigate lately. Someone will display observable emotionality while denying the subjective experience. I'm not sure what to do with it. I'm not trying to cure them or anything, all I want is to get them to understand that their lack of internal experience of emotion doesn't improve things out here, where I'm still dealing with an agitated person yelling at me about how fine they are. Does this seem to align or does it sound unrelated, you think?

[leche]

I have (self-diagnosed) aphantasia and SDAM. I do not relate to your belief that SDAM is related to the emotions felt. I don't believe I have ADHD nor autism. We don't currently have a scientific understanding of the mechanisms that cause these differences in experience, so everyone forms their own ideas of what's going on based on their own grab-bag of internal experiences and qualia.

[sReinwald]

That's fair criticism, I'm obviously coming at this from my personal perspective and that is shaped by how my brain experiences the world. I should've been more precise, I didn't intend to suggest that alexithymia is the only pathway to SDAM, there are likely multiple aspects or pathways that can contribute to or cause it.

However, I would challenge the premise that SDAM is entirely unrelated to emotional processing. It's important to distinguish between the conscious feeling of an emotion and its subconscious role in the mechanics of memory formation. There's significant evidence that emotional salience is a crucial part of how the brain tags and consolidates strong autobiographical memories. A disruption to this process doesn't have to be a consciously felt emotional deficit; it can be a mechanical one operating below the level of awareness.

We can look at this as two distinct points of failure in the memory pipeline:

Failure at the input stage: If the emotional signal required to "tag" an event as important for rich autobiographical encoding is never met, the memory is formed, but only as a semantic fact ("a thing that happened"), not a re-experiencable episode. The processing can't happen because the right input was never provided.

Failure at the retrieval and re-experiencing stage: For someone with aphantasia but no issues with alexithymia (like you, I'd assume), the initial emotional tagging might function perfectly well. The disruption happens later. The core deficit of SDAM is the inability to "mentally time travel" and re-experience the past. Aphantasia, by definition, removes a primary tool for this: visual imagination. The brain processes and integrates emotions by revisiting them. If you cannot truly "re-live" a moment because the visual data is inaccessible, then the episodic, first-person quality is lost.

This second point matters beyond just losing access to nostalgia. We process and regulate emotions by mentally revisiting experiences, integrating them into our broader life narrative. If you have greater difficulty "re-living" moments of joy, achievement, or connection because you lack the tool of visual imagination, your ability to extract meaning from them and build emotional understanding is compromised.

Both mechanisms effectively lead to the same subjective experience: a past that feels like "someone else's life" that you know facts about but can't emotionally (re)connect with. The specific pathway might vary between individuals, but I now strongly believe that the underlying issue remains the disrupted relationship between emotional processing and autobiographical memory formation.

Does this potential explanation align more with your personal experience?

I might have to spend some time over the long weekend to explore this a bit more, and to properly back it up with studies.

[leche]

Thanks for the follow-up. I find this stuff quite interesting.

I feel my emotions strongly as I live through them(as much as one can say, we can't feel others' feelings), but feel them not at all when I relive them (because I cannot relive them). My emotions are a guide for me, but after the initial feeling of them, they guide me semantically (why was I feeling anger during a particular conversation? maybe I need to reconsider my position).

Incidentally, I generally think of this as being able to "let go" of emotions/grudges/etc that I might otherwise spend unnecessary time worrying over. It does set me up for being an "especially boilable frog" in that I can quickly acclimate to conditions that others might have trouble with.