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People With Aphantasia Have Significantly More Accurate Memory

An article in IFLScience covers a recent study which indicates individuals with aphantasia are significantly less likely to make mistakes when remembering things. Apparently, those with a visual imagination are significantly more likely to conjure their own ideas of what they sensed, and this is where the inaccuracies come from.

More research needs to be done, but perhaps individuals with aphantasia are hyper-realist, nearly incapable of “imagining” a reality which doesn’t exist. If this is true for visual memory, the same could be true for audio memory as well. Perhaps those of us without an internal monologue or an internal sense of sound also have hyper accurate recall of spoken words.

I know from personal experience I rarely misremember what was said during a conversation, but I often find those without aphantasia can’t seem to keep track of dialogue.

In the future, maybe a diagnosis of aphantasia will help society identify individuals with significantly more accurate recall. Perhaps this will lead to a new class of expert witnesses or non-digital record keeping specialists within organizations or teams.

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