Aphantasia and memory

[Santa Claus]

Recent discussion in the Discord reminded me of a thought I had recently: what fraction of people in quiz bowl have aphantasia?

For those not aware, aphantasia is something named fairly recently to describe people who don't "see things" in their mind. I skimmed a review that suggests much less than 10% report "totally absent" or "vague/dim" imagery but anecdotally I have a friend with complete aphantasia (cannot visualize things at all) and I am not much better, as I can only conjure blurry, black-and-white images without sound or motion. It's the sort of thing that isn't really that relevant in everyday life but I think of it in the context of memory a lot. For instance, I can't really use the "memory palace" at all and I've also really bad at the score clues in Dede Allen (not to mention PAVEMENT) because none of my memories of movies have music in them.

Given that quiz bowl is a game that really tests people's retention, I'm curious to see what the distribution is in the community and whether it correlates with how much people have had to study to remember things. In my experience I've had to work really hard to retain things and the resulting recall is basically a black box where I think really hard about certain words and the answers pop in my mind.

Here's the picture for the poll:


A few follow-up questions for anyone who willing to answer them:

• what you voted for
• whether you think you have a good memory for clues
• if you think that those two things are related
• do you have an internal monologue

[ryanrosenberg]

somewhere between 2 and 4, varying on the strength of the memory, my memories are pretty low-resolution
yes
yes, I think my brain is generally very good at remembering text because a lot of times that is the most I can remember (actually thinking about this I think studying for quizbowl also attunes me to remember text well)
yes

[Stinkweed Imp]

I'm a little skeptical of the concept of aphantasia, or at least it being as common as some people posit. When asked to visualize, I'm solidly a 5 but I have a very strong "minds eye" idea of whatever it is. Visual art has always been my best quizbowl category, and the only one I find mostly effortless to study, and I would have no problem drawing most paintings (or maps, etc.) I've seen from memory. I'm bad at score clues because I have no musical background but my audiation is very good and I can easily recall even small details in instrumentation from songs I've listened too enough. Overall, I would say my memory for clues is good but very inconsistent. Some things will stick effortlessly and some things I won't remember even after reviewing cards several times, but there doesn't seem to be a particular pattern to what something will fall into, and making a deliberate effort to remember something while reading doesn't help (unless I make notes or cards that I review). I do have a (very strong) internal monologue.

EDIT:
Checking my anki data, ~72% of my mature cards have an again count of 0. The highest again count is 10 (for a particularly generic-looking de Chirico)

[Halinaxus]

I voted for 2. I'm not very good at visualizing objects in my memory (particularly faces; I'm absolutely horrible at keeping those straight), but I don't have trouble with basic colors (eg, red apple).

I do, however, memorize sections of text pretty easily. Given a sentence from a book I've read a few times, I can usually start quoting what comes next, as well as where on the page it is on my copy of the book. This serves me well in quiz bowl, though it also occasionally leads me into silly binary association negs.

I struggle to visualize paintings and don't really benefit from mental visualizations for quiz bowl art, but I'm inclined to think that's just a skill issue because I've never engaged with or studied art much.

[forrestw]

The phrase "red apple" immediately causes something like 2 to pop into my head, but I can visualize 1 with a small amount of effort, so that's what I voted for.

I do have a good memory for clues, but I don't think this is related. I'm basically never visualizing anything when playing quizbowl and nearly all of my buzzes derive from semantic memory. I have occasionally been able to audiate very simple score clues or visualize scores of pieces I have studied in detail, but this is rare and if I buzz on a score clue it is usually because I have already thought of it in words. I don't think I've gotten any visual arts questions from visualizing the clued works, but I am much less likely to know any given visual clue.

I do have an internal monologue.

When asked to visualize, I'm solidly a 5 but I have a very strong "minds eye" idea of whatever it is.

Could you say more about what this "minds eye" idea is like, if not a visual image?

[albanbergcronenberg]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how my time playing quiz bowl sits alongside the rest of my life as a reader, a classical music listener, and someone who loves to look at a painting until it starts to vibrate. These things don’t really feel like separate pursuits to me. If anything, they feed the same inner mechanism: some combination of attention, orientation, and imaginative strain.

Quiz bowl has never been, for me, about encyclopedic knowledge. I rarely card at length unless there’s a name or title I want to hold onto, something I already half-know and just need to catch again in the right light. I’ve always been more interested in how people know things, how they recognize patterns or atmospheres, than in the accumulation itself. That’s why one of my favorite things is talking to people (readers, musicians, artists, other quiz players) about how they use their imagination when they read or listen or look. What do they see? What do they follow in a sentence or a phrase of music? What cues them into a mood, a structure? Those kinds of questions really light me up.

And that’s really the through-line for me: the imaginative orientation a work demands. My favorite novels are the ones that don’t just tell a story but fundamentally scramble or deepen the way I perceive. Robbe-Grillet is a perfect example. His long, rigorous passages of spatial description aren’t dry to me; they’re exhilarating. He turns the act of observation into something almost athletic. Rooms, angles, distances, repeated gestures. They begin to pulse with a kind of latent narrative energy. You start to feel like perception itself is becoming unstable, like you’re being asked not to read but to re-measure reality. Flaubert does something different but related. His famous details (the color of a curtain, the way a gesture is described and then undercut) are never just decorative. They’re part of a deeper architecture of irony and emotional withholding. Sebald shifts the imagination into yet another mode: associative, melancholic, archival. He draws you into a world where a walk through the English countryside becomes a portal into buried histories, forgotten texts, and vanished figures. The prose never announces what it’s doing; it just accumulates resonance. It’s not so much that the novel disorients you, it reorients you, slowly, toward loss, toward the unreadable. And Beckett's prose works, of course, strip it all away. What’s left is the voice: fragmented, recursive, at war with itself. You’re not imagining a scene anymore. You’re inside the residue of thought. The imagination isn’t led, it’s cornered.

This is the same sensitivity I bring to classical music, though in a different register. What draws me isn’t the grandeur or “beauty” but how time gets handled. In late Beethoven or Bach, what I’m listening for is structure under pressure (delays, withheld resolutions, the way a phrase folds back on itself). That kind of form-consciousness is mirrored in quiz bowl, in a strange way. The best questions are shaped. The clues land at intervals that create a weird kind of tension. You start to hear the way an answer might arrive, not by content alone, but by tone and movement.

I'm largely against considering quiz bowl some grand artistic endeavor because that kinda ruins the fun for me. However, quiz bowl has always felt closest not to “trivia” but to reading or listening at a high pitch. You’re not just retrieving a fact, you’re catching a shape. You start to feel the style of an answer before the information fully locks in. And when you talk to other players, especially those who come from literature or music or art, you find they have their own imaginative pathways: the way someone thinks about phrasing in Chopin, or narrative pacing in Austen, or negative space in de Chirico. It’s not all about mastery. It’s about attention, how it’s trained, how it moves, what it listens for. It rewards people who are sensitive to tone, pacing, rhythm, not just speed. The best players I’ve seen don’t just know things. They feel the shape of a question. They can hear how it’s written, where it’s headed, what kind of answer it wants.

So yeah, I keep playing, not because I want to “know more,” but because it’s one of the few spaces of its kind where these forms of sensitivity (to pacing, to tone, to structure) actually matter. Where the buzz isn’t just a response, but a recognition of form, mid-flight.

If you read this far thanks lol this was fun to think about and write although it ended up a bit rough :D

[Jcm48]

1. I voted for 1. This is intuitive to me and I struggle to conceive of what the experience of the other responses would be like.

2. I think I have a decent memory for clues, having learned almost everything I know from osmosis, classes, youtube, books etc. and never carded. Admittedly I also think my textual memory is really terrible (i.e. I'm very bad at buzzing on books I've read relative to most and am basically unable to quote passages I've read several times) so perhaps what's actually going on is that most of the clues I know I've encountered repeatedly and thus inadvertently reinforced my memory. Or perhaps my textual memory just functions in a quantitatively different fashion from my broader clue memory.

3. Probably not? I don't know how to evaluate such a question. I'm quite good at art but oddly enough I think I rely more on old clues than visual details of paintings I've seen -- yes, usually when I buzz on a descriptive clue I can visualize the painting afterwards and say "yes, this is where that visual element is located within the frame" but in the moment I don't believe I usually buzz because of recall of the painting rather than that the clue applies to the painting. And it's not immediately obvious to me how buzzing on other categories would have much to do with my mind's eye either, at least in the way that I do it -- I'm basically in agreement with Forrest here, I believe.

4. Yes. My internal monologue is continuous, simultaneously considers multiple thoughts/ideas/things (usually including some sort of music), and I am unable to make it be quiet. I also have a detached metacognitive voice that is present when I consciously attend to my thoughts that says e.g. "I should think about this in x y and z fashion" or "hm, why does that thought keep recurring" or "what a strange thing to believe, reject that." I think of this voice separately because it is useful to do so, but I'm not convinced that it actually is meaningfully distinct from my internal monologue.

[Majin Buu Roi]

Thanks for starting this discussion, which I find extremely interesting.

1. I voted for 2 generally, but as to be seen below I can be like a 1+ in extremely specific contexts.

2 & 3 I think I have a good memory for clues but this is mostly unrelated to the above. For whatever reason, I have a real island of function with memory for text with substantive semantic meaning. So, when I can hit the "1+" alluded to above, it is typically by recruiting that memory for text to assist with visualization, rather than recruiting visualization to support memory for text. For example, I have on several occasions answered bonuses or other bar trivia by visualizing an entire wikipedia page info box or sidebar. This is part of the reason I was an old theater kid: I could memorize lines very quickly and tended to be able to instantly assimilate acting instructions and line cues (but not staging or choreography) to the text I was memorizing.

Conversely, I have really poor spatial reasoning skills. While I can do the memory palace, I tend not to simply because the basic premise of it (recruiting spatial reasoning to support working memory) just isn't as powerful for me as just trying to remember the text itself.

4. Unfortunately, yes. Joel's experience reminds me tremendously of my own. I frankly am only able to function professionally and emotionally at all due to DBT skills helping me empower that meta-cognitive voice to challenge what it's saying or otherwise to ignore it.

[dni]

The best questions are shaped. The clues land at intervals that create a weird kind of tension.

The best players I’ve seen don’t just know things. They feel the shape of a question.

You are years behind my research.

[Votre Kickstarter Est Nul]

I put a 3, but if I sit here and try really hard I think I can get to 2, I think. I find it easier to conjure memories or very specific objects (like a painting I've seen many times, or the fridge behind me right now) than general objects, but these things also don't tend to be very vivid. When I read I picture virtually nothing, but can try hard and get some hazy types of images going. It often feels to me more like I'm going through the act of trying to visualize-which generates both a hazy image and some "feeling" of "seeing" the thing--but don't feel I'm properly visualizing the thing, if that makes any sense at all.

I'm a perfectly average clue remember, better or worse depending how frequently I'm trying to do so.

No I don't think they're related, and like Forrest, rarely find myself accessing this while playing (when I do it will usually be that I remember I physically saw a clue recently. I try and picture the adjacent information so I can buzz on it, and am rarely successful).

I have a strong and consistent internal monologue and cannot quiet it (not that I really try at all). I feel similarly to Joel with regards to the commenter-voice (it'll often be things like "let's think about something else now"), but don't class this as a separate monologue, more my brain taking a more active role in the monologue process. I don't know how human brains work so this could all be mumbo jumbo.

[Shahar S.]

Voted for 1

I have a terrible memory when it comes to aquiring new clues. My strength as a quizbowler has always been to retain my memory of clues after they've been encoded in long term memory for a very long time after I've internalized it.

I don't think the two are related

I can have an internal monologue in the same way I can choose to breathe consciously, but it isn't the baseline way I think about things.

[The Blind Prophet]

I voted for 2, but I think I'm pretty similar to Forrest; I usually can get to 1 upon fairly minimal reflection.

I think at least relative to most other quizbowlers my level and above, I have a pretty poor memory for clue retention (and just in general I think). This may be related to the above, but I'm not sure-- I think I am pretty visual generally as a learner, which I think makes me above average at sort of like seeing the "big picture" of things, but I'm not nearly as good at just remembering pieces of text. For things I am able to remember I do tend to use memory palace or related sorts of techniques that help convert it into a more visual/spatial enterprise.

I do have an internal monologue, but I am able to shut it off.

[23nl1us]

I voted for 2, but I can sometimes get 1.

[Sean]

I voted for 3. I could visualize an apple with more color/detail if I tried, but by default when I visualize things they're in muted colors and I just know what those colors are. I don't know that I could get to 1 with anything too much more detailed than an apple.

I have no idea how to rate my memory of clues. As an uneducated guess, I'd say slightly above average with the above average part coming from either my neuroticism or experience. I can see how 5 would be problematic as a player, but outside of that I'd think many people's learning styles would develop accordingly such that there's no correlation. I'll also add that my experience with recalling clues is pretty similar to what Kevin described in that I'll concentrate or word chain during a bonus until I can identify something that sounds like the answer.

I do have an internal monologue. With the exception of music being stuck in my head, it can usually only focus on one thing at a time.