I think that the Hamilton musical is objectively the funniest thing that could happen to that man’s memory. Imagine dying of a gunshot wound infection in 1804 and learning from the afterlife that tweenage girls in 2017 are drawing thousands upon thousands of images of you making out with your fellow congressmen because someone wrote a 2-hour rap opera about you. I like to imagine that Hamilton found a monkey’s paw and wished to leave a legacy, and this is what it did to him.
you don’t control who lives who dies who tells your story
The 2 birds per stone factoid is actually a statistical error. Astroid Georg, who fell from the sky and killed 38 billion birds, is an outlier and should never have been counted.
In the ongoing discussion of aphantasia (see “an aphantasia fantasia” tag for more) an article popped up recently which has some details to share, including a history of how aphantasia was discovered in the scientific sense. I don’t have “spatial thoughts” the way the author does, but it’s also a pretty good discussion of how people who don’t form mental images (or can’t access sound, smell, etc in their minds) still interact normally with the world.
Here’s some fucked up shit I didn’t expect, however:
In a 2015 paper, a group of researchers […] identified a new syndrome they called “Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory,” or SDAM for short. People with SDAM lack the ability to relive past experiences in their minds. While this condition is rare among the general population, a preliminary survey hints at a link with aphantasia, with as many as 51 percent of a sample of 2,000 SDAM individuals also having aphantasia.
My own experience is similar. Past episodes of my life—when I can recall them at all—feel distant and non-sensory. […] I would describe my recollections as summaries of key facts rather than first-person “mind movies.” When asked, out of the blue, about an experience I’ve surely had—say, any childhood birthday party—my mind first responds by drawing a blank. It feels as if my episodic memories were filed into a “mental cabinet” without an index. Many memories are in there, somewhere, but retrieving them is a daunting task unless I’m provided with very specific prompts. With some groping work of deduction (where did I live at the time? Who did I hang out with?) I can gather enough hints to bring out some locations and non-visual facts: I had a big party in our countryside garden when I was 11 or 12; there was cake; a lot of kids running around and … that’s about it.
This is one hundred percent how I access memory and how I assumed everyone did – I am well aware I don’t remember chunks of my past (or only remember them if prompted by something) but I do the same thing he does. I ask myself where I was living, or what other things were happening at the time, or I snag on a rare memory of a piece of clothing or a feeling, and I extrapolate from there. I don’t relive memories in the way that the article implies regular people do, and while I will recognize say, the smell of a specific library, a deeply ingrained scent for me, I don’t remember the smell if I’m not standing there smelling it. And this explains my dedication to making an annual photobook documenting the past year, each December – the photobooks are powerful memory triggers and have more than once reminded me where I was or what year it was when I did XYZ thing.
Also, turns out that one of the key methods for emotional regulation in most people is calling up a happy memory to counteract sad ones, which is why depression is so pervasive, because depressed people have literal biological impairments to remembering or reliving positive memories.
And SDAM, associated with aphantasia, is an impairment to reliving any memory at all, so…
“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
