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Last month of 2025 we were able to push out a few videos, which leaves me with a lot to cover. With regards to the memory hack video, we’ve received many comments explaining to us how this can apply to people with aphantasia. So we thought we’d share!
First off lets all recall what were the objects in question, there was a hairbrush, a bottle of soya sauce, some colourful sox, a biplane and a giraffe. If you recalled these, then good on you maybe the tricks working! Now with aphantasia, one cannot visualize the specific object with your mind’s eye, but a variety of other cues exist when a memory is formed. People with aphantasia can remember their way to school and the phone number of that ex… what was I talking about? Oh right, people with aphantasia utilize other associations than visual cues for objects, concepts and locations. Turn right past the train track, may be remembered as a distinct sentence, or more than likely, turning right once you start walking on gravel. And walking on loose gravel has a whole slew of physical cues that aren’t visual. The unsteady footing, the crunching and scraping sounds under your boots, the dustiness of it all. It can even be tied to other anterior memories, like the feeling of tripping over the tracks, or the annoyance of having to wait out a particularly long train.
And this is the important bit, the ability of our brains to tie objects, concepts and emotions together is in the end what we call making a memory. Remembering a hairbrush may not reveal the image of the hairbrush, but the feeling of having your hair brushed early in the morning before going to school, or that first hair brush pass right after having gotten a haircut. Object, concept, emotion. Soya sauce, that time the cap fell off at a restaurant and you drenched your steaming bowl of rice in that dark umami liquid. Biplane, that cool airshow you went to as a kid sitting on your father’s shoulders so you could see what was making that loud roar on the tarmac. Silly socks, remembering that one cool English teacher that preferred to play the guitar with his feet on the desk rather than teaching anything useful. The giraffe, watching an old David Attenborough documentary on the life of the savanna during a snow day and remembering that male giraffes whip their long necks at each other when battling, and how completely absurd the display was. Sure there are plenty of visual cues in what I’ve described, but they’re all contextualized with concepts and emotional state of minds. And so that’s the trick for people with aphantasia!
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