Reading – Auxiliary Memory

The Next Five Short Stories in The Best American Short Stories 2025

by James Wallace Harris, 8/25/26

When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be a science fiction writer because I loved reading science fiction. I began thinking about writing after subscribing to science fiction magazines in 1967 and learning how they paid writers. Science fiction magazines and anthologies were my introduction to the short story.

I’m pretty sure they introduced us to literary short stories in junior high, but they made no impact on me. In the 12th grade, I took a creative writing class. I can’t remember any of the stories I wrote for that class, or even the teacher’s name. In college, I also took creative writing classes as electives for my English major. In the 1990s, I got into an MFA program for creative writing. I still have some of the stories I wrote for it.

In all those writing classes, my teachers discouraged us from writing science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, and other genre-type stories. My teachers pleaded with us to write about what we knew. I didn’t tell them that what I knew most was science fiction.

In 2002, I went to Clarion West Writers’ Workshop for six weeks in Seattle, Washington. Its focus was science fiction, including a week’s instruction from Gardner Dozois, the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction at the time. Saturday, I received a packet from Clarion West of my old stories. I haven’t had the heart to open them. It was not long after that I gave up hope of ever publishing a short story or writing a novel. Writing fiction was a lifelong dream that I never worked hard enough to make a reality.

In 2020, I joined a Facebook group that read one science fiction short story a day. For almost five years, I kept up with that pace. I had hoped it would inspire me to write again, but it never did.

Most years, around October, I get the latest volume of Best American Short Stories, believing it will inspire me to write again. That hasn’t worked either. However, it does show me what’s going on in literary fiction. It seems that since the 1990s, literary writers have sometimes embraced writing ideas and techniques from genre writers. But then, I feel genre writers have become more literary. I wonder how many of them go through MFA writing programs.

The short story was replaced by the television show in the 1950s. The short story used to be the primary source of 30- to 60-minute doses of fiction. That was the primary product of broadcast television. Streaming television has changed things. Its product is now eight to twelve 30- to 60-minute episodes that tell one story. People often binge-watch them. They’re novel replacements.

An episode of The Big Bang Theory or Law and Order is essentially a short story.

On the other hand, many people have switched to short videos that run a few minutes. They are the equivalent of flash fiction.

Evidently, the short story, whether written or filmed, is no longer appealing. Literary magazines and genre magazines struggle to find audiences larger than several hundred to a few thousand. That’s a shame, because fiction at that length is rather distinctive.

The variety of story types and writing styles is striking in any anthology. In the time it takes to read or listen to one average bestseller, you can read or listen to twenty short stories. A good short story makes an intense emotional impact on the reader. Novels do this too, but require a longer commitment. And I don’t know if all those extra words pay off any more.

The main reason I failed at writing was that I couldn’t create that emotional impact. Here is the next set of stories I read in The Best American Short Stories 2025. I’m going to try to entice you to read them by describing the setup for their emotional impact.

“Maritza and Carman” by Lyn Di Iorio

Maritza was taken in by Juancho after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. She didn’t know who she was or where she came from. Juancho let her work in his cafe, and over the year she found a kind of inner peace working in his garden. Then, Juancho saw Maritza’s picture in the newspaper. It was a picture of a policewoman named Carmen Sandin de O’Farrell. She had rescued people during Hurricane Irma, but was described as having died trying to save her daughter, Taina O’Farrell, in Hurricane Maria.

They contact Taina, who comes to visit. Carmen is told who she was, and that triggers some memories. But as Taina recounts how her mother saved her and her boyfriend, Carmen remembers something different.

Did Carmen lose her memory because of physical injury in the hurricane, or because of what her daughter did? Will she return to her old life?

“Gray, Cotton, White Lace Edges” by Isabelle Fang

May is a college girl who sells her worn underwear to men with fetishes. Then she gets a job working with Bridget on a reality TV show and decides her underwear-selling days are over. May has avoided meeting any of her customers, but her best customer, Bill, asks to meet her after she informs him that he will no longer be getting her panties in the mail. She puts him off by telling him she’ll be out of town on location for three months.

The TV show is about an older white man, John, who has divorced his imported Asian wife and is marrying 19-year-old Ally, who is flying in from the Philippines. May befriends Ally. Her job is to help pull off a wedding for the show, but she identifies with Ally because her father left her mom for a young woman like Ally.

The impact of all of this conveys the icky compromises women have to make with men. Yet, readers are surprised at the decisions the women make. May does meet with Bill, and the ending is an interesting surprise.

“Time of the Preacher” by Bret Anthony Johnston

Holland builds wooden fences, pergolas, decks, and even tree houses. He’s doing great business during Covid because everyone wants to isolate themselves but spend time outdoors. Holland is divorced and misses his ex, Mandy, who is about to remarry. Mandy texts Holland, asking him to come get a snake out of a house she’s renting. A house rented by a preacher who skipped out on her.

Holland goes right over, and they don’t find the snake. He wants to think Mandy just wanted his company and made up the story about the snake. The story is really about how Mandy sees Holland and how he sees her. Holland is not like the icky men in the previous story, but he’s disappointing to Mandy in other ways.

Love the ending, but wonder what it implies.

“Underwater” by Hannah Kingsley-Ma

Sam, the wife, is married to Sam, the husband. Sam, the man, has a twin sister, Lizzy. Sam, the woman, is jealous of her husband’s relationship with his sister. They might be too close.

Sam’s family is jealous that she spends all her vacation time with his family. Sam’s family is just as weird as her in-laws. Sam’s sister, Sarah, has a son who wants to saw off her legs.

This story is a comedy about strange relationships. It asks: who is fucked up? Or should ask: who is fucked up the most?

We’re only given more and more proof of weirdness. My favorite part deals with Lizzy’s weird dog, Dotty.

I’d love to see this story as a TV series.

“Drapetomania” by William Lohier

Drapetomania was a fake, racist mental illness proposed in 1851 by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright. He claimed that enslaved Black people who tried to run away from bondage were suffering from a disease.

William Lohier turns “Drapetomania” into an allegorical horror story.

Nina is in class when Jackson asks to leave class. He leaves and begins running. He keeps running until he dies. We’re told the world has been hit by a condition that makes black people start running and keep running until they die.

Nina has already lost a sister, Demetria, to this condition. Nina is introduced to a senior, Jai, who is a reporter for the local public radio station. She wants to follow Nina to cover the running mania. Nina takes Jai home to meet her mother and brother TomTom.

Jai’s father is Japanese, but her mother is Guyanese. She doesn’t know if she’s black enough to catch the mania.

From here, the story becomes bleaker and bleaker. “Drapetomania” is really a genre story, with a good plot. It has a surreal, nightmarish ending. There’s enough here to make a movie.

It shuddered and rumbled and moaned. Beyond TomTom’s lithe back I could see only a weltering sliver of sun. Runners, I realized. I edged into a sprint. The motel and the moon and the world behind me—it all fell away. Beside me Jai stumbled and slowed, but I couldn’t turn back. We were neck and neck, TomTom and I, blood and blood. The sun enraged the sky and I saw them, before us, haloed in the rising dust. Their feet played the earth like an enormous drum. We ran toward them, enraged, and sweat stung my eyes but I didn’t need to see TomTom to know what his face looked like. Mine looked the same.

Then we were among them, and I could barely see through the grit. Soon it blotted out the sky, and the trees, and left only a red sun and our persons. It was so beautiful, I lost my breath. My feet pounded against the ground until I could no longer feel them.

If “Drapetomania” were stretched out to novel length, would it have a greater impact? I don’t think so. The story isn’t realistic, but it does have great symbolic impact. I can easily imagine Holden Caulfield being so disturbed that he started running and kept running until he died.

Wrapping Up …

I’d love to have written any of these stories. There’s a reason that at least three editors have chosen them. The single most important thing I learned at Clarion West Writers’ Workshop was “great fiction is the accumulation of significant details.” It’s all those details that make us feel for the characters. I seldom could gather enough details to make my stories ignite.

I still have the fantasy of writing science fiction. I’ve thought for years, “If I could only write one good story that got published.” I even know the story and characters I want to write. I’ve attempted that story many times. But I can never finish it in any form that works as well as these five stories.

JWH

“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” by J. D. Salinger

by James Wallace Harris, 8/18/26

It’s been almost seventy years since I’ve cried — well, the boo-hooing, body-shaking, snot-slinging kind of crying. For most of my life, I was in control of my emotions. However, since I’ve gotten older, movies, books, sappy commercials, and even old songs will make my eyes water a bit. Reading “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” gave my eyes a soaking and even stopped up my sinuses.

That’s my concrete review of this story. Now for the verbose version.

I’ve developed a literary theory that I call the “Message in a Bottle” theory. All humans live inside their heads like living alone on a deserted island. Writing, especially fiction, is one solitary individual putting a message in a bottle and throwing it upon the ocean, hoping someone will read it.

However, messages in a bottle have an inherent limitation. Language is a poor tool for describing what we feel. I doubt I’d want to experience what was in J. D. Salinger’s head when he wrote: “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” It would have been too intense, too painful. Actually, it might have killed me to have had telepathic contact with Salinger. So, in that regard, we should be thankful for the limitations of words.

On the other hand, I think we wish we weren’t alone. I’m not sure even the closest of lovers ever get that near to each other. I suppose if telepathy existed, it would allow us to share feelings and maybe feel we weren’t alone. I’ve often wondered if twins achieve anything close to telepathy. Theoretically, those poor souls who have multiple personalities could share their feelings, but from everything I’ve heard about such folks, they only occupy the body one at a time.

Most writers create works that don’t attempt to describe what’s inside their heads. They either paint with words something they see outside of themselves and hope readers recognize it. Or imagine something they hope readers will recognize.

J. D. Salinger worked to describe exactly what he felt. I assume that’s why he’d get so furious with editors when they tried to alter his work. He knew the limitations of words, so he used them very carefully. Like any message-in-a-bottle story, the words are going to fall. However, Salinger knew that if he could use just the right words, they could trigger pale imitations of his emotions in us. The key was coding his message just so.

“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” is about a staff sergeant in London just before being shipped out on D-Day. And that same sergeant after the war ends. J. D. Salinger endured five brutal WWII campaigns, from D-Day to walking into a concentration camp.

There is no way readers can understand what J. D. Salinger experienced. Salinger’s biographers, David Shields and Shane Salerno, in Salinger, said: “Of the 337 days the war lasted for the American soldier in Europe, Salinger was in combat for 299.” We could read every history of WWII combat in Europe and never come within light-years of what Salinger experienced. Salinger had a nervous breakdown after his company discovered the death camp.

How can anyone write about that experience? The thing is, we can’t, not in any definitive or rational way. Salinger continued to write throughout the war, carrying around chapters of Catcher in the Rye with him in combat. He obviously wanted to express himself. And after the war, he disavowed the stories he had written before it.

“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” is merely a postcard from hell. It was published in The New Yorker, April 8, 1950. You can read it online here. Or buy a copy of Nine Stories, one of four official Salinger books. (One famous novel, and three story collections.)

After the war, it was obvious that Salinger had what we now call PTSD. Of all the stories I’ve read by Salinger, this one is his most direct attempt to convey his war experience.

After 1945, Salinger had a thing for children and young people. The people who knew him felt children represented pre-war innocence to Salinger.

In the first half of the story, an American staff sergeant visits a children’s choir in London and then goes to a tearoom. This part is told in first person.

While drinking his first cup of tea, the thirteen-year-old girl, Esmé, who had been the standout singer in the choir, her little brother Charles, and their aunt arrive in the tearoom and seat themselves near the narrator. Esmé and Charles come over to his table, and the sergeant and children have a charming conversation. (There are many parallels in this story’s structure to Salinger’s more famous story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”)

In the second half of the story, it switches into the third person. The setting is Bavaria several weeks after V-E Day. Staff Sergeant X is barely hanging on mentally. His buddy Clay says, “I wrote Loretta you had a nervous breakdown.” X is sitting at a table with mail and packages addressed to him. Salinger is conjuring Kafka.

When Clay leaves, X opens a package and discovers it’s from Esmé.

This is when my eyes get watery. They are watering again as I type. It is a very effective message in a bottle. I can never know what was inside Salinger’s head, but it must have been beyond intense. Reading his biography is incredibly intense. The poor bastard was fucked up for the rest of his life.

My theory is fucked up people resonate with Salinger, and that’s why he’s sold more than 60 million copies of his famous novel. Many of those readers drove Salinger to hide from the world when they tried to chase him down. He even came to regret publishing The Catcher in the Rye.

I believe Salinger was so successful because he was so damn good at writing messages in a bottle. The question is: Are readers still successfully decoding his stories?

Many literary critics believe a story has to stand on its own. And I can understand that sentiment, but I disagree quite strongly. I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye twice in my lifetime. Both times it made a great impression. But I need to read it again since I’ve read Salinger. My earlier impressions weren’t even close.

Before now, I had no idea how tortured Salinger’s soul was when I read The Catcher in the Rye. I understood Holden Caulfield was a tortured teen, not to the level GI Salinger was. There are novels by certain writers, like Thomas Wolfe, Jack Keruoauc, and Philip K. Dick, that you can’t really understand until you read several biographies about them. What they have in common is tortured souls.

I doubt I would have teared up for “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” if I had not read Salinger. If you’ve read the story, or will read it, let me know how it affected you. Let me know if you’ve read about Salinger.

By the way, if you’re not willing to read a 600-page biography, there’s a documentary based on the book. Watch it on Amazon Prime. It conveys only 1% of the information and intensity of reading the biography, but it does help you understand J. D. Salinger.

JWH

THE ANTIDOTE by Karen Russell

by James Wallace Harris, 12/27/25

There are some conservative Republicans who wish to censor history by forgetting events in America’s past. They worry that such history could make their children feel bad about themselves. They want to remember a past that makes America look great again. Please read Donald Trump’s executive order regarding this issue.

Karen Russell’s latest novel, The Antidote, philosophises why we need to remember everything, even things our ancestors did that make America look bad. Russell uses fantasy to educate us about reality. When my friend Annie first recommended that we read this novel together, the fantasy elements turned me off. As a life-long science fiction reader, I was in the mood to read realistic fiction for a change. The older I get, the more I want nonfiction, but I can’t give up fiction completely.

Throughout the first half of The Antidote, I was annoyed with all its fantastic elements. However, I eventually realized that Russell was using them as a plot device to get her readers to contemplate real history. Eventually, I felt Russell had read a great deal of American history that disturbed her, and she was using her novel to come to grips with why we shouldn’t forget that which many want to erase from American history books.

Memory is the main theme of this novel. Both personal memories and historical memory.

The Antidote makes a case against five crimes our ancestors committed. These tragic deeds explore the dimensions of greed. Each of these historical atrocities has been well-documented in nonfiction books I’ve read over the years. Reading the novel made me ask: Which has more impact, fiction or nonfiction? Listening to The Antidote made me feel closer to the suffering.

How many books have you read that deal with these historical events? Did you learn more from reading fiction or nonfiction?

How did we take land from the Native Americans?
How did we force Native Americans onto reservations and attempt to reeducate them with our culture and values?
How did poor farming practices cause the environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl?
How did we institutionalize unwed mothers and steal their babies?
How do we allow the murders of women to go uninvestigated and underreported?

The Antidote is primarily set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, in 1935, between two significant real events, the Black Sunday dust storm (April 14, 1935) and the Republican River flood (May 31-June 1, 1935). The story is told sequentially, but with flashbacks. We hear the story told from many voices. Four primary characters: The Antidote (Antonina Rossi, AKA, the Prairie Witch), Asphodel Oletsky (Del), Harp Oletsky (Del’s uncle), and Cleo Allfrey (photographer), along with two significant secondary characters, a cat and a scarecrow.

Antonina, a middle-aged woman, had been institutionalized at age 15 for being an unwed mother. Her son had been forcefully taken away from her. She makes her living as a vault, or prairie witch. Antonina can enter a trance while another person relates a memory they wish to forget. That process will erase the memory from the teller’s mind and store it in hers. Antonina gives them a written receipt that will trigger that memory, and she can reinstate it at a future time. Antonina does not remember what she vaults. She is paid for this service, but her clients consider her no better than a prostitute.

Asphodel “Del” Oletsky, a fifteen-year-old girl, just five feet tall, is the captain of Uz’s high school girls’ basketball team. Her mother was murdered when she was young, and she lives with her uncle Harp Oletsky. Cleo is a young black woman who travels the country documenting the depression for FDR’s government. The plot of the novel eventually brings them all together.

The novel begins with a roundup of jack rabbits and clubbing them to death. My father was born in Nebraska and was Del’s age in 1935. He told me stories about how the farmers would exterminate the jack rabbits. My mother also went to high school around this time and played basketball. My grandmother was on a basketball team in Indiana at the turn of the century.

My memories immediately made me connect with the story. We remember the good ones, but forget the bad ones.

The story then goes into catching a serial killer of young women. The sheriff even connects the killer to Del’s mother’s cold case. This murder mystery is the apparent backbone of the plot, but it’s not the real story.

The Antidote immediately triggered a memory of an article I recently read, “The Nurse Who Names the Dead” by Christa Hillstrom. The article was about Dawn Wilcox, who created a database to track the number of men killing women. She discovered that femicide goes vastly underreported. One of the truths of Russell’s novel is that she’s writing about evils that have always existed. Can we ever break the cycle?

Dust and evil color this novel with darkness. I listened to the audiobook edition, and it felt like I was watching an old black-and-white movie. I’d call it noir magical realism.

I admit, I had to push myself to keep listening for the first half of this book. I was just put off by the fantasy elements. But the characters grew on me. And by the middle of the story, I was hooked. The last half of the book often made me teary-eyed. For most of the novel, I felt Russell was too writerly, but when Harp gives his big speech near the end, I must say I was quite impressed with the writing and the description of the riot and storm.

Throughout this story, I kept thinking about the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. Uz almost sounds like Oz. Plus, the story has a tornado and a talking scarecrow.

I wanted to connect the elements of this story with all the nonfiction books I’ve read that back up its fictional history. Especially, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan, plus the Ken Burns’ documentary, The Dust Bowl. However, I can’t remember where I read about the other issues in this book. My mind is getting old and tired.

My friend Linda and I often talk about how humans repeat the same crimes throughout history. In recent months, we’ve focused on how greed is the primary driver of evil. As you read The Antidote (if you do), think about how greed motivates people to do what they do. We’re all greedy to a degree, and that might be a survival mechanism, but there seems to be a point when more greed makes us evil. I see that everywhere.

I’m also watching The American Revolution by Ken Burns. It brings up many things that some Republicans would like the world to forget. Like I said, we don’t change. But we should ask, what are we doing now that people in the future will wish to forget that we did?

The Antidote by Karen Russell was on 11 best-books-of-the-year lists for 2025.

JWH

Reading With a Purpose

by James Wallace Harris, 11/12/25

I used to keep up with the world by watching NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, reading The New York Times on my iPhone, and bingeing YouTube videos. I felt well-informed. That was an illusion.

I then switched to reading The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Magazine. I focused on the longer articles and developed the habit of reading one significant essay a day. That has taught me how superficial my previous methods were at informing me about what’s going on around the world. Television, the internet, and newspapers were giving me soundbites, while articles provide an education.

However, I still tend to forget this deeper knowledge just as quickly. I don’t like that. I feel like I learn something significant every day. What I’m learning feels heavy and philosophical. However, it drives me nuts that I forget everything so quickly. And I’m not talking about dementia. I think we all forget quickly. Just remember how hard it was to prepare for tests back in school.

I’ve watched dozens of YouTube videos about study methods, and they all show that if you don’t put information to use, it goes away. Use it or lose it. I’ve decided to start reading with a purpose.

At first, I thought I would just save the best articles and refer to them when I wanted to remember. That didn’t work. I quickly forget where I read something. Besides, that approach doesn’t apply any reinforcing methods.

I then thought about writing a blog post for each article. It turns out it takes about a day to do that. And I still forget. I needed something simpler.

I then found Recall AI.

It reads and analyzes whatever webpage you’re on. Providing something like this for today’s article by Vann R. Newkirk II, “What Climate Change Will Do to America by Mid-Century:”

Recall allows me to save this into a structure. But again, this is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. If I were writing an essay or book, this would be a great tool for gathering research.

Recall is also great for understanding what I read. Helpful with quick rereading.

This morning, I got a new idea to try. What if I’m trying to remember too much? What if I narrowed down what I wanted to remember to something specific?

Within today’s article, the author used the term “climate gentrification” referring to neighborhoods being bought up because they were safer from climate change, and thus displacing poor people. The article mentions Liberty City, a poor neighborhood in Miami, with a slightly higher elevation, bought up by developers moving away from low-lying beachfront development.

I think I can remember that concept, climate gentrification. What if I only worked on remembering specific concepts? This got me thinking. I could collect concepts. As my collection grew, I could develop a classification system. A taxonomy of problems that humanity faces. Maybe a Dewey Decimal system of things to know.

I use a note-taking system called Obsidian. It uses hyperlinks to connect your notes, creating relationships between ideas. I could create a vault for collecting concepts. Each time I come across a new concept, I’d enter it into Obsidian, along with a citation where I found it. That might not be too much work.

I picked several phrases I want to remember and study:

Climate gentrification
Heat islands
Climate dead zones
Insurance market collapse
Climate change acceleration
Economic no-go zones
Corporate takeover of public services
Climate change inequality
Histofuturism
Sacrifice zones
Corporate feudalism

Contemplating this list made me realize that remembering where I read about each concept will take too much work. I have a browser extension, Readwell Reader, that lets me save the content of a web page. I could save every article I want to remember into a folder and then use a program to search for the concept words I remember to find them.

I just did a web search on “climate gentrification” and found it’s already in wide use. I then searched for “corporate feudalism,” and found quite a bit on it too. This suggests I’m onto something. That instead of trying to remember specifically what I read and where, I focus on specific emerging concepts.

Searching on “histofuturism” brought up another article at The Atlantic that references Octavia Butler: “How Octavia Butler Told the Future.” Today’s article by Vann R. Newkirk II is also built around Octavia Butler. This complicates my plan. It makes me want to research the evolution of the concept, which could be very time-consuming.

The point of focusing on key concepts from my reading is to give my reading purpose that will help me remember. But there might be more to it. Concepts are being identified all the time. And they spread. They really don’t become useful until they enter the vernacular. Until a majority of people use a phrase like “climate gentrification,” the reality it points to isn’t visible.

That realization reinforces my hunch to focus on concepts rather than details in my reading. Maybe reading isn’t about specific facts, but about spreading concepts?

JWH

Do You have Aphantasia or Hyperphantasia?

by James Wallace Harris

If you don’t know what aphantasia or hyperphantasia then you should read “Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound.” by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall, so I’m going to reiterate the high points to encourage you to find a copy. I highly recommend subscribing to the magazine or Apple News+.

The article is about a condition called aphantasia, one that I have. I wrote about that when I first discovered it in 2016. This new article by MacFarquhar describes the condition and its discovery in much greater depth than I have previously read. It also describes the opposite of this condition, hyperphantasia.

If you don’t know what aphantasia and hyperphantasia are, then you need to read this article if you have a certain kind of mindset such as artist or scientist, have trouble remembering the past, have difficulty recognizing faces, feel disconnected from your self, think you might be autistic, and many other personality traits that make you wonder if you’re different.

Aphantasia is the inability to remember mental images. Most people can close their eyes and recall a scene from their life. The face of a loved one, their desktop at work, the home they lived in as a child. About 2-3 percent of people can’t. But it turns out there all many degrees of not being able to see mental images, including some people who are overwhelmed with mental imagery. That condition is called hyperphantasia.

This article taught me a great deal about this condition I didn’t know. From my previous readings, I simplistically thought aphantasia meant one thing, but it’s not. For many people with the condition, they can’t remember their own past. I can. In fact, I’m obsessed with my past. I was particularly impressed what aphantasia did to artists and scientists.

I’m not like the extreme members of The Aphantasia Network or the people interviewed in the book Aphantasia: Experiences, Perceptions, and Insights by Alan Kendle. That’s comforting, but I still miss mental memories. Yet, I’m lucky. Some people have aphantasia so severe they can’t remember anything about their past, and they feel like living corpses.

For most of my life, I assumed everyone perceived reality pretty much the same if all their sense organs were healthy. Of course, I knew some people had better sight or hearing than others, but I assumed what we perceive was the same reality. That’s because I naively thought we observed reality directly.

I now know we don’t. Our senses are used to construct a model of reality inside our heads. And we all model reality differently. This is called our Umwelt. I highly recommend reading An Immense World by Ed Yong if you want to learn more about that.

MacFarquhar’s article explores how the ability to recall mental images affects our personality, memory, sense of self, and our Umwelt. When I first learned that I lacked the common ability to consciously recall mental images, I felt deprived. Some call it mental blindness. MacFarquhar suggests I would be a different person if I had what I missed. More than that, aphantasia affects people in various ways, and I could have been very different in other ways.

MacFarquhar begins her article by profiling Nick Wakins. He thought he was normal, but couldn’t understand why other people could remember their past and he couldn’t. He abstractly knew about his earlier life from what people told him and photographs. He started researching his condition and discovered that some 19th century scientists had discovered people like him. Then in the 1970s, psychologists again explored visual memory, but it didn’t go far.

In 2010 Adam Zeman and colleagues published research in Neuropsychologie about “blind imagination.” The journalist Carl Zimmer wrote an article for Discover magazine. That caused dozens of people recognizing the condition in themselves to contact Zeman. Zeman coined the term aphantasia with the help of a friend, and published “Lives without imagery–Cogential aphantasia” in Cortex in 2015.

That inspired an article in The New York Times and Zeman got around seventeen thousand emails. It was around this time that I heard about it and wrote my blog piece.

Zeman was now hearing about many related conditions that people claiming to have aphantasia experience. Since 2015 a tremendous wealth of research has gone into this topic, information I didn’t know about. Larissa MacFarquhar does a fantastic job of catching me up.

This article is as exciting as anything Oliver Sacks wrote about. He also had aphantasia. And it’s more than just visual memories. It also relates to being remember sound, smells, tastes, and touches.

We all peceive the world tremendously different.

Nick Wakins thought he was absolutely normal until he uncovered this research. Nick has a PhD. He didn’t know what he was missing until he researched how other people peceived. We seldom compare notes like that.

Melinda Utal had an extreme case of no past memory that is very sad:

One of Kendle’s interviewees was Melinda Utal, a hypnotherapist and a freelance writer from California. She had trouble recognizing people, including people she knew pretty well, so she tended to avoid social situations where she might hurt someone’s feelings. When she first discovered that she was aphantasic, she called her father, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease and living in a nursing home in Oregon. He had been a musician in big bands—he had toured with Bob Hope and played with Les Brown and his Band of Renown. She asked him whether he could imagine a scene in his head, and he said, Of course. I can imagine going into a concert hall. I see the wood on the walls, I see the seats, I know I’m going to sit at the back, because that’s where you get the best sound. I can see the orchestra playing a symphony, I can hear all the different instruments, and I can stop it and go backward to wherever I want it to start up and hear it again. She explained to her father what aphantasia was, how she couldn’t see images in her mind, or hear music, either. On the phone, her father started to cry. He said, But, Melinda, that’s what makes us human.

Melinda had an extremely bad memory for her life, even for an aphantasic. She once had herself checked for dementia, but the doctor found nothing wrong. She had become aware when she was in second grade that she had a bad memory, after a friend pointed it out. In an effort to hold on to her memories, she started keeping a journal in elementary school, recording what she did almost every single day, and continued this practice for decades. When, in her sixties, she got divorced and moved into an apartment by herself, she thought it would be a good time to look through her journals and revisit her younger days. She opened one and began to sob because, to her horror, the words she had written meant nothing to her. The journals were useless. She read about things she had done and it was as though they had happened to someone else.

MacFarquhar profiles many people for her long article, but I was particularly taken by two artists she interviewed. Sheri Paisley had aphantasia:

Among the e-mails that Zeman received, there were, to his surprise, several from aphantasic professional artists. One of these was Sheri Paisley (at the time, Sheri Bakes), a painter in her forties who lived in Vancouver. When Sheri was young, she’d had imagery so vivid that she sometimes had difficulty distinguishing it from what was real. She painted intricate likenesses of people and animals; portraiture attracted her because she was interested in psychology. Then, when she was twenty-nine, she had a stroke, and lost her imagery altogether.

To her, the loss of imagery was a catastrophe. She felt as though her mind were a library that had burned down. She no longer saw herself as a person. Gradually, as she recovered from her stroke, she made her way back to painting, working very slowly. She switched from acrylic paints to oils because acrylics dried too fast. She found that her art had drastically changed. She no longer wanted to paint figuratively; she painted abstractions that looked like galaxies seen through a space telescope. She lost interest in psychology—she wanted to connect to the foundations of the universe.

On the other hand, Clare Dudeney had hyperphantasia.

In talking to a friend of hers, an aphantasic painter who was one of Zeman’s research subjects, Clare had realized that she was the opposite—hyperphantasic. Her imagery was extraordinarily vivid. There was always so much going on inside her head, her mind skittering and careening about, that it was difficult to focus on what or who was actually in front of her. There were so many pictures and flashes of memory, and glimpses of things she thought were memory but wasn’t sure, and scenarios real and imaginary, and schemes and speculations and notions and plans, a relentless flood of images and ideas continuously coursing through her mind. It was hard to get to sleep.

At one point, in an effort to slow the flood, she tried meditation. She went on a ten-day silent retreat, but she disliked it so much—too many rules, getting up far too early—that she rebelled. While sitting in a room with no pictures or stimulation of any kind, supposedly meditating, she decided to watch the first Harry Potter movie in her head. She wasn’t able to recall all two hours of it, but watching what she remembered lasted for forty-five minutes. Then she did the same with the other seven films.

An interesting aspect of new research is showing that some people have aphantasia since birth, but others acquire it later in life, often due to a physical injury. Other reseach suggests that visual memory is better in children and women, and that many children might have hyperphantasia. I believe I did see mental images when I was young. And other studies suggest that taking drugs brings back the ability to create mental imagery. I can testify to that. I used to get great flashes of imagery when I got high. Other studies show that people repress the ability to create mental imagery because of psychological trauma. All of this makes me wonder if I could retrain myself to create mental pictures in my head.

It is quite common for people with aphantasia to dream with vivid imagery, although others claim their dreams are thin and dark. As I’ve gotten older, my dreams have become dark and shadowy. However, the other night I had a dream that was intensely vivid, bright, and colorful. I was even aware in the dream to a slight degree. I said to myself that I was in a dream and I couldn’t believe it was so damn real. It felt so real that I was afraid I couldn’t get back to my old life. I was on a street looking at buildings I didn’t know, and was worried that if I became stuck in the dream I wouldn’t know where to go. I was quite relieved to wake up.

Scientists who are very good at thinking abstractly often forget how to create mental imagery. And some even theorize that spending so much time reading and staring at words have ruined our capacity to create mental pictures.

At first I envied people with hyperphantasia until I read this:

Hyperphantasia often seemed to function as an emotional amplifier in mental illness—heightening hypomania, worsening depression, causing intrusive traumatic imagery in P.T.S.D. to be more realistic and disturbing. Reshanne Reeder, a neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool, began interviewing hyperphantasics in 2021 and found that many of them had a fantasy world that they could enter at will. But they were also prone to what she called maladaptive daydreaming. They might become so absorbed while on a walk that they would wander, not noticing their surroundings, and get lost. It was difficult for them to control their imaginations: once they pictured something, it was hard to get rid of it. It was so easy for hyperphantasics to imagine scenes as lifelike as reality that they could later become unsure what had actually happened and what had not.

I believe I’ve copied as much of this article as I ethically should.

I’m using this blog to encourage you to go read the article. I’m also encourage people to subscribe to magazines. If you want good information it costs. We need to get away from always assume information should be free. Free information on the web is corrupting our society. Subscribing to magazines supports the spread of better information.

My new effort at home schooling myself is to read one great article a day from magazines with solid editors. I look for articles that expand my mental map of the world. This one certainly has.

JWH