Not everyone can picture their past. Some of us can’t relive it at all.
A space for people with aphantasia and SDAM — and for the people trying to understand them.
Choose your entry point
Newly diagnosed
You know the name for it now. What tends to come next, in roughly this order.
Think you might have it?
A short, honest self-check. Links to the validated tools. No diagnosis — no performance.
Family & partners
What this is, what it is not, and how to be useful without being strange about it.
UK clinicians & educators
A five-minute briefing: what to know, what to say, when (if ever) to worry.
From the founder
I built this site because I could not find it. Placeholder note — more on the about page.
Recent from the research tracker
All posts →New peer-reviewed findings, translated into plain English. Monthly.
Ten years on, from the man who named it
Adam Zeman — the Exeter neurologist who put the word "aphantasia" on the map in 2015 — takes stock of a decade of research. A short, readable review from the person most responsible for the field existing at all.
Aphantasia as a functional disconnection
A 2025 review proposes the most coherent theory yet of what is happening in an aphantasic brain: the imagery machinery is physically intact, but the parts of the brain that would normally call on it are failing to do so.
How SDAM got its name
Before 2015 there was no term for the experience of remembering your life as a set of facts you cannot step back into. Palombo and colleagues at the Rotman in Toronto described three adults who had always lived this way, showed the pattern was real and measurable, and gave it a name — Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory.
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