Some People Can't See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound

"When Nick Watkins was a child, he pasted articles about space exploration into scrapbooks and drew annotated diagrams of rockets. He knew this because, years later, he still had the scrapbooks, and took them to be evidence that he had been a happy child, although he didn't remember making them. When he was seven, in the summer of 1969, his father woke him up to watch the moon landing; it was the middle of the night where they lived, near Southampton, in England."

"He didn't remember this, either, but he'd been told that it happened. That Christmas, he and his brother were given matching space helmets. He knew that on Christmas morning the helmets had been waiting in the kitchen and that, on discovering his, he felt joy, but this was not a memory, exactly. The knowledge seemed to him more personal than an ordinary fact, but he could not feel or picture what it had been like to be that boy in the kitchen."

"Near the end, the main character, David Bowman, spools backward through memories of his life: Not only vision, but all the sense impressions, and all the emotions he had felt at the time, were racing past, more and more swiftly. His life was unreeling like a tape recorder playing back at ever-increasing speed. . . . Faces he had once loved, and had thought lost beyond recall, smiled at him."

Mental-visual imagery ability influences how people store and experience memories and emotions. Nick Watkins retained physical evidence and factual accounts of childhood events without the capacity to visualize or relive them. He knew specific details—being woken for the 1969 moon landing and finding space helmets at Christmas—and experienced those facts as personally meaningful despite lacking pictorial recollection. Repeated reading of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey and its depiction of reliving life impressions fascinated him as otherworldly and disconnected from his lived experience. He pursued physics and was drawn to statistical approaches rather than visual reminiscence.

Read at The New Yorker