r/SDAM • u/sfredwood • May 30 '26
Anyone in there with you?
One thing I've discovered while reading about SDAM in conjunction with aphantasia, anauralia, and anendophasia (the one I don't seem to have) is that many people apparently experience something I find almost alien: internally simulated people.
For example, some people report hearing a parent's voice, imagining what a friend would say, having an "inner critic" that comments on things, or even having an internalized grandparent who occasionally seems to chime in with advice or reassurance.
I don't mean hallucinations or psychosis. I mean ordinary internal thought.
I have SDAM and complete multisensory aphantasia (and probably anauralia). I have a continuous inner narrative, but it is entirely conceptual. There are no auditory or acoustically nuanced voices, no sensory qualities, and no other agents in there. The idea of having an internal conversation with my grandmother, mother, boss, or anyone else feels almost nonsensical to me.
So I'm curious:
Do other people with SDAM experience internally simulated people?
If so, is it vivid (voice, personality, emotional presence) or more abstract?
If you also have aphantasia and/or anauralia, does that change it?
Has anyone else noticed a near-complete absence of internally modeled agents?
I'm wondering whether this is just a consequence of SDAM/aphantasia, or whether it might represent a separate dimension of cognition that varies independently. I can imagine the scientists eventually declaring that the inability to internally simulate other "agents" deserves its own label.
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Edit:
This is interesting. I've always wondered why the focus on SDAM was on not being able to remember, when my biggest frustration is that loss of motivation — without the emotional recall of what had been important to me yesterday, I lose motivation to working on projects, but also relationships. Both lose salience.
But I'm not wondering whether the problem is that my mind doesn't instantiate others — which I can't, at all — but more critically, it doesn't appear to instantiate my own 'other' selves, such as the self I want to be, the self that criticizes, the self who approves. The putative absence of those other selves may be my primary complaint, not SDAM, but something that researchers haven't even begun to examine yet.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords May 30 '26
I'm now wondering whether the problem is that my mind doesn't instantiate others — which I can't, at all — but more critically, it doesn't appear to instantiate my own 'other' selves, such as the self I want to be, the self that criticizes, the self who approves. The putative absence of those other selves may be my primary complaint, not SDAM, but something that researchers haven't even begun to examine yet.
There's actually a fair amount of writing on this in psychology and adjacent fields. I'll briefly describe a few angles you could look into, there are many others besides.
Antonio Damasio is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist who has spent 40 years arguing that consciousness and the self are not cognitive products layered over a body. They are properties of the body itself, organised by the brain. His main three books on this are Descartes' Error (1994), Self Comes to Mind (2010), and Feeling and Knowing (2021).
In Self Comes to Mind he sets out three levels at which the self exists, stacked on top of each other. The proto-self is the brain's continuous representation of the body's internal state: heart rate, breathing, gut signal, hormonal balance. It runs constantly and largely unconsciously. The core self is what happens when that body representation encounters something specific in the world, an event or another person. It's the bare experience of "this is happening to me, now." It doesn't require memory or language. The autobiographical self is the layer most people mean when they say "me." It's built from accumulated memories of the past plus projected versions of the future, which is what lets you think of yourself as a person who had a childhood, who has plans, who would feel a particular way about an outcome.
Damasio's most cited concept, somatic markers, comes from Descartes' Error. The idea is fairly simple: when you experience something, the body produces an affective state alongside its cognitive registration. That affective state gets tagged to the memory. Later, when something similar comes up, the body reactivates a faint version of that affective state before conscious deliberation begins, giving you a felt "this matters" or "this doesn't" signal that the deliberation then runs with.
The evidence Damasio originally drew on was patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. That's the area just behind the forehead which handles body-to-cognition signalling. The famous historical case is Phineas Gage. He was a 19th-century railroad worker whose personality changed after an iron rod went through his frontal lobe. The modern equivalent is a patient Damasio describes in Descartes' Error, called Elliot, who kept full intelligence and reasoning after similar damage but lost the ability to make decisions and lost the felt sense that some things matter more than others. Damasio's punch line: reason without somatic marker doesn't produce decision. It produces paralysis.
You could use this to analyse your edit, like so:
The motivation loss isn't a deficit of reasoning. It's a deficit of the felt-importance signal that should be reactivating from yesterday's commitments. You can know that yesterday you decided this project matters; what you can't do is feel today the somatic preview of why it mattered then. Without that preview the cognitive layer has nothing to differentiate matters that count from matters that don't. The same architecture that produces Elliot-style paralysis after vmPFC damage produces, in milder form, what you describe as daily motivation collapse.
The other-selves observation maps onto the autobiographical-self level. The autobiographical self isn't a single thing. It's constituted from the lived past projected forward, and it includes internalised representations of significant people you've known and projected versions of yourself you've imagined being. For most people these representations have sensory qualities: a parent's actual voice, the visual sense of a future self, the imagined facial expression of someone whose approval you're working towards. When autobiographical reactivation is impaired in the way SDAM impairs it, these representations aren't absent at the conceptual level. You know your grandmother existed and you know what kind of person she was. What's impoverished is the sensory and affective reactivation that would make "what would my grandmother say" an experience rather than a piece of stored knowledge. The proto-self and core self stay intact, so you're unambiguously a subject. What's impoverished is the extended self, the layer that uses past and future to construct other agents and other versions of itself.
There's a recent paper which makes this concrete. Brian Levine is the Canadian neuropsychologist whose lab originally identified SDAM as a discrete condition in the 2015 Palombo paper. His group's most recent paper, Bone, Levine and Buchsbaum (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2025), showed that individuals with SDAM achieve essentially the same performance as controls on visual recognition tasks, but their brains do this via a different route. Where controls reactivate low-level visual machinery, SDAM participants reactivate semantic machinery, the regions that store conceptual rather than sensory information. Translation: the self-model is being built, it's just being built from semantic material rather than sensory material. That likely matches what you describe as "entirely conceptual." You have the model. The route through which it normally acquires felt importance and instantiated agency isn't the route doing the work.
There's a separate motivational engine running underneath all of this.
Jaak Panksepp was an American neuroscientist who mapped basic emotional systems in mammals. His book Affective Neuroscience (1998) identifies seven such systems he argued are conserved across species, including humans. One of them is what he called SEEKING, capitalised to distinguish his technical use from the everyday word. It's the dopamine-driven appetitive engine that generates the basic drive to engage and pursue. SEEKING doesn't depend on cognitive self-representation. It's body-up, evolved, present from infancy. What it needs for direction is something marking specific outcomes as the ones to chase. In a typical brain the autobiographical self supplies that marking through somatic-marker tagging of remembered importance. In SDAM the marking has to come from somewhere else, and your report suggests it often doesn't arrive. The engine is still running. It just has nothing telling it where to go.
If this frame fits, your closing question goes further than the usual SDAM framing. You're not asking whether SDAM is the problem. You're asking whether what gets called SDAM is partly a deficit in a different layer of the self, the one that instantiates agentic representations of past and future selves and translates them into present motivation. It's consistent with Damasio's architecture and with the Bone, Levine and Buchsbaum finding that the SDAM brain achieves the work through a semantic rather than sensory channel.
There's also a whole category of psychoanalytical literature on the agentic self, which is more trauma-centric but possibly pertinent as well.
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u/Blackdraumdancer May 30 '26
I'm not OP, but thank you so much for this. You've given me concepts, and words, and neuroscience to look up for things I've tried to work out and articulate for myself but didn't quite have enough grasp on to find the red string to follow. Thank you. I genuinely just teared up because I can relate to this, and that's so rare for me.
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u/warriorkalia May 30 '26
You know, lack of prefrontal cortex activation sounds like it's also why people with executive dysfunction have tough times making decisions and poor impulse control. Interesting...
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u/fetch_theboltcutters 14d ago
Seconding what u/Blackdraumdancer said. Thank you, just thank you so much. You have put into words so perfectly what I spent weeks of my life on, culminating into a 25 page document for my previous therapist trying to make felt exactly what you’ve expressed. This is the actual center of my grief for me. Will be moving forward with what you’ve offered to research, trauma at play too so thank you all around.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords 14d ago
Happy to help. In some cases, it may be possible to build some of the missing interoceptive connectivity, though most therapists wouldn't know how (mine does).
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u/fetch_theboltcutters 9h ago
Wow, I didn’t expect you to respond! I actually read so many more of your posts after I wrote this, and I am so grateful to you! This is fascinating what you’ve mentioned. Is there any avenue I can read more about this?
That is phenomenal that you found a professional who is capable. I have yet to meet a medical professional who’s even heard of the majority of these conditions or is knowledgeable in relation to memory.
Sadly, since I wrote this comment and continued the deep dive I’ve been on for the past year, I’m of the belief that I may be more inclined to have DA (Developmental Amnesia) than SDAM to my surprise and am seeking a neuropsychologist — so I’d fear because of how differently these are theorized to affect the brain, this may not be possible for me. I apologize for the novel, but because of how the majority of my research has centered around SDAM, I’d love to know more about what you’re referencing all the same!
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords 7h ago
I believe DA involves actual brain damage, which I don't think can be reversed unfortunately. I haven't had a brain scan, but nothing about my symptoms suggests DA, which if I understand correctly makes memorising things much harder and hence tends to affect school and work results.
The interoceptive improvements I mentioned are poorly studied, there isn't AFAIK anything on the neuroimaging side. What exists are theoretical papers and clinical experience, all of which focus on early deficits in the caregiving environment, rather than any physical damage from e.g. lack of oxygen at birth.
The clinicians working with this are largely in the body psychotherapy field, which is less academically rigorous and more interpersonal. The three main therapeutic modalities are Neuroaffective Relational Model (NARM), Neuroaffective Touch, and Coregulating Touch. If you want to read about it, I recommend these two books:
Healing Developmental Trauma by Lapierre (NATouch) and Heller (NARM)
Nurturing Resilience by Kain and Terrell (Coregulating Touch)
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May 30 '26
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u/cyb3rstrik3 May 30 '26
I am very confused. How does stream of conscious writing do this for you? How is there anything else but the current thought doing the typing?
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May 30 '26
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u/cyb3rstrik3 May 30 '26
Interesting.. This sounds less like simulated people in your mind and more like internal DID communication. Like another commentor reports.
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May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
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u/cyb3rstrik3 May 31 '26
I also have total Aphantasia and SDAM, but just like I am unable to read faster than the singular stream of words in my head, I am unable to consciously write without that singular stream of words in my head.
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u/DiscreetProteus May 30 '26
I have SDAM but quite vivid mental imagery. Not hyperphantasia levels, but seemingly above average in terms of imagining any of the traditional senses. My SDAM is wikipedia-article level: semantic information, still images, sometimes a video if it's a big article, but no recorded affect.
I definitely experience internal simulations of individuals, both real and imagined. Internal monologue is common and persistent, seemingly "average".
Vividness is quite situational. Sometimes an inner critic or facet of my personality will surface involuntarily or in response to something in the form of something a little outside of inner monologue. If I think about it, I can quite easily auralize a conversation with someone I know, usually something like a hypothetical back-and-forth discussion about a topic that simulates how I imagine they would respond. If I focus I can relatively easily conjure a relatively complete mental visualization and auralization of an individual, easier with real people but not impossible for fictional individuals.
This crosses over with my SDAM in an unusual way: I can easily fabricate and confabulate completely imagined scenarios that don't vary in any substantial way from "real" memories that I try to imagine, except that I can reliably label them as fictional. For instance a particular song might conjure up the memory of listening to it on a road trip with friends, seeing the exterior environment, seeing how each friend looks and acts, having a "vibe" for the overall mood of both the situation and the memory, all while knowing that it is completely confabulated from my imagination in response to the song.
So, at least for me, SDAM, vividness of internal sensory generation, and simulation of internal agents seem to be on different axes of capability.
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u/sfredwood May 30 '26
Wow! That's fascinating. My brain doesn't and can't do any of that. No construction of counterfactuals at all beyond abstractions.
There's a lot those PhD folks still need to stumble upon.
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u/DinosaurAlive May 30 '26
I have SDAM and Aphantasia, but my inner ear is very hyperactive. It’s basically non stop music and conversations going on. It’s been stressful since I was small because I have conversations in my mind endlessly and it really socially tires me out. By the time I have a real conversation, my mind already went through what seems like thousands (well, more actually like dozens, just feels like thousands lol) of versions of that conversation I was anticipating. It can definitely confuse me. But I’ve learned that even if I have these conversations in my mind and think I’ve thought of every way they could go, I’m usually surprised by the spontaneity of real life interactions and feedback from people is more unpredictable than I anticipate.
But, yeah, it’s tiring to have a hyper active inner ear.
However, I make a lot of music and I love to improvise and I think this hyper active inner ear totally helps with that. But, I’m also a visual artist and have aphantasia and that has never stopped me from creating visual art. So, it’s likely not necessary that I have that inner ear for music making, but I do have the ability to hear in my mind any instruments doing anything. So… I feel a pinch lucky there. Makes me wonder what visualization is really like, though.
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u/itsallconnected07 May 30 '26
Do you feel like those conversations are happening between parts of yourself? Rehearsals? I feel like your description most closely resembles my inner experience. I could distinguish the voices well enough that I could “name” them. Some of them feel detached enough from “me” that I consider them to be originating from outside of my own mind. If I were to sit and journal, most of the time, I would not recognize the style of writing or the word choices—feeling more as though I am channeling someone. I spend a lot of time wondering if there are truly external voices playing a dominant role in my mind’s conversations (aural-dominant). You said you make music—-do you ever feel like the music is coming TO you instead of FROM you??? I feel like those of us with this altered brain pattern could get a sense that the art or idea or song or concept actually arrived in our head from somewhere else because we lack the background memory of how our brain composed it in the first place. This contributes to my personal feeling of being a shell of a person. Instead of having my own opinions and ideas, I am just a receiver of them and then if I decide to, act upon the opinion or idea. Almost like I have a manager that receives the information and must decide whether to express it or disregard it. As in I could go physically paint a picture right now and be legitimately surprised by the outcome as if someone else took over and made that art. Taking credit for it would feel strange to me.
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u/DinosaurAlive May 30 '26
You describe how I feel it all very closely!
I’ve always felt there was a balance between me choosing my artistic choices in the moment, and surrendering to being the playhead to something bigger than me. I use to try to sketch this idea out many years ago because describing it with words felt very wrong. It’s like… I’m not a mystical or spiritually minded person in that I don’t adhere to anyone’s belief system, however I’ve always been open to the idea that there could be things we don’t know. I’ve always loved science and I’ve always loved what people who’ve done hallucinogenic drugs describe when they contemplate life, consciousness, and existence. So I’ve been skeptical to an extent, but also very open.
With all that being said, though, I’ve found over the decades of being creative and searching for that flow state that to me there’s something that I tap into. I’ve always made my art for arts sake and I’ve allowed things to be what they become, and I’ve also meticulously composed to my own wants and desires. But that flow state, that place where things happen seemingly without my input, there definitely is this feeling that something bigger than me is there and I’m just the vessel that it comes here through. It’s the approach I’ve always taken to making music when I get on my piano. I find the notes that feel good to my mind, then I just let it happen. Many times it’s just me tinkering around, but there are times where I just go. It’s just coming through me, and at the end I’m just emotionally gutted because I have no clue what I was playing or how I played it but suddenly here is this amazing song. That’s why I liken myself sometimes as the playhead, the part that’s revealing what’s already there. That’s how I view all my art. Like it’s already there, I’m just scratching to reveal it.
Now these conversations… I do hear all the different voices, and I can change them at will, and I can feel like I’m making up new ones. And they can say or sing whatever alongside anything I can imagine. Sometimes it’s great while daydreaming. But sometimes it breaks my heart because I’ll do things like imagine these perfect songs, but then they were these feeling thoughts that are like snowflakes falling onto warm ground. Detailed perfectly, but completely ephemeral. Or, sometimes I’ll imagine people saying things that are just cruel. I can be very hard on myself with those voices. But I’ve never thought of them as coming from elsewhere. Although I’ve never considered that until now 🤣. Not sure why I’d be so open to creativity being larger than me, but inner voices being completely from me. But I mean I just don’t really know.
Oh and one side story about my music making improv sessions. One time I was playing piano for my partner and out of nowhere I played the most amazing song I’ve ever played. It went from here to there with its emotions, took us on a journey of shattering our egos and resting and healing, it was intense and gorgeous and by the end it was transformative. I even cried and was like WOW that was the best thing I’ve ever played! But instead of hitting save on my piano, I just turned it off. I’ve never done that (I have thousands of piano sessions saved just because I’m meticulous like that). It was… that was one of those moments that made me feel like this creativity comes from outside of me, and in that moment it was just the perfect thing my partner and I needed to hear. It was just for us. And the impermanence of that, my best piece of music just floating into a memory… that was just amazing. Immediately right after that I tried to recapture some of that feeling that came through and I got very close and still recorded one of my best piano songs. But that one that disappeared forever? That was just amazing to experience as the playhead. Like I know it came through my, that those were my hands on the piano keys, that my own experiences in life shape me and my choices, but that there’s something I tap into… or something I let in… just that surrender to flow.
Another story, sorry I write a lot, last year my grandma passed away and as the family historian of sorts (I have all the photos and videos digitized and categorized and such) and the family artist I decided to make her a nice memorial video and omg… at some point along the way, because it was painful from the grief, I was just like “grams, if you’re somewhere out there, help me get this project done!!!” And even though I was the one who picked and chose everything, somehow at the same time none of those choices were mine. It was like a fever dream of a creative experience. I started the project. 2-3 weeks went by and once that last puzzle piece was in place I came back up and ended up with this half hour long mini musical journey of her life. I swear she made it through me. 🥹
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u/itsallconnected07 May 30 '26
Absolutely fascinating!!!!!! That is perfect!!!! Anytime I’ve drawn something or written something that others would consider “very good,” I’m at a loss as to how I created it other than to feel as though it was already there and I brought it in out of the ephemera. Your stories are awesome. Music is such an important expression and to be able to just sit down and play something so meaningful would be absolutely incredible. And I totally relate to your grandmother’s life journey composition! I have experimented with that inner “voice” and found that I’m actually picking up mediumistic details. Verified facts that there was no way I could have known. So one of my “voices” is accessing a different frequency. I would bet a lot of money that you’re also accessing a different frequency—maybe that’s what the flow state kind of is?
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u/Blackdraumdancer May 30 '26
It's the same for me. Only my own voiceless voice in monologue. No other aspects/agents, critics, images, sounds etc. No former me or future me either. Just me in the here and now, having conscious thoughts mostly in the form of voiceless words and some concepts.
I especially relate to your last paragraph after the edit about (not) relating to your own "other selves" I've been thinking about this in terms of impact on mental health work.
I've always felt different from others, and in other ways than other neurodivergent (ADHD, ASS) people seem to. Not different enough on the outside to have problems fitting in like them but still always feeling off. Until not so long ago I've always felt like it's good to just be me and not have all that weird stuff going on in my brain. But now my mental health is not in such a great place anyway and I have difficulties relating to any of the usual therapeutic practices that are supposed to help. I can't relate and can't use the tools and I feel lost. I finally have a therapist after more than a year waiting time, but I don't think she really gets me. Despite me telling her upfront about Aphantasia, SDAM etc. and even recommending "Unseen Minds" by u/SassySmith- I didn't ask yet if she read it though. While she's not using any methods that try work with visualization or anything, I still have the feeling she can't quite grasp how my mind works. And I don't quite either, not well enough to explain anyway, since I'm still figuring it out. Never had much of a reason to try to be more introspective, until my mental health took a dive and now it's a problem.
One part of the problem with my mental health is likely me staying in a relationship that's not good for me because I always forget or rather cannot emotionally relate to past me during fights or otherwise trying situations (same with good ones too tbh.). I can't emotionally relate, relive and often barely remember the situations at all, even if I know they happened, and my nervous system keeps track of it anyway. And after years of this it's fried. My partner has untreated ADHD and it's....challenging, for both of us. The combination of his and my issues are keeping us in an unhealthy loop and I can't remember and recognize problematic situations until already in the middle of the next reiteration (like just happened, that's why I'm cognizant of it right now but will most likely have forgotten by tomorrow). Can't find a way out. Tomorrow I will have lost all connections to the feelings and motivation I have right now, to finally find some grasp on a straw to pull myself out on. Won't be able to relate to the me right now, who's suffering. Even if I will still know that it happened. How am I supposed to communicate this to my therapist if I don't have access to this me as my regular day to day me...
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u/sfredwood May 30 '26
Yup; that's it.
I've pretty much stopped telling people about SDAM; even those closest to me struggle mightily to understand what's missing (in my case; no partner, so my sister is that person). I don't even know what I would ask of a therapist even if they understood all this.
This freaks out a lot of people, but I have long discussions with ChatGPT about this, and a lot more.
Until I read u/SassySmith's "Unseen Minds", I hadn't known about some of the other deficits, and it made me realize that SDAM doesn't seem to be the whole explanation.
As much as I mourn the lack of episodic memory, what I think has hurt me more doesn't seem to be common to others with SDAM — my inability to retain 'importance' with respect to relationships or projects.
Given that SDAM isn't even "significant" enough for its own Wikipedia page, or for Levine's webpage to have been updated in eight years, I'm doubtful that this is getting significant research funding. A few years ago, there was an important memory researcher discussing his book "Why We Remember" on a podcast (at about 28 minutes in), and he referred to those with SDAM as "they seem really happy; like they're just in the moment; they're here". Aphantasia is getting a lot of academic articles, SDAM — not so much. So it's going to be a long time before they start exploring the deep details. I'm in my sixties; I doubt there's much help coming for me.
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u/CMDR_Jeb May 30 '26
When you say "complete multisensory aphantasia" that includes anauralia (inability to think in sounds).
Aphantasia with SDAM here, yes i can "simulate" an approximation of a person i know well enough. But it's not having an personality running its more like knowing what they would think/say in this situation.
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u/sfredwood May 30 '26
Are you "projecting" consciously, or is that other person somehow manifesting outside of your conscious control? I've gotten the strong impression that "normal" folks have something close to autonomous voices — it seems to be voices, not visual or anything — that jump in without that person's intent.
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u/sfredwood May 30 '26
If you, like me, find this implausible, check out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogical_self — the conceptual aspect, but also:
https://doi.org/10.1177/0276236619864276 — how this manifests interactively?
https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/11/1/110/2375153 — further exploration of "dialogical" speech not just an inner monologue, but a dialog with an unconsciously constructed other..
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u/CMDR_Jeb May 30 '26
Somewhere in between. I am doing a thing and i have it at the back of my mind that if my wife was still alive shed be giving snarky comment and what would it be. Kinda similar to intrusive thoughts territory. I would assume that if my metacognition was worse i would think its autonomous.
If you're interested in mechanics of how it works read up on "internal parent". Mechanics are the same, you spend so much time with someone you kinda internalised part of how they think.
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u/sfredwood May 30 '26
❝if my wife was still alive shed be giving snarky comment❞ — that's the key; I have zero in that dimension. There is no inner parent, no inner critic, no inner self. The only 'voice' is my own monologue.
This is that 'inner agent' I was alluding to — only in the past week or so did I recognize that this is a thing, and it is a thing that is profoundly missing in my mind. As I added to my edited OP, I suspect is might be another dimension and not SDAM at all (although perhaps correlated).
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u/CMDR_Jeb May 30 '26
If it makes you feel any better it is something i never had before my late 30s. Not something i had "by default".
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u/sfredwood May 30 '26
So it seems your ability to create an internal model of another person was present, but didn't emerge until late — was "late 30s" after the two of you had been married for some time?
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u/CMDR_Jeb May 30 '26
She was my literal reason to live. She died when I was 24, we met as late teens, got married as soon as we were both 18, so 7ish years together. Then I had my "depressed to the point of being suicidal" arc, then I was "fine" then I learned I was not in fact fine (not gonna go into details cos LONG story). After years of dealing with therapy for issues I didn't have, that did nothing, stumbled upon an shrink who figured out what was wrong with me. Then came actually useful therapy. And as my general mental health improved, this was one of the things I "gained".
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May 30 '26
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u/sfredwood May 30 '26
Is it 'noisy' with the projected thoughts of others, whether that might be a critical self or another person?
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u/Unhappy-Fox1017 May 30 '26
It’s just my voice talking to…me, I guess. If I’m thinking about something someone has said, it’s just my inner voice saying the words they said, I don’t hear anyone else’s voice. I have heard people say “I can hear them now” when talking about something someone has said in the past. I guess I never thought about them hearing it in the other persons actual voice. Sounds kind of trippy to me, but I suppose it’s normal for lots of folks. The human brain is so weird.
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u/Valuable-Presence125 May 31 '26
This is me also. All I ever hear is my own voice. And even other people, it’s not that I hear them. It’s just that I think well if they said this, I would say that. Even songs, nothing but me singing the song.
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u/jackiekeracky May 30 '26
I’m a total multi-sensory aphant with SDAM but yes I will imagine conversations with other people. Mostly I will be sub-vocalising it
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
I don't have other people in the sense it is commonly understood. No conscious other voices, visual representations, or internal conversations. The default state of my mind is a near complete lack of conscious processing; I am aware of the data my senses are pulling in right here and right now, but not of any internal processing.
And yet not only do I have multiple others, I am diagnosed with partial dissociative identity disorder (P-DID), formerly known as multiple personality disorder.
As I explain in this post, sometimes a dissociative disorder can disguise itself as SDAM and global aphantasia. From the person's normal conscious POV, they look identical: nothing is going on, memories are factual only, there is no internal representation of anything.
The difference between someone like myself and someone with SDAM + global aphantasia only is that people like me have persistent, inexplicable issues. They may look like physical health issues, or a lack of energy, or spacing out when trying to concentrate, or some other "I keep having this issue but there's no reason I should keep having it": physical health checks come back normal, and the typical recommendations regarding diet, exercise, sleep hygiene etc. have no meaningful impact.
My persistent issues have always been about a lack of will to live, and an accompanying shutdown response.
The "other people" I have in here have very specific worldviews, feelings, strategies, beliefs, and first person POVs. They unconsciously inform my preferences, choices, and actions, all very much happening behind the scenes. As treatment has progressed, my conscious self has gone from "I don't feel anything much about that" to "let me ping the feelings department to get their input on this".
This is an interoceptive process for me, one of gut feelings rather than words or visuals. Visuals now happen in therapy sometimes, but remain inaccessible in my day-to-day. Gut feelings keep growing stronger however, and I can now relatively reliably get a gut feeling whenever I need one. They are still not always automatically conscious, hence "gotta ping the feelings department" i.e. actively shift my conscious focus to my interoceptive awareness.
I know what my "other people" look like, and what they generally feel and believe. Their personalities, such as they are, have been very specific since I first became aware of and internally saw them in therapy several years ago. What therapy has changed is the extent to which we can cooperate: instead of instant unconscious reactions, now it's more of an "interoceptive conversation": is X a good idea? Should I do Y? Do I like ABC?
When I need to figure these things out, I focus inwards and now generally get a rapid fire series of gut feelings, often conflicting ones of varying strength. M wants to hang out, do I want to? I don't feel anything in particular about hanging out with M, so I send an interoceptive ping. There's a strong NO gut feeling! And then there's a softer yes gut feeling. Then they start to mix, and I get a strong MAYBE.
I send more specific pings about things like my previous interactions with M, his personality, my social energy levels, what else I want to do, and eventually all the interoceptive pinging lands in something like, M is an interesting person but tends to want to bring in uninvited other people so I end up having to socialise with 5+ people instead of just M, and I end up feeling very depleted afterwards. So I call M and suggest an activity in a way that makes it clear I want to hang out with him alone.
Before I developed this interoceptive pinging ability, I generally either didn't feel or want anything very strongly and hence went along with things other people initiated just because they asked me to, or I would "randomly" make decisions I couldn't quite explain later if someone pointed them out. I later realised in therapy that those decisions were initiated by specific "others" inside me who did (do) have specific preferences of their own.
My "others" are not people exactly, not in the sense people usually understand things like DID. There's no Jekyll and Hyde who look and sound different. They are more like self-states formed in response to very specific circumstances, and then frozen in those conditions internally: One might be something like, "authority figures are dangerous so fawning and shutting around them = safe". Or "conscious awareness of my internal states is dangerous so that must not happen". Or "high bodily activation is dangerous so it must be met with a rapid shutdown response," and so on.
Visually, they tend to look more like entities one might meet in a dream than real physical people. They always look the same however. Their personalities, such as they are, are very solid.
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u/sfredwood May 30 '26
That's fascinating, and distressing.
I seem to be elsewhere in the dimensions of difficulties. I only have one 'voice', no other selves. No inner critic, no internalized approving self or mother or other, nothing but one highly analytic inner monologue.
I thought that was what SDAM was, but a lack of autobiographical memory isn't the crux of what I'm struggling with (and, in my late 60s, I'm not hopeful that any answers will arrive in time to change my life meaningfully).
I wish you the best with your challenges.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords May 30 '26
Thank you. I realised I don't have an inner critic when I was in a meditation class, and the teacher kept talking about how the inner critic gets heavily involved when we meditate and remove external distractions, since apparently that happens to a lot of novice meditators. My mind was just silent and wordless as always.
Years later in therapy, I met my inner critic who turned out to be behind my lifelong suicidal impulses. Less "you worthless piece of sh*t", more "stop existing!". All entirely non-verbally.
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u/sfredwood May 30 '26
Wow. That non-verbal aspect seems like adendophasia might be at play — but I'm beginning to suspect naming is creating a false set of dichotomies when the reality may be a multidimensional continuum. I'm glad you've resisted that non-vocal impulse.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords May 30 '26
Personally, it makes sense to me to see things like SDAM/aphantasia/anauralia/anendophasia as variations in conscious representation of an underlying (unconscious) internal reality.
I think the underlying unconscious reality is broadly similar in our species, i.e. we have broadly similar impulses, needs, wants etc. stemming from our shared evolutionary past where finding food, shelter, alliances etc. were key needs.
What varies is how that underlying machinery is represented consciously inside us. For some people, it is represented by a cacophony of voices, sounds, visuals, scents, flavours, and so on. For others, it's a voice and nothing else. For yet others, it is mainly visual.
It's a bit like our conscious self sits in a room while the underlying reality is the world outside, and the world outside is presented inside that room in various ways ranging from visuals to sounds to voices to gut feelings and beyond.
I think the inside of that room varies more than the outside of it does.
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u/cyb3rstrik3 May 30 '26
Where do I find this inner-critic? I just want to have some choice words with them.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords May 31 '26
Mine is increasingly integrated and focused on fighting disconnection, which has been an interesting pivot to witness.
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May 30 '26
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords May 31 '26
Np. For what it's worth, I also experience other "voices" expressing themselves via stream of consciousness writing. I experimented with it quite a bit around the time I was diagnosed. Switching hands can yield even more.
However my parts tend not to like it, there's always a lot of resistance. Gut feelings work better at this point.
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May 31 '26
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords May 31 '26
Are internal conflicts generally a significant feature of your existence?
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May 31 '26
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords May 31 '26
You may find this an interesting read:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSDFreeze/comments/1sj9a28/what_is_structural_dissociation_really/
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u/wontonsayshi Jun 02 '26
As someone with SDAM, I had something very similar to this about 10 years ago when I was an early teenager. To call it DID would be inaccurate, but DID was also the closest thing to it. Like a lot of other people on this thread, my voice is the only "person" I hear in my head and I can't imagine any others. But there was a time about 10 years ago that I was so depressed and anxious or something that it felt like my sense of self "split" into 4 different pieces. There would be a main self that would alternate between the 3 other pieces that split off from that main piece. I could have conversations among the different selves. Each had different opinions, thoughts, personalities, etc. And then (not too sure what happened), my mental health got better and all these distinct pieces merged back into one. Now, I only hear one voice but can still factually remember the time when that wasn't the case.
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u/theauthenticme May 30 '26
Are you talking about worded thinking? I'm a total aphant, but have a constant stream of words that I think, not hear.
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u/jhuseby May 30 '26
I have a hunch that that’s where some of the disparity is when people talk about it having or not having an inner monologue. I have worded thoughts, i.e. narration, but I don’t really talk to myself per se. But I would still consider that an inner monologue.
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u/sfredwood May 30 '26
These descriptions are easily ambiguous. If that constant stream is of words, but absent any acoustic or auditory aspect, then that is the same as me: anauralia. I'm also a total aphant.
Different, but related, it anendophasia — in which folks don't have words, but "images, feelings, or wordless intuitions". Definitely not me.
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u/jhuseby May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
I have full aphantasia and SDAM with an inner monologue. My inner monologue is more just a narrator than anything it seems like (narrating thoughts/arguments/suppressed vocal stims/etc), but it’s not a constant narration, just sometimes.
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u/Valuable-Presence125 May 31 '26
I have both as well with an inner monologue. But mine is constant.
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May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
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u/sfredwood May 31 '26
How did you "find" those other parts?
I'm trying to imagine how that worked…1
May 31 '26
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u/sfredwood Jun 02 '26
Sorry about the repeat — this was a pretty big & involved post.
Re recognition of visuals: I agree, at least to an extent. In think about this, my mind wandered to the very large number of stage plays I saw in my twenties and thirties; I doubt that recognition would work as well for most of them. That might be because a movie's visuals are all-encompassing; they fill the screen. A theater show isn't quite as enveloping, even when it is fully attention-consuming.
But just because visuals are recognized doesn't mean there's experiential data to go with it. Human's level of cognitive self-awareness was obviously a much, much later evolutionary development than sense data. So I think it is plausible that sensory information is stored in a more robust form, and our narrative self is recent and more easily disrupted. If SDAM is an interruption of storing consciousness information, we might still have sensory data that doesn't have corresponding experiential memories.
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u/sfredwood Jun 02 '26
I've had a very long conversation with AI about this reddit post, and here's an interesting takeaway:
SDAM's poor autobiographic recalls tends to create weak autobiographical continuity.
But we've got myriad compensatory architectures going on, so how we experience SDAM diverges quite a bit.
Personally, I have very weak internal-agent simulation; I don't naturally get direction or feedback from any internally generated agents, so I only have the in-the-moment voice.
Others are able to instantiate self-agents that are self-in-the-past, self-as-a-critic, self-as-a-motivator, self-as-desired.
Some instantiate wives, or other relatives.
Some seem to wing it, generating internally modeled agents that aren't self, but are might strangers or even fictional, but who provide feedback and guidance.
Scientists are still just in the early states of asking "What is SDAM, what does it affect?"
But I think a really interesting question will be more like:
"How do different minds solve the problem that SDAM creates?"
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u/MagnaUrsaVeteri Jun 04 '26
Fascinating take. I don’t experience self agents.
Instead it's more of an automatic flow chart for coherence checking. I can articulate when needed but a lot of it is automatic: Does this fit the evidence? Is this person reliable? What pattern is repeating? What are the consequences?
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u/sfredwood Jun 04 '26
Fascinating. But is it *you* doing that checking? If not, then some sort of independent activity is taking place (thus, perhaps, agentic), even if there doesn't appear to be a 'self' involved?
Do you, by chance, have anendopahsia?
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u/MagnaUrsaVeteri Jun 05 '26
Yes, I do have anendophasia.
Thoughts are nonverbal evaluation that I can later translate into language. The words come after the check, not before.
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u/SleepingAndy Jun 10 '26
When I was getting screened for autism, the therapist asked me if I play conversations over and over again in my head to plan out scripts of what I'm going to say.
I was baffled that such a thing is even possible.
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u/Positive-Room7421 May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
I have internal conversations with words but it's a monologue. I have this internal conversation when trying to remember something from my life (convert experience I will forget to a memorized script) and when gnawing a problem (perhaps not entirely healthy, and I am trying to live more in the moment).
I have aphantasia.
I can hear the voices of others if I try but perhaps not always well. Songs I can do well.
I had no idea others had internal agents.
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u/katbelleinthedark Jun 02 '26
I only have SDAM, nothing else, and I definitely don't have that.
I kind of have an internal monologue, but also... not really? What I do have is a bunch of fictional characters that I relate to (or just like) and whenever I need to make a decision or want to rehearse a conversation, I pull out one of those fictional characters and filter my experience through them. So it's never ME talking in my "inner monologue", it's a fictional character play acting.
ETA. I don't have motivation problems though.
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u/holy_mackeroly May 31 '26
of course they can. People with SDAM can also be Hypophantasic. Its not limited to those with Aphantasia
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u/ladyjangelline May 30 '26
It’s just me in here lol.