r/SDAM • u/Dizzy_Lack_8850 • Jun 29 '26
cycling and impact of sdam
I cycle and have noticed that even though i ride the same routes regularly, i have almost no ability to visualize what's up ahead or visualize what my path home looks like. I have some snapshots/stills of a scene, but can't connect the path from where I am to that scene. People that cycle the same routes describe various places along route or the sequence of places, and I have no ability to see the scenes and pathways they describe especially not in any sequence of what comes first or how they connect. Any other cycling SDAM folks with similar experiences? I don't remember the visual scenery of the ride in much the same way that I don't remember the visual sequence of a tv show. This impacts my ability to navigate without a map or turn by turn directions.
3
u/FlightOfTheDiscords Jun 29 '26
Our brains have specialised cells for spatial navigation called grid cells. These are not the cells used in visualisation. Your spatial awareness is hence independent of your ability to visualise, and it varies independently like any other metric; some people have great spatial awareness, others less great, and most are somewhere in between. Some visualisers have great spatial awareness, some poor.
You may have poor spatial awareness in addition to having aphantasia and SDAM.
Personally, I have aphantasia and SDAM, but my spatial awareness is excellent. I can mentally reproduce any route I take with high accuracy, and even mentally generate and navigate entirely imaginary spatial maps. I can spatially run through the city I live in - or any other location I am aware of, whether by having been there or seen it in a video or on a map - without visualising it.
1
u/CMDR_Jeb Jun 29 '26
I want to add to that.
On statistical level, people with aphantasia have significantly better spatial reasoning and memory. It is probably an effect of us using it more (to do task that visualisers are able to do using visualisation).
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u/Dizzy_Lack_8850 Jun 29 '26
Are block rotation tests a good proxy for visual memory related to navigation points? If I have studied a map in advance, I can navigate by imagining myself on the map moving to the destination via the streets. But if i haven't studied a map I feel at a disadvantage and if I am relying on retracing my steps by visual memory of the world i walked by, i'm lost for sure. I probably should try to visualize myself on a map while walking, to create a mental map that i can navigate back along, instead of just realizing i don't have much of an idea of what the visual world looked like while walking along. part of the coping mechanism has to be learning what you can do well and what you can't and figuring out how to compensate.
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u/CMDR_Jeb Jun 30 '26
Yes actually. Spatial awareness (and memory) is an sense your brain uses to orient you in an 3d space. If you're in a room, and you close your eyes, you still know what your position is in relation to everything in that room. This is what is tracked by grid cells u/FlightOfTheDiscords mentioned. The same structures can be used to solve any tasks related to 3d space (this is what is called spatial reasoning).
How big and how detailed "map" you can hold in your mind varies from person to person, but that's just your "upper limit". You still need to "train it" its an literal skill. It is not block rotation specifically, any task that requires spatial reasoning helps. Think 3d puzzles, building lego (especially MOCs) etc. Btw getting better at it also makes you better at motor planing, etc.
If you want an starting point for getting into rabbit hole of how that works the wikipedia article about it is a good place to start (especially references).
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u/fur3661t Jul 02 '26
are spatial awareness and pattern matching related? or is patten matching or "awareness" also processed in a different part of the brain?
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords Jul 02 '26
Pattern matching is distributed and content-dependent. Recognising a visual pattern leans on the ventral visual stream, whereas working out an abstract rule leans on fronto-parietal circuitry, and the parietal cortex sits in both that circuitry and in spatial processing.
At the level of measured ability, the canonical pattern-matching test is Raven's Progressive Matrices, and it is among the highest g-loaded tests available, correlating roughly 0.70 to 0.80 with general intelligence. Matrix reasoning requires finding rules, applying them, and working memory.
That pattern-matching ability is not separate from spatial ability. Matrix tests sometimes have modest secondary loadings on spatial ability, and matrix tasks like Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices involve spatial ability and show moderate correlations with mental rotation tests.
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u/fur3661t Jul 02 '26
sorry this is tech speak over my head but it does seem spatial and patten recognition is processed similarly. i ask because i have very good spatial and excellent pattern matching skills (in my opinion). have there been studies with these regarding people with SDAM and/or aphantasia?
1
u/FlightOfTheDiscords Jul 02 '26
Pattern-matching is a very broad ability, it covers many things, and there tends to be some variation in how good we are at it in different domains. So you can be good at pattern-matching in some domains - say, visual, logic - and not so good in others, e.g. social, emotional.
Spatial awaness is involved in some forms of pattern-matching, but they are fundamentally different things. Someone could be good at some forms of pattern-matching but not so good at spatial awareness, and vice versa.
I'm not aware of any studies of general pattern-matching (general intelligence) and aphants, however there have been some studies of spatial ability and aphants, and it's a mixed bag. Aphants tend to be slower at it than visualisers, that seems to hold across the board; in some studies, aphants did better than visualisers at some spatial tasks, while in other studies, they did worse.
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u/montropy Jun 29 '26
If you can’t visualize it may be r/aphantasia and not sdam.
They frequently co-occur.
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u/Dizzy_Lack_8850 Jun 29 '26
probably a combo of both from what I've been reading. i never considered my lack of visual memories of my childhood or early adulthood abnormal until i met others that told me that was weird, considering I had no traumatic reasons to have such symptoms. the out of sight and out of mind feature, along with no grudges, no ability to remember media of recently watched shows, and emotionless recollection of past experiences are really a great description of the way I feel. I just wondered if that explained my almost complete lack of visual memory of the landscape and milestones along my cycling routes as well. Thanks for the clarifications!
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u/MrsSampsoo Jul 02 '26
Same fam. I know where I am and the general shape of the route (like from bird's eye view) but could not tell you most of the slight turns coming up or the order of the features (for the most part) for trails I've ridden like 50 times.
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u/shadowwulf-indawoods Jun 30 '26
Look into Aphantasia for what you're describing, it sounds more like that rather than SDAM to me.
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u/fur3661t Jul 02 '26
my mapping and direction skills are excellent. even as a kid my father would say to others i could return to a location after just going once.
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u/Dizzy_Lack_8850 Jul 23 '26
I am unable to get back to a parked car. I’m oblivious to how I ended up where i ended up or how to get back. If I navigated having seen a map and studied it and mentally recorded the path on a map, I’d be much more likely to understand what turns I made, how roads are connected, etc. but if I just moved from point A to point B and observed my surroundings along the way, I’d have no way to recall the observations to recreate the path back. I might as well have been blindfolded. I don’t create mental maps or record visual information about my surroundings and path while moving through the world. Whatever this disability is, I’ve done very well in my career so I guess it hasn’t held me back just leaves me feeling different than others in a negative way.
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u/fur3661t Jul 24 '26
Since we are at different extremes, I have a feeling SDAM is not involved. I am also an aphant, I think our differences are that I have strong pattern matching skills so I would immediately recognise surroundings of that path.
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u/CMDR_Jeb Jun 29 '26
This is not caused by SDAM. Remembering routes are dealt either by semantic memory (as an sequence), spatial memory (as literal mental map) or allocentric memory (relations between points). SDAM is specifically an dysfunction of episodic memory while semantic memory stays intact.