I'm the same way with remembering facts. Like a juicer and a sieve I quickly turn experiences into facts, potential facts and general concepts. My memory for facts and concepts is better than most people I meet but my chronological memory is poor. I remember going to lectures in uni and providing I comprehended the lecture and was focused remembering all the concepts and facts presented was trivial. Conversely remembering the order of events like what year I went on that holiday to the USA or what month this year I left my last job is harder. I might remember the season at best.

These researchers should look into correlations between this and so-called aphantasia. There may be a form of recall different from “2D” visual (“watching a film”), more 4D “information geometry”.

Similar experience to yours: recall experienced as a series (fabric?) of facts which tend to be more accurate than my peers, able to describe spatial relationships and manipulate/rotate them; also voracious reader growing up.

If using GPS prefer “North Up” mode which puts all the geometry I experience into a map quite easy to play back later and navigate as-yet-unseen roads in the vicinity of, by projecting/inferring where I am relatively. I don’t “see” the map, I just “know” where everything is relative to everything else.

Unable to actively “picture” myself on a beach, always thought “counting sheep” was a metaphor, yet able to render spatial facts into architectural sketches, or even tell you where on a page a fact was from a text book, and how deep into the book.

I like your term “text optimized”. I’m baffled by the YouTube visual/spoken learning culture — it feels so slow and tedious compared to reading the same knowledge.

This keeps coming up on HN, and I’m struck by similarities in things some self-reported “non visual recall” people are also “extremely good” at relative to norm.

I get the sense researchers are running into lesser-abled, while there may be a cohort who are /differently/ abled, for instance with some almost savant memory abilities instead of the visual recall.

I imagine there's a spectrum and certain strengths are at opposite ends of a gradient. I have weak (but existent) visual recall and imagination, and strong spatial awareness, with a strong preference to text over visual learning. Perhaps strong spatial relationship awareness is one end of a gradient and the other end is strong visualisation.

There are a couple of quite interesting studies about the malleability of some of our cognitive abilities, such as spatial reasoning: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17894600 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22663761 for example.

This is interesting because I never really thought about spatial and visual abilities as opposing- I'd say I'm subpar at both but very strong with language, so I sort of assumed that was the tradeoff. I always thought of daydreaming for example as "hearing" fake conversations with people. Was very surprised to find out that other people did not think the same way. I'd love to see more research on this stuff. But even just reading other people's accounts here has been informative IMO.

It would be especially interesting if we could retrofit some of these abilities into existing neural architectures with the help of technology. For example, one could imagine an implant or indirectly connected device which increases your "L1 cache size" (working memory capacity), or provides supplementary "GPUs" to offload spatial reasoning. They could change the way the brain itself works, or perhaps just act as external modules with fast data lanes which your brain eventually starts to treat as extensions of itself, like it can with prosthetic limbs (or even imaginary "virtual" limbs, like with a mirror box).

It may not actually ever be possible to do it without direct, messy biological/genetic engineering, but if it is possible, I think it would have an incredible impact.

Facts are digital, narrative experiences are analog. Facts are high precision but very expensive, while narrative memory packs far far information but is less accurate (error prone) and precise (memories change with each recall).