I Hate Stroads - and so do you.

Driving is frustrating. It's frustrating to try to predict unpredictable drivers, it's frustrating when you need to take four turns, cross a 5 lane road, and make a U-turn to get from the Bed Bath and Beyond to the PetSmart, and it's frustrating to need to take a car out on an large arterial road to get milk for the recipe when you run out.

As frustrating as driving in North America is, walking is often worse. I'd want to get my will and testament in order before walking from the Bed Bath and Beyond to the PetSmart on the opposite side of the road.

I hate this intersection. Especially on foot.

Having had many conversations along these lines, among the first things I hear are "the car is the ultimate form of freedom," and "North America was built with the car in mind, unlike Europe, which was built in the time of horses and carriages." These are pretty easy to dispel. Cars are an absolute necessity for anyone living outside of a city center. Saying "cars are the ultimate form of freedom" strikes me much like saying refrigerators are the ultimate form of freedom because your refrigerator allows you to keep your food at a variety of temperatures. Cars are a requirement for participation in society, there is no freedom from cars outside of city centers. They allow you go anywhere, by often it's the only form of transport available. Being able to walk, take a car, bike, bus, or catch a train is a lot more free.

As for the "European cities are built different" gambit, this is a dodge. Cities are not static, they are rebuilt year after year. A moving feast. Most US cities were incorporated before cars were mainstream, and all have been retrofitted to become more car-centric. We've surrendered more and more public space to cars as years have gone on.

Some definitions will help in moving forward. For the purposes of this post, a "road" is made for efficiently transporting cars from one place to another. A road is not a place. Roads connect places. Roads have wide lanes, few connections or distractions, high speeds, and no land access. You must leave a road to access a business. Roads are designed by the mile. If you're traveling more than 50 mph, you're on a road.

Highway 287, south of Loveland. This road leads to Longmont

Streets are places. You might go to a street to shop or run an errand, you may walk from one shop to another, have a meal, or sit on a bench. Things on streets are human scale. Small signs, sandwich boards, window displays, and wide sidewalks. Two story buildings with offices or apartments on the second floor. Streets are places of high productivity. Places like walking malls, college campuses, and Disney World are all incredibly productive, needing only slow streets to connect them; they transcend the need to accommodate cars. Streets are designed by the foot. If you're traveling less than 35 mph, you're probably on a street.

4th between Lincoln and Cleveland in Loveland, one of my local streets. 

Enter the stroad. Stroads are the futons of travel: they have two functions and perform neither well. A stroad has two lanes of travel in either direction, long turn lanes, a center turn lane, many traffic lights, and stay on one long enough and you'll find powercenters (strip malls but with big box stores) on either side. They have many entrances and exits, but do not provide access to places. Sure you can get to the Home Depot, but that's not a place. It's not human-scale, it's car-scale. Stroads are designed by the 'hundreds of feet.' If you're going between 35 and 50 mph, you're probably on a stroad. This is the worst thing traffic engineers have unleashed.

Once you learn to recognize these, you see them everywhere. I'm so sorry (I'm not), but I'm going to absolutely ruin them for you. Stroads are ugly. It's not a place anyone outside of a car wants to spend any time, and if you're in a car, you're glad the speeds are high, so you can get somewhere else quickly.

Most accidents in cities occur on stroads, not highways (look up crash rates in your city). The wide lanes and highway-like design encourages fast driving speeds, regulated by enforcement, and not by design. Combine the high speed with lots of intersections, entrances and exits, and you have the most dangerous design possible. You would be hard-pressed to to purposefully design a road more dangerous than a stroad if that was your expressed goal. The design contributes to the fact that the US has the most dangerous roads of any developed country. 10.6 deaths/100,000/year vs 3-4 across most of Europe.

During the pandemic, road usage dropped, but the fatality rate/miles driven actually increased. So the only reason these stroads weren't killing more of us is because they were too congested to get going fast enough to kill anyone. The average risk of severe bodily injury increases from 50% at 31 mph to 75% at 39 mph. The average risk of death increases from 25% at 32 mph to 50% at 42 mph (source). Bear in mind stroads exist between 35 and 50 mph.

"But stroads at least get a lot of people from one place to another, right?" Well, they get a lot cars from one place to another. Cars are the worst way to carry lots of people. It's the suburb problem all over. Cars are not dense. Most cars contain one person, take up a whole lane, and cut across two lanes of traffic because they just remembered they DO need another towel from Target.

The capacity of a single 10-foot lane (or equivalent width) by mode at peak conditions with normal operations.

Assuming peak values, stroads can move 6,400 vehicles per hour. Changing the 5 lane stroad to a single lane in each direction, a center bus lane, and a two way bike lane in each direction, assuming the lowest values on the new street, actually increases capacity from 6,400 to 12,700. And that's taking the stroad from 5 lanes to 4. Add a sidewalk, and you're at 21,700. With slower vehicle speeds, you could also eliminate the clear zones (cleared out areas along the roadside for out-of-control cars to roll on into).

"This new street would be far more expensive though! Stroads are at least cheap, right?" No. Stroads require far more space and maintenance than comparable higher-capacity roads. Long, wide, and frequent turn lanes mean more asphalt, more traffic lights add cost and maintenance, as do high speeds.

The land that is served by stroads is incredibly low productivity. Parking lots are required, take up space, make no money, and pay little taxes. The land is very low-density by design, meaning a stroad serving powercenters is a high-cost, low-payoff way to use land.

Generic, low-productivity powercenter in Anywhere, USA.

So stroads are bankrupting our cities, but at least they are ugly, inefficient, and unsafe while doing it.

While I'm at it, here's another thing that I'm sorry I'm going to ruin for you (not really). There is a better way to control speed than speed limit enforcement. Everyone hates getting a speeding ticket, but often it's not your fault. When designing environments, the designer has a duty of communication. When that fails, the designer, not you, has failed. Ever pull on a door with a vertical handle, and felt stupid when you realized it's a push door? Don't. The designer made the door with a signifier (vertical handle) that grants the affordance (ability) of pulling. You're not stupid for pulling, even if there is a sign that says "Push."

Design isn't value-free. When designing a door, the values aren't that relevant, but when designing a roadway, prioritizing things like speed or flow over safety is creating a design that comes with a value statement about human life.

Roads are designed just as much as door handles. There is a road that I drive that signifies and grants the affordance of driving 50 mph. Wide, straight lanes, no intersections or distractions signal that driving fast is okay, however the speed limit is 35. I once drove that road at 35, and felt deeply unsafe, being passed by traffic going 15-20 mph faster. Speeding on that road is the safer choice, as it was designed for a high speed. When the road design doesn't match the speed, you are left to constantly monitor your speed. Have you ever carefully monitored your speed on complex, narrow street with lots of distractions? Of course not—the road design matches the intended speed.

Future Scott here: I just got back from driving around Scotland, and the design of the roads there tell you the speed limit. Whenever I checked the speed limit, it was about the speed I was going every time. Big wide roads has higher speed limits. When the speed limit was lower, the road was narrow, curvy, and complex to navigate, naturally slowing me down. I never needed to look at a speed limit sign the whole time I was there. The car could just as well have not had a speedometer at all.

Back to Past Scott: Okay, this has been fun bit of taking down stroads and road design, but pointing out problems is always is the easy part and trying to come up with solutions is the hard part—except with these problems. The solutions can be so easy to implement. Small changes in regulations can make a HUGE difference in the livability of a city. It's almost comical how much of a problem these regulations cause, and how a few targeted changes can eliminate these problems. I find it quite heartening and a wonderful area to direct resources.

Changing the standards to which we build essentially gives us a new road system for free—it just takes a few decades. As roads are regularly updated, it doesn't cost anything more to update to different, safer standards. Many changes are as easy as literally repainting a road.

What follows are specific recommendations, targeted to fix these issues.

Simple Solution #1: Update road standards to human-centric designs.

Streets and roads should be designed with humans in mind. Currently, when designing a road, the intended speed is chosen, followed by projected volume. It is then made as safe as the speed and volume allow, and the cost falls out of the equation. Humans, when asked what they want from their streets and roads, will prioritize 1) safety, 2) cost, followed by 3) volume, then 4) speed. This is almost the exact reverse of how streets and roads are actually designed.

Currently, roads are designed for cars. Switching the standards to consider the other road users - pedestrians, bikes, people in wheelchairs, will lead to more useable, efficient, and higher capacity roads. Techniques like traffic calming can help bring the design of the road match the intended speed.

The street here is brick, signaling that the car isn't the only user. The pedestrian crossing is on the same level rather than using a street cut. A pedestrian island in the middle means the pedestrian only has to look one way before crossing.

Chicanes are used here to narrow lanes, protect turning bikes, and the mini roundabout disallows cars breezing through the intersection without looking for other users.

This area is a huge rabbit hole. If you're interested in how to change standards with better designs, please look into the extra resources below. Traffic calming is just one of many arrows in the quiver.

Simple Solution #2: When updating stroads, slowly convert to streets or roads.

Stroads are not places like streets. Nor are they efficient at moving cars, like roads. Land can be used much more efficiently by creating dense, less car centric areas of high productivity where humans may actually want to spend time, with roads connecting these areas.

Stroad-to-road conversion:

• limit access
• prioritize throughput over access
• connect productive places
• embrace simplicity

Stroad-to-street conversion:

• Slow traffic (traffic calming)
• Prioritize people over throughput
• Build a productive place
• Embrace complexity

Better use of the space that stroads take up could take many forms. You can keep high speed travel in center lanes (roads) and have 'frontage roads' separated from high speed travel that includes all the intersections and complexity of a street. (Esplanade Street in Chico, CA does this). You can cut down to one lane in each direction, and include alternate travel options like sidewalks, public transit, and bike infrastructure to make these powercenters more productive. With less car demand, parking lots can be reclaimed into walkable places.

Simple Solution #3: When implementing alternate transit options, make them more convenient than driving.

On some trips, buses, or trains need to be the faster or cheaper option. If a bus gets a dedicated lane, it will arrive before the cars stuck in traffic. If the bus is more convenient, people will take the bus. If a bus is sitting in the same traffic as the cars, the only people who will use it are the people for who it is an ethical choice or those with no other options. The same goes for biking and trains. If trips are more convenient using other modes of travel, these modes of travel will get used. In Boulder, it is difficult to bike from off campus housing, but there is a convenient bus. Most students in Boulder take the bus. In Fort Collins, there is great biking infrastructure, so students bike. People will take the most convenient mode of transport, and creating more options means no one is forced to take any particular mode of transit. If you like driving, feel free to drive on the now less congested roads.

Changing the zoning rules and standards will change our cities. Every time a road or street gets an update, it can be brought up to the new standard. Cities aren't static; think to a time when you hadn't seen a city for 5+ years, and when you come back it seems unfamiliar. We've seen this happen before.

Car centric areas can be redesigned to reclaim area surrendered to cars and car infrastructure:

Before

After

With an decreased dependence on cars, cities will become less noisy (cities aren't loud, cars are loud) and less space will need to be devoted to parking lots. To see how much space that will open up, here is a map with parking lots and garages highlighted in red of Little Rock and the area around Disneyland in CA:

Notice the sea of red around Angel stadium and the parking surrounding Disneyland in the upper left

It's been done in the past; we can reclaim bad, car-centric, dangerous, and inefficient design and replace it with good, human-scale design.

In the US, we have a car culture, and no one is proposing to take that away. None of these interventions actually force cars off roads. They simply make the roads more efficient, more pleasant, and more productive.

Cheers,

  - Scott

Email List: tinyletter.com/scottsieke

Extra resources:

• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Charles Marohn Jr.
• Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles Marohn Jr.
• The Deadly Myth That Human Error Causes Most Car Crashes 
• City Beautiful on YouTube
• Not Just Bikes on YouTube

Suffocating Suburbs

What a cute suburban garage, it almost looks like a house

Suburbs are isolating. It's so natural to think of the suburbs as the fulfillment of the American Dream, or as the middle-class goal, but that's just familiarity. Getting into a car, driving for 12 minutes each direction onto a collector road then an arterial and back to grab more dish soap is normalized if that's the only way it's ever done. Having a few close friends in nearby houses seems like 'the way things are' until you start investigating alternatives. It's easy for confirmation bias to kick in and say "I know lots of people in my suburb, and they're some of my closest friends; I've had a wonderful time living in my suburb," but what you don't ever have is a point of comparison to something different, because all suburbs are so similar.

In this post, I'm not going to advocate for getting rid of suburbs, or single family homes on big lots, or big wide streets with lots of on-street parking. What I will advocate for is zoning laws that make other types of suburbs possible.

Currently, nearly all suburbs (any by land area, most of all cities) are zoned as single-family homes on big lots. This is Residential zoning (R), at the lowest density (1), making this a R1 zone:

A suburb in Anywhere, USA
(I zoomed into a spot on Google Maps with labels turned off, and ended up in West Des Moines)

R1 zones contain homes with no access to any retail, except by car. While parks, churches, schools, and childcare can be built in these single-family residential zones, simply having a corner market within walking distance would save many car trips, but these zones disallow even that small convenience.

A vehicle is a necessity for living in single-family R1 zones. In order to get anywhere that isn't zoned for R1, you need to get into a car, which necessitates that the people you are meeting there are less likely to be neighbors. People love a small town feel where they know their neighbors, but balk at ideas like putting a coffee shop in a suburb. R1 zones lack any third place (work and home are the first two places, the third place is where you can go to socialize), like a coffee shop, bowling alley, salon, makerspace, bookstore, arcade, lodge, social club, or coworking space. These are all destinations accessible by car only, and when you get there, it's usually full of strangers unless you've planned to meet up with friends. Part of the reason that churches are so popular in America is because they function as one of the only third places easily accessible from deep within R1 zones.

Children growing up in this environment are incredibly isolated until they get a car. That's why getting a car can seem like it has life-or-death importance to children in suburbs. Taking away the car is tantamount to trapping them in an environment that lacks any stimulation or fulfillment.

Imagine growing up here as a child with no car.

There are better ways to make suburbs.

Think of this neighborhood in your (large) city: narrow alternating one way streets, with one lane of travel and one lane of on-street parking. Small to medium houses line the street with small front yards that are right up against the sidewalk. Trees cover the sidewalk and part of the street, and there is a corner market where you can buy staples like flour, milk, and eggs. Now that you have that in mind, answer these two questions:

• How expensive are the houses?
• How old is the neighborhood?

A typical house in Capitol Hill. Bonus point for someone walking their dog.

For me, this description reminded me of Capitol Hill, Washington Park, and Central East Denver. These are old and expensive neighborhoods. Part of the reason they are so expensive is because they are rare - they are in fact illegal to build today in any zoning district. We updated the regulations to mandate things like parking minimums, wider lanes, two way traffic, no mixed-use zoning, setback requirements, minimum lot sizes, and clear zones for the fast-moving cars to roll into when they crash. These regulations make those quaint, human-scale, livable neighborhoods a thing of the past. We can regulate them back. Not only are they more livable—they are far safer than the neighborhoods built with updated road standards.

Wide residential streets with large clear zones, straight roads, lots of on-street parking, and setback houses encourage faster driving, making these roads less safe than complex narrow streets. In fact, these wide residential streets have 4x the number of accidents as narrow streets.

Again, we can fix this problem. Single Family R1 Zoning can be a thing of the past.

A note before moving on: I'm not advocating for eliminating this type of suburb. At least not for everybody. If you can live with it yourself, and can justify subjecting children to the isolation, no one will stop that from happening. Developers can (and will) still create these neighborhoods. Eliminating the zoning simply opens more options, it doesn't shut any down.

Simple Solution #1: Eliminate R1 Zoning or change the R1 zoning district for single-family homes to allow variable lot sizes, duplexes and fourplexes, and small apartment complexes in keeping with neighborhood aesthetic, as well as small commercial corner markets and third places that save car trips to commercial zoned developments.

These changes helps make these areas more walkable and less car dependent, as well as more serviceable by public transit. Duplexes, apartments, and smaller lots increase density, giving the corner markets and third places a greater customer base and public transit more justification—more density means fewer transit stops service more people.

Simple Solution #2: Change standards to increase safety by narrowing roads, reducing on-street parking and setbacks, reduce lot sizes, and make the area more difficult to navigate by car to promote slower, safer neighborhood speeds.

These changes functionally bring back the old style of neighborhood that demands such a premium nowadays. These neighborhoods experience far fewer vehicle accidents, despite being built before the new standards surrendered space to fast moving cars, presumably to keep things safer (it's actually due to an adherence to a measurement of traffic flow called "level of service" which makes things less safe in order to keep cars moving, but that's perhaps a story for another time).

Cheers,

  - Scott

Email List: tinyletter.com/scottsieke

Extras resources:

Urban Design Extras and Pics

Paved Paradise, and put up a 5 level interchange

If you've been driving for a decade or more, you've lived through this story: highway is congested, so they want to expand it. It's under construction and nearly unusable for a few years, after which traffic is better for a year or two, then its right back to square one. This problem is called 'induced demand.' People will use the infrastructure that is built. Build more lanes and more people will drive. Build a protected bus lane that goes faster than traffic, and people will take that. People just want to the most convenient mode of travel.

I don't like driving every day, so I take the bus, even though it's in the same traffic That's induced demand. <sidenote> When you think "why is there all this traffic?," you are part of that traffic. </sidenote> The state DOT's have always built and expanded highways, and they are stuck with that hammer, seeing every traffic problem as a nail. Just take a look at this page: three active projects, ALL just expansions. Adding lanes doesn't do anything, just allow more cars to create more low-density traffic. To help rethink these highway construction efforts, check out these projects: Rethink 35, Better Streets Chicago, Lid I5.

All the pictures that didn't find homes in the other two posts:

You've got to build bypasses

Didn't seem worth it

Fixed it

Yes it is

I like that the city I work in started leaving bikes around everywhere

Extra Resources:

Aphantasia

This post will be a lot more personal than other posts on this blog, because rather than catching my curiosity, this topic has personally affected me, and as such, I’ll be sharing my own experience in learning about this thing called “aphantasia.” Though this is a personal story, I find that learning about how other people perceive the world and how other brains work to be endlessly fascinating. (If you do too, read anything by Oliver Sacks)

I’m not going to define what aphantasia is quite yet, because for me, the most interesting part of this topic is how I learned about it, and I’d like to try to share a small part of that experience.

Mystery 1: My first inclination that my cognition might be a little different from others came as I started taking masters-level classes in Education. Having graduated college in a STEM field, I’ve noticed numerous changes in pursuing a liberal arts degree, one of which is the introspective nature of much of the coursework. The instructor would often questions like, “Think of a time when a teacher didn’t understand something you were trying to communicate;” or, “How were you taught about ‘X’ subject?” 

I drew a complete and total blank for specific examples like that. I thought they were overly specific questions, but everyone else had very detailed answers. I continually thought “How could you possibly remember something like that?” I remember that I learned things, but never how I learned things. I am among many people who always hated the “essay about personal experiences,” the “two truths and lie game,” and thinking about what to put on a resume, but I never realized that my troubles might related to the fact that I simply don’t remember any of these details. I thought it was because I don’t like talking about myself, the oft-cited reason I’ve heard from so many others. In truth, while I also don’t like talking about myself (despite doing it for this entire blog post), there might also be this underlying reason of poor autobiographical or experiential memory.

Mystery 2: I took up the practice of vipassana meditation several years ago, and among the many cues delivered from my guided meditations are things like “close your eyes, and notice that while you can’t see the desk or wall you have been staring at, this visual space is still active.” When I closed my eyes, I could see some small modicum of activity (subtle grey blobs, and very fait light cues), and it was that to which I though the mediation was referring. 

One session however, the daily meditation said something along the lines of “Look at the table in front of you, and imagine a candle, sitting on the table. You may see a faint outline of a candle, or your experience may be no different than if the candle were really there. Look at the candle, and see if it is one that you recognize, or a candle you have never seen before. Closing your eyes and placing the candle on the table in your mind may help.” That is a paraphrase, but I listened to that section 3 or 4 times. It was the first time I had ever heard, in completely unambiguous terms what the visual sensation should be like, and this didn’t match which my experience at all. I was completely unable to conjure any whisp of an image of a candle with my eyes open or closed. The prompt of “is it a candle you recognize” was completely nonsensical to me because I was imagining the idea of a candle, not any specific one. It could just as easily have been red or white, tall or squat, vanilla or plain paraffin.

I initially chalked this second experience with the meditation app up to not being quite that good a meditator yet. I couldn’t believe that with enough practice, I might be able to actually “see” something that wasn’t there! To most of you, I suspect, this is starting to sound off because, of course, you don’t need to be some Level 20 meditation expert to see a candle when you close your eyes. You just picture it, what’s the big deal? Maybe it’s just an outline, or a flash, maybe it’s in greyscale, or you need to concentrate to see it, but it’s there, right?

I lack any an ability to visualize things. In other terms my “mind’s eye” is completely blind. Yesterday as I write this, I listened to a podcast that mentioned the term “aphantasia,” and out of curiosity I Googled it (well, I DuckDuckGo’d it). It was having a name for it that finally collapsed all the weird phenomena into one explanation.

Aphantasia is a term coined in 2015 by Adam Zeman that refers to the inability to picture things in your “mind’s eye” There has been relatively little research on it, with the majority of research just starting to break out from two researchers: Adam Zeman from Exeter and Professor Joel Pearson from the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

My experience of trying to visualize things seems to be different from others. From accounts I’ve read and people I’ve asked, if asked to picture an elephant, the experience varies from flashes of a full picture, being able to conjure and hold an image, to registering an outline or a greyscale image. To me, when asked to visualize an elephant, this is approximately what I’m seeing when I close my eyes:

Subtle grey shades, the occasional indistinct shape or line, and a faint awareness of some sort of network, which I suspect might be blood vessels in my eyelid. This is what I’m seeing regardless of what I’m being asked to picture – an elephant, my wife’s face, a place I’ve been on vacation

If I had to categorize the thought process, it would be something like this:

Note that I don’t actually “see” the text or lines, I just think them. I could continue adding details like this until I ran out of things I knew to be true of elephants, but there is never any image I’m referencing.

‘Visualizing’ things has always been abstract like this for me. If I asked you to picture a star, something visual will likely come to mind, but I asked what the next word is in “Twinkle, Twinkle Little ____” you likely just thought the word “star” rather than picturing one. For me, everything is like the latter case. If I care to draw something (I’m about average at drawing), I refer to these descriptors, and draw them out such that they resemble what I know to be true about elephants. Here is a drawing I did of an elephant with no reference:

I tried being fancy and making the elephant take a step. While drawing, I thought things like “elephants have pretty wrinkly knees, so I’ll add knee wrinkles” and “I know they have a little diamond shaped tail because I remember thinking that was odd while watching Tarzan once.” After looking at a reference I realize I got the tusk and the back leg/belly areas pretty wrong, and the eyes should be lower down. Close enough.

I’m sure aphantasia has been noticed by individuals for as long as there have been humans, but the earliest real account of aphantasia was written down by one of Darwin’s cousins in 1800. Francis Galton asked 100 people to visualize their breakfast table, and 12 reported little to no imagery, which took Galton by surprise. Fast forward a few centuries and in 2009, neuroscientist Adam Zeman had a patient, called MX in the literature, who lost the ability to visualize internally after surgery. This curious case opened up the field and the eventual coining and description of aphantasia. Others who are known to have aphantasia include Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Walt Disney Animation Studios; J. Craig Venter, the biologist who led the team that first sequenced the human genome; Glen Keane, Disney animator and creator of The Little Mermaid; and Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller.

The most interesting thing about all of this to me is that it took until my late 20’s to realize this. For years, I thought everyone was using “picture this” as a metaphor, a figure of speech. I thought it was the same usage as “feel the music” or to get a “taste of success.” Those aren’t literal feelings or tastes (I know you can feel bass in your chest, and feel emotions with music, but I still think the expression is mainly metaphorical). If asked to describe an elephant, my process and that of looking at an elephant in your mind's eye and listing details are indistinguishable. The fact that I can’t see it never comes up. I assume they can’t see anything, they assume I can see something, and it never gets brought up. It took listening to someone really carefully spelling out their experience visualizing something to realize that I’m doing something different.

It blew my mind to realize that when many people are reminiscing, they are revisiting the sights, smells, and sounds of past times. I have none of that sensory input with memories. My memories are more or less a list of facts, or major plot points, like Cliff Notes or Sparknotes.

I’ve seen tweets such as these one that made no sense to me:

People saying “that’s not how I pictured it” to a movie finally makes sense to me. “Counting sheep” makes a little more sense. Math word problems make a little more sense now. That example from earlier of being able to conjure up a candle on a table that’s as real as if it were really there still seems like a superpower to me. <sidenote> "Conjure" is the perfect word if you can't do it. It seems like magic. </sidenote>

To wrap up one more thread before moving to some FAQ, that first mystery from my grad school classes hasn’t really come up yet. This is the main insight that I had upon learning the word “aphantasia.” I’ve always considered myself to have a decent memory. I memorized the lyrics to Blackalicious’ Alphabet Aerobics, and Tom Leher’s Elements Song, I have known pi to 50 digits, I can solve a Rubik’s cube by remembering sequences like “U R Ui Ri Ui Fi U F” 

These are sort of memorization ‘feats’ which are categorically different than being really good with names or remembering stories from your past. It’s that last type that I am really terrible at. If you know me well, you’ve probably heard me say, “that sounds like something I’d do,” or you may have looked at me dumbfounded while explaining something that we had done together while I registered no recognition. I’ve always kind of acted along while feeling a bit guilty for forgetting the memory.

The realization was that memories are so often tied to sights, sounds, smells, and emotions led me to understand that most can use those senses as a ‘hook’ to remember something from their past. They can call to mind a visual of what they were seeing, or an emotion they were feeling at the time, and access that memory. I don’t have any of these ‘hooks’ with my memories. So when I think about a vacation I had, I think things like “we saw this show, which I’m sure was quite nice, and stayed here, so the walk to there must have been pretty quick. The city was close to the sea, so I’m sure I could smell saltiness. I liked the people I was with, and I remember this funny joke we all laughed at...” Sparknotes. It’s absent of any visual, auditory, emotional, or other sensory components.

This quote from Blake Ross, Co-founder of Mozilla, rang really true for me:

"I’ve always felt an incomprehensible combination of stupid-smart. I missed a single question on the SATs, yet the easiest conceivable question stumps me: What was it like growing up in Miami?

I don’t know.

What were some of your favorite experiences at Facebook?

I don’t know.

What did you do today?

I don’t know. I don’t know what I did today.

Answering questions like this requires me to “do mental work,” the way you might if you’re struggling to recall what happened in the Battle of Trafalgar. If I haven’t prepared, I can’t begin to answer. But chitchat is the lubricant of everyday life."

 

It’s hard not to feel a sense of loss for this type of autobiographical memory. I wish I could “relive” moments from my past, remember childhood stories or the plots of fictional books I’ve read, or even access my favorite smells when they’re not around. Next time you see me, please don’t hesitate to tell me a story from our past, because unless it was in the last few years, I probably don’t remember anything but some really basic ‘plot points.’

One effect of this lack of autobiographical memory is that I find it very easy to “live in the moment.” Holding grudges or feeling embarrassment is basically an impossibility for me, which I don’t mind. It may sound callous, but my grieving process is mercifully short, as I can’t keep recalling memories from the past like most can. I suspect that moving on from loss is easier with less solid memories to fall back on.

While I’m talking about benefits of aphantasia, I’ll mention that I had always assumed my lack of memories from my childhood was the result of repressed memories, which I had heard of. I have always thought it was more likely than not that I must have been terribly bullied or lonely and attributed the fact I couldn’t remember much of it was due to repressing those memories. I’m relieved to figure out a happier cause for their absence. My own lack of these memories also led to the assumption that my grad school classmates were wildly inventing when asked about their own schooling, so it’s comforting to know that I can have a little more trust that they aren’t making things up.

A final result of this lack of autobiographical memories is that I don’t really identify with my past self. I think of “Scott from 15 years ago” as a different person who I have little in common with. I mean, that guy hasn’t taught a professional development workshop, hasn’t been to Scotland, nor does he even know who Cordelia the cat is. Those are all important aspects of who I am now. In many fundamental ways, I have more in common with my wife than I do with 15-years-ago Scott. As a result of this, I find it really easy to change my opinion on things. Since I don’t identify with ‘past Scott’ who held that old opinion, there’s no problem with having a different one now. For example, Scott from a year ago drank 2-4 caffeinated drinks a day. Current Scott drinks none (okay, maybe once every week or two). No problem. Present Scott has never been a coffee drinker, only past Scott has, and he's gone already.

General questions often asked about aphantasia, and the experience of having it:

1. Can you picture my face?

• No, but I know what you look like. I have always been able to recognize faces just fine, but have a hard time knowing from where I know them. I think this is common, though.

2. Do you recognize me when you see me?

• Yes. The process of putting a name to a face is different that the process of visually generating a face from a name.

3. What about simple shapes, like a circle or triangle?

• Nothing. If the brain is a computer, mine has no monitor. Asking “what is on the monitor?” doesn’t make sense to me.

4. “I can’t really SEE things either. For me it’s just picturing it in my mind. It’s not the same as seeing it.”

• I can’t even picture it in my mind. I don’t SEE things, but I ALSO can’t picture them in any “mind’s eye.”
• I was initially worried that this is all a bit subjective until I read about a study that looked at "Binocular Rivalry" In that study they asked participants to visualize either red horizontal bars, or green vertical bars. Researchers then flashed one image to the left eye and one to the right simultaneously, and asked which image participants saw 'more.' People who are strong visualizers saw the image they were asked to visualize about 80% more often. With aphantasics, there was no correlation between what they were asked to visualize and what image they saw 'more,' suggesting a real and objective measurement of a real phenomena.

5. What about other senses?

• Same with all senses. If a song is stuck in my head, it’s just lyrics and rhythm, no sound whatsoever.  I don’t think I’ve ever had a non-lyrical song stuck in my head. Concerning smells, I have no idea what coffee smells like, but I’m confident that I’d recognize it if I smelled it again. If you asked me to describe the smell, I’d say “nutty, earthy, and slightly burnt.” I’m referencing things I know about coffee, and nothing about the smell itself. The weird thing is that it’s the same with emotions. I don’t know what it feels like to be frustrated, but I know that if frustrating circumstances come up, I’ll be able to identify it.

6. Do you have an ‘inner monologue?”

• Yes, but it doesn’t have a voice, or accent. It’s just thoughts. I was amazed to hear that some people’s “inner voice” is not only auditory, but uses their speaking voice, or a high pitched version, or accented version.

7. What goes through your head all day if not sights, smells, and sounds?

• Just that ‘voice,’ and only when I pay attention to it.

8. Do you dream?

• I think I do, but I forget every last detail within a minute of consciousness. There are no images or sensory components, just ‘plot points.’ I can remember a grand total of 3 dreams from my entire life, one of them lucid.

9. How do you follow directions if you’re not following a map in your head?

• I have three lists: One is a list of turn directions like “left, right, right, take the exit onto the highway.” The next list is the street names: “Washington, 3rd, Ralston, Highway 287.” Last, I have the distances “right away, 1 mile or so, quite far, right away.” Those together get the job done.

10. I’ve heard of synesthesia, is this similar?

• Not really, I don’t experience anything like synesthesia.

11. Does not knowing what an emotion feels like affect your empathy?

• Yes and no. No in the sense that I don't feel others' emotions for the sole reason that they are feeling them. If someone is crying because they lost someone I never knew, I don't feel any sadness 'on their behalf.' So, in that sense, I don’t emotionally feel what anyone else is going through. Often, the thing that is affecting them is also affecting me, so I may feel the emotion independently. If I also knew the person who passed, I'll feel my own sadness. Otherwise my main emotion is one of compassion for my friend, not of sadness. However, I make a lot of effort to understand what others are going through and know that their feelings are valid, so in that sense, yes, I do 'feel' empathy.

12. Do you not have an imagination?

• I do. “Imagination” is a broader term than “visualization.” I use different tools, but I can still create things from scratch, even if I’m not visualizing them.

13. Do you feel that having aphantasia is a positive or negative thing?

• Neither. I sure would like to remember my own life better, but I am who I am because of my brain and how I think. With mental imagery and autobiographical memory, I would be a different person. It’s a difference, not a benefit or loss.
  
  There are a few fringe benefits though: I’ve never been scared by a verbal story because I’m not imagining anything; I can forget all the terrible images I’ve seen in movies and TV shows; adaptations of books are always spot-on because I wasn’t picturing anything in the first place; I’ve never held a grudge; I’ve never lingered on an embarrassing memory; and living in the moment without visual images 'intruding' on my mental space increases my mindfulness.

To me, it's a testament to the varieties of the human experience that it took me until my late 20’s to realize this difference in how my brain works. This cognitive difference, which has presumably always existed, has only even begun to be studied in the last 5 years. There are so many possible variants to cognition, memory, and more that we're presumably only beginning to discover. 

Who knows, maybe your red really is different than my red, and we can never know.

If you are interested in participating, or finding out about how well you can see with your mind's eye, you can take the Visual Imagery Assessment from the University of Exeter (Zeman), or the Vividness of Visual Imagery Quiz from aphantasia.com.

I'm a 1, unless you think you can see a faint star in "1," in which case I'm a 0

Cheers,

  - Scott

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