BROASA-8v1.pdf — page 16

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Lajos Brons
Vol. 28
no obvious reason why they would have to be, however.
According to Daniel Dennett (1992) and others, the self is a narrative construc-
tion. We are (more or less) the stories we tell about ourselves (to ourselves). (The
idea of the narrative self has been further developed in Narrative Identity Theory
within personality psychology.) In the reported cases of frontal leucotomy personal
stories lose their role in narrative self-construction (which is an ongoing activity)—
they become just stories without any special relevance or aﬀect—and the subjects
lose their sense of self-continuity. Which is the cause and which is its eﬀect isn’t
clear exactly (to me at least), but the role these stories play explains their aﬀect, and
that explanation does not in any way depend on their form. That is, these stories—
the elements of our self-identity—can be modal (in the form of imagery-involving
recollections or re-imaginations), but they can also be amodal (i.e. more explicitly
story-like). In either case, they form who (we think) we are.
There is no reason, then, to assume that aﬀective memory must be modal (i),
but this should have been obvious anyway: someone without aﬀective memory would
be like a frontal leucotomy patient, and aphantasics and people with SDAM—who
lack modal memory including (i)—most certainly are not. Consequently, aphantasics
(etc.) must experience (h). This doesn’t establish the existence of (g), however. For a
possible example of (g), see Renoult and colleagues’ (2012) notion of “autobiograph-
ically signiﬁcant concepts”, which they assume to be part of personal semantics.
Nevertheless, while the claim that aphantasics and people with SDAM lack per-
sonal or aﬀective memory would be implausible, they do have autobiographical mem-
ory deﬁciencies. Many aphantasics report having bad personal memories, and the
abbreviation “SDAM” stands for “severely deﬁcient autobiographical memory”. How-
ever, these deﬁciencies are—most likely—not explained by deﬁciencies with regard to
personal or aﬀective memory but by the lack of modal memory. If autobiographical
memory is roughly identical to personal memory and thus to (d) to (i) in table 3,
and aphantasics and people with SDAM lack (f) and (i), which are the two kinds of
modal personal memory, then they have deﬁcient autobiographical memory indeed.
Anna Basso and colleagues (Basso, Bissiach, & Luzzatti 1980) report a case of
loss of imagery. The patient “said he knew his wife to be ‘small, grey haired, with
almond-shaped eyes’ but was unable to conjure up a picture of her in his mind”
(436). This and other aspects of the case report show that the patient—after losing
imagery—had to switch from inferring amodal descriptions (or “semantic” knowledge)
from modal memory (i.e. imagery) to directly recalling stored amodal descriptions—
that is, pseudo-modal memory—but lacking such stored amodal descriptions, he ex-
perienced severe memory deﬁciencies.
Presumably, aphantasics and people with SDAM store much more information in
amodal form—or in other words, they make extensive use of pseudo-modal memory—
to compensate for the lack of modal memory, but this comes with a number of disad-
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