It’s about the same as anyone else, I think, though I remember lyrics more strongly if I remember the concepts or melody or rhythm that I can associate with the lyrics. If I have a particularly strong feeling about a song or lyric or if I repeat it and sing along, I can easily remember it for some time after. It’s not like my memory works better or worse than others (as far as I know), it’s more like I can’t as easily store and recall a visual memory without converting it first to concepts or details and storing those instead. The idea that I can see someone’s face clear as day in my mind or see my life flash before my eyes seems incredibly foreign, almost like a superpower.

The problem seems to be visual memory, not auditory or verbal. And it’s not that I can’t understand visual concepts better - e.g. a YouTube video or diagram can have a greater impact on my understanding than a verbal speech or audiobook. But it’s about remembering concepts and details - there’s no “fuzzy visual” for me to latch on to. Either I remember a detail or concept clear enough, almost as if it were described in words, or I don’t.

If anything, I find it weird that I can easily recognize visuals or logos that are similar to what I’ve seen before. E.g. to say “that looks like the Spotify logo,” while needing to actually look up the Spotify logo to “see it”. I suspect I end up “pattern matching” the concepts and details I’ve seen visually - e.g. round, green and black, sans-serif semibold type, rectangular, relative thickness/margins, and so on… and match on that. Like anyone, my memory can be faulty or incomplete - I’ve less reason to remember something I haven’t seen or experienced as often.

I do wonder what a scientific study might uncover or have uncovered about this condition. All I can say is of anyone else I know who might have it, most don’t think about it as much as I have. It’s uncomfortable to think that you’re deficient in some way for being unable to do what “everyone else” can do, especially when it doesn’t seem to affect your day-to-day life in a particularly visible way.

I suspect it is why I liked computer software so much, though. I could move and manipulate visual things so easily that otherwise seemed impossible. I could imagine that just like glasses help correct vision deficiencies, a future AR headset could easily help correct a lack of visual memories through automated capture and some form of recall querying. Visual mental manipulation would probably be harder to mimic though, and more like today’s software, I imagine, in which you have to “issue instructions” a bit more. If I had to say an obvious advantage to this condition, it’s that any visual brainstorming I do can be easily shared as I do it, since I’d be using paper or digital means anyway.

By comparison, if I have a song idea, it’s nearly impossible to reproduce it exactly. I’ve never had that issue visually - either the visual in front of me matches the idea I had or it doesn’t, there’s no perfect visual idea in my head to try and match up to or fall short from. In that way, it is perhaps a bit easier for me to “live in the moment,” and to share ideas I have in a visual format, not that I’ve given it much thought before. I think it leads me to have less creative visuals though, as their basis is almost always a concept of some kind, or merging of concepts.