What’s it like to remember every single day of your life? And does photographic memory exist?
“Memory evolved, we think, to help us predict what would happen next, to plan,” says German neuroscientist Boris Konrad. “And so what happened to you was the most important [predictor], particularly anything related to emotion and to location.”
That helps explain why episodic and spatial memory are especially powerful. You are more likely to remember the turtle dropped onto your lawn by a hurricane than you are the random fact that turtles navigate using Earth’s magnetic field. During a high-impact event, from turtles falling from the sky to meeting your future partner, stress and other hormones released by your body tell the brain to encode the memory deep in your long-term recall, explains McGaugh, who spent his career researching how species normally form memories before he discovered the super memories of HSAM. “The amygdala in the brain says, in effect, ‘I need to remember this.’”
Rebecca Sharrock doesn’t quite remember her birth, but she says she remembers the hospital – the glass walls and cotton blankets, the faces peering into her cot. She remembers being in the car at just 12 days old, sheep-skin seat covers and the disorientating flash of a camera. Really, there’s very little that Sharrock forgets. Quizzed at random on what she was doing on January 17, 2010, she offers, “That was a boring day, but it was a Sunday, and we had the best breakfast: pancakes, waffles, everything.” Boxing Day 2004? “We were just coming back from our first big joint Christmas with my stepdad’s family on the Gold Coast when the news came in there’d been a huge tsunami [in Indonesia] and the beaches were closed.” What about July 21, 2007? “That’s easy,” she smiles. The final Harry Potter book came out. In fact, Sharrock, an avid fan, can recite virtually every line of the series by heart.
I find HSAM/Hyperthymesia incredibly interesting. I take notes on it (thanks for the article links!). However, I think it is not something that is particularly applicable to most people (including members of this forum).
The first article mentioned a researcher Boris Konrad; I will be curious to see what he comes up with regarding teaching memorization techniques to HSAMs.
Because of von Neumann, I even assumed for a long time that photographic memory is possible, and he had it. But then I learned a funny story.
His wife asked him to bring wine glasses, he went to look for them, but soon returned asking for help. And this despite the fact that the glasses were in their usual place, and he lived in this house for 15 years.
And it wasn`t the first report that von Neumann had a terrible memory in daily life. It is more likely that he had some structural features of the brain that we are unlikely to ever know about.
I think it really comes down to semantic memory, an unusual and prodigious memory for symbols and abstraction. Yes, I totally agree with you, I also read about that story, which is quite interesting, because he seemed to have more of an awesome aural memory or auditory intuition for things, as other professors said about him, but lacked equal visualization skills, which is, as I think, the cause of his relatively bad memory for those sorts of things. His visual memory might was just normal.
It would have been great if they had preserved his brain and analysed it thoroughly like Einstein’s.
Yes, I read similar stories from his colleagues. They noticed that he had never used visualization, apparently, he simply didn`t need it. His brain was a perfect abstract machine.
It’s a shame that it will never be explored.
