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I was watching a show in which actress Marilu Henner was a guest and she was talking about her memory. It seems she is one of 12 people in the world diagnosed with the uncanny ability to remember everything in her life. I was interested as I used to have an ability to instantly recall conversations with people from years earlier, being able to basically see it playing over like a movie clip. People found it astonishing or highly annoying. I never had it anywhere as strong as the people with this condition, but I think I understand what they're describing. I was 24 when I realized that my memory did not work like other people.
I thought this kind of "super memory" would be interesting for members to read about. People that have this do have a definite difference in the size of both their temporal lobe and the caudate nucleus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/enterta...e-super-memory-recalls-every-day-of-her-life/
I thought this kind of "super memory" would be interesting for members to read about. People that have this do have a definite difference in the size of both their temporal lobe and the caudate nucleus.
Individuals with hyperthymesia can recall almost every day of their lives in near perfect detail, as well as public events that hold some personal significance to them. Those affected describe their memories as uncontrollable associations, when they encounter a date, they "see" a vivid depiction of that day in their heads.[3] Recollection occurs without hesitation or conscious effort.
It is important to draw a distinction between those with hyperthymesia and those with other forms of exceptional memory, who generally use mnemonic or similar rehearsal strategies to memorise long strings of subjective information. Memories recalled by hyperthymestic individuals tend to be personal, autobiographical accounts of both significant and mundane events in their lives. This extensive and highly unusual memory does not derive from the use of mnemonic strategies; it is encoded involuntarily and retrieved automatically.[4] Despite being able to remember the day of the week on which a particular date fell, hyperthymestics are not calendrical calculators like some people with autism or savant syndrome. Rather, hyperthymestic recall tends to be constrained to a person’s lifetime and is believed to be an unconscious process.
Although hyperthymestics are not autistic, and likewise savants do not memorise autobiographical information, there are certain similarities between the two conditions. Like autistic savants, individuals with hyperthymesia have an unusual and obsessive interest in dates. Russian psychologist Aleksandr Luria documented the famous case of mnemonist Solomon Shereshevskii,[5] who was quite different from the first documented hyperthymestic known as AJ in that he could memorise virtually unlimited amounts of information deliberately, while AJ could not – she could only remember autobiographical information (and events she had personally seen on the news or read about). In fact, she was not very good at memorising anything at all, according to the study published in ‘’Neurocase’’. Hyperthymestic individuals appear to have poorer than average memory for arbitrary information. Another striking parallel drawn between the two cases was that Shereshevskii exemplified an interesting case of synaesthesia[6] and it has been suggested that superior autobiographical memory is intimately tied to time-space synaesthesia.[7]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia
This is how my memory works, or worked before I became so sleep deprived, except dates are not the triggers for me, perhaps because I rarely know what the date is. I can also bring up a "clip" of a memory by remembering an event chronologically near the event I wish to recall, then I can "search" the surrounding memories for the one I want. Like flipping through a mental photo album.Henner said her memory works like a scene selection menu on a DVD, with “little videos moving simultaneously.”
“When somebody gives me a date or a year or something, I see all these little movie montages, basically on a time continuum, and I’m scrolling through them and flashing through them,” she said.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/enterta...e-super-memory-recalls-every-day-of-her-life/