There are people on Earth who do not forget anything
Recently, USA Today magazine spoke about one such unique person from Southern California, without giving his last name. Psychologist Larry Cahill, who researched him, assures: this man can describe in minute detail any day of his life. As if she was captured on film. Cheating? Not. The psychologist checked: the unique one easily recalls events in which some famous people participated, and this, for example, was shown on TV a long time ago.
Thanks to real-time brain scans, scientists have penetrated deep into its secrets. But they have not yet been able to get to the causes of phenomenal memory. And now, in the latest issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, a hint of a possible solution appeared. Research by Professor Don Cooper and his colleagues at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center has shown that only one neuron - a nerve cell in the brain - is able to store incoming information. But before, scientists were sure: memory is formed by groups of neurons, establishing connections-contacts with each other.
The researchers tracked the process of memorization taking place in a neuron using nanoelectrodes. And it is believed that the individual memory of a neuron is short - it lasts for several minutes. But it may well be that in phenomena it is somehow fixed. And each neuron becomes a carrier of indelible information, which people get access to.
Neurons Are Like Octopuses At one time, the famous mathematician and cyberneticist Johann von Neumann calculated that the human brain can contain approximately 10 to 20 power units of information - millions of volumes of books. And this is only due to the connections between nerve cells. And if we add here the "storage" of each neuron? The possibilities of human memory will turn out to be completely limitless. Like the universe.
Now scientists have to check how realistically it is possible to increase the abilities of individual cells, and with them - of the whole brain.
BTW
They didn't forget
Napoleon had an exceptional memory. They say that he - still a simple officer - was put in a guardhouse. There he found a book on Roman law. Two decades later, Napoleon could still quote excerpts from it.
Commander Suvorov, as contemporaries say, remembered all his soldiers by sight.
Once the fourteen-year-old Mozart in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome heard a large piece for two choirs "Miserere", the score of which was kept secret. He remembered it, and at home he recorded music without making a single mistake.
According to legend, the memory of Pushkin's brother - Lev Sergeevich - saved the fifth chapter of the poem "Eugene Onegin". Pushkin lost her on the way to Petersburg. And the draft was destroyed. Alexander Sergeevich wrote to his brother in the Caucasus and told about what had happened. Soon I received the complete text of the lost chapter, accurate to the comma. Brother restored by reading first of all once.
Academician Abram Fedorovich Ioffe did not use the table of logarithms - he knew it by heart.
The great Russian chess player Alexander Alekhin could play blindfold from memory with 30-40 partners at the same time.
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