Only a few dozen people live on the entire planet who have a phenomenal memory and can remember even the smallest details from their infancy, while most people do not remember themselves at such an early age at all. The incredibly large amount of memory is due to the syndrome associated with the concept of hyperthymesia.
Hyperthymesia, or hyperthymestic syndrome, is a person's ability to remember and reproduce an extremely high amount of information about his life. This ability only affects autobiographical memory. In medicine, they still cannot determine the status of this phenomenon and sometimes associate it with hypermnesia, that is, a similar ability that already affects all types and forms of memory.
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The term "hyperthymesia" appeared not so long ago, in 2006. A group of scientists then put forward a hypothesis about the characteristics of this violation. So, a person who develops hyperthymestic syndrome spends an abnormally long time thinking about his past, due to which the ability to recall certain events from his life arises.
While phenomenal memory developed with the help of mnemonic techniques is not considered a pathology, when it comes to memorizing the necessary information and data, scientists consider hyperthymesia a deviation. Patients with this syndrome have uncontrolled and unconscious associations when they see certain objects or dates, as a result of which a person remembers with accuracy any day of his life.
One famous person who has developed hyperthymesia is Marylou Henner (born 1952), an American actress and producer.
As for Marylou Henner, whose phenomenon is now being actively studied by experts, her earliest memories date back to the age of 18 months. On this day, as the woman recalls, she played with her brother. Interestingly, it was previously believed that a person cannot remember what happened to him until two years old.
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After this event, she can talk about how she spent any of her days, what she talked about, what programs were shown on TV, etc. So, if in his entire life an ordinary person remembers about 250 faces, then Henner remembers thousands of them. From this, scientists also concluded that long-term memory is not selective, and all events that short-term memory processes are transferred to long-term storage.
The very process of remembering Marylou Henner requires absolutely no effort. This, experts say, is akin to an ideal video editor that can accurately recreate any fragment of a recording.
American Jill Price - she remembers absolutely all the events of her life, starting from the age of 14 - if you name an arbitrary date, Jill will reproduce what happened to her that day, what the weather was like, what important events happened in the world.
Her phenomenal abilities were confirmed by scientists at the University of California, Irvine in 2006. Since then, due to the increased interest in research in this area, hyperthymesia has been confirmed in five more people.
In total, according to scientists, by 2014 it was possible to identify about 50 people with such incredible abilities to remember in detail any day of their lives. Scientists at the moment cannot accurately identify the causes of this syndrome, but this may be due to the fact that the temporal lobes and the caudate nucleus in the brain are enlarged in patients.
Neuroscientists study the characteristics of the brain. As part of the search for people with good memories at the California Center for Neuroscience, more than two thousand people were studied. They were asked sixty questions, which could only be answered by people who remember everything.
Due to the fact that there are very few people with hyperthymesia, there is practically no data on the occurrence of this ability. Some scholars consider absolute memory to be a myth and the desire of people to believe in their limitless possibilities. Douwe Draaisma, professor of the history of psychology at the University of Groningen, writes in his Book of Forgetting that "most of our experiences leave no trace in the brain."
Dowe also notes that “people tend to compare memory to something that has become a symbol of preservation for them personally, such as a computer or photography. And other metaphors are used for forgetting: a sieve, a colander. But they all assume that memorization and forgetting are opposite processes, and, accordingly, one excludes the other. In fact, forgetting is mixed up in our memories like yeast is in dough.
The professor applies a medieval metaphor to memory - palimpsest, i.e. a recyclable piece of parchment.
“Parchment was expensive, and therefore the old texts were scraped off or washed off and a new text was written on top, after a while the old one began to appear through the new text. … a palimpsest is a very good image of the layers of memories: new information comes, the old is erased, but in principle, the old information is hidden in the new.
Your memories also resonate in your experiences, and therefore it is impossible to describe the memory as a direct copy of the experience. They are absorbed by what is already there. (Based on materials from “Het geheugen is ongezeglijk.” - de Volkskrant, 03.11.10, p. 48-49.)
Most of us, nevertheless, are not threatened with the "happiness" of having an absolute memory. And while scientists argue whether hyperthymesia is a disease or a semantic feature of the body, it is in our power to make our memory good, because no one disputes the possibility of training it.