Marylou Henner, a Broadway star who rose to fame back in the 70s, has now become popular for medical and physiological study. They are researching her phenomenal memory. This 59-year-old woman remembers every day of her life. Such an unusual ability confuses specialists in the study of brain activity, and forces them to reconsider their fundamental ideas about the nature of memory, its limits.
Marylou can easily describe any day she lived with the smallest details: what the weather was like, what clothes she was wearing, what was on TV. The first memories of a woman belong to the age of one and a half years. Merylou remembers playing with her brother. “In a matter of seconds, I go back in memory and see what happened on any given day,” says the woman. As a rule, the average person remembers about 250 faces in his entire life. There are thousands of them in Henner's memory.
Marylou Henner is one of the rare people whose extraordinary memory is called hyperthymesia - i.e. the ability to remember the events of your biography. This concept in psychophysiology appeared relatively recently, first appeared in 2006. The number of people with similar abilities around the world does not exceed 20 people.
The actress perceives her unusual feature as a kind of gift. According to the woman, he does not bring her any particular inconvenience. The actress says that such a superpower has never been a trauma for me, and she is very glad that she remembers her whole life. She is a walking story of her family, relatives and friends can always come to Marylou and ask what happened on any day.
The super-memory of this woman is "arranged" in a completely different way from those of those people who have phenomenal abilities to memorize numbers or playing cards. She does not need to make special efforts to remember the events of her life. Her brain works like a video recorder, where you can rewind any length of time and play the necessary fragment.