Like a Google search engine in their brains: how ‘super’ memory gives a handful of people total recall of what they did and what happened on a given day
- A tiny number of people have what scientists call a highly superior autobiographical memory. It gives them instant recall of a day – what they did, with whom
- One, comedian Bob Petrella, says it’s almost as if ‘my eyes and mind are a camera’; actress Marilu Henner recalls the first time she wore every pair of shoes
What days of your life can you recall? How about in Technicolor detail?
I remember the day I got married – bits of it. I remember details about the days my children were born – the pain of labour, naturally, and how long each took to arrive. And I remember the day my father died, and who told me. But I can’t identify specific details of random dates.
I can’t tell you what I did, or what news events occurred, on May 16, 1993, for example, or September 29, 2012, or any other day.
Jill Price can. The author of the memoir The Woman Who Can’t Forget wrote to James McGaugh, a distinguished professor emeritus at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, to tell him about her unusual capacity.
“I am 34 years old, and since I was 11, I have had this unbelievable ability to recall my past. I can take a date, between 1974 and today, and tell you what day it falls on, what I was doing that day, and, if anything of great importance occurred on that day, I can describe that to you as well.”
American actress Marilu Henner can do this, too.
