Some people can remember details of events that happened twenty years ago, almost as well as they remember details of events that happened but yesterday
Towards the end of spring of the year 2000 was received by one of us (McGough) An e-mail message from a woman named Jill Price who was trying to cope with the burden of her own memory. Here are excerpts from the message:
As I sit here trying to think of how to begin to explain why I am writing to you... I just hope you can help me in some way. I am 34 years old, and since I was 11 years old I have had an amazing ability to recall my past... I can pick any date, from 1974 until today, and tell you what day of the week it falls on, what I did that day, and if something of great importance... happened on that day, I can also describe the event. I don't look at any calendar before, and I don't look at my personal diaries that I've been keeping for 24 years.
We were skeptical of Price's claims, but intrigued enough to invite her to our research center at the University of California, Irvine, where we study the neurobiological processes underlying learning and memory. A few months later, on June 24, Price came to the meeting. It was on Saturday. We know for sure that this was the date, as her visit was recorded in the lab log. We soon discovered that Price remembers such facts without the need for a diary or calendar.
In this first interview we were careful and looked for objective means to evaluate her claims. We had no way of verifying at the time what she told us about her private past. However, we could ask her about public events that occurred during her lifetime. We had a copy of a book that had been published a short time before, "The 20th Century - Day by Day", by Sharon Lucas, which contained an overview of news events that occurred every day during the 20th century.
We started in the mid-70s, when Price first noticed that her memory was unusual. When we asked her what happened on August 16, 1977, she quickly answered that it was the day Elvis Presley died. When we asked her about June 6, 1978, she told us that on that day California's 13th state bill passed, capping property tax rates. On May 25, 1979, a plane crashed in Chicago. On May 3, 1991, the last episode of the TV series was broadcast Dallas. And so on. Price answered correctly every time.
After that, we presented her with a series of questions in the opposite direction and asked her to indicate the date on which a certain event occurred. When was JR [the main character in "Dallas"] shot? When did the police beat Rodney King? And again, Price immediately answered the correct answer. During our inspection, she identified a mistake in the book regarding the date when the hostage crisis broke out in the US embassy in Iran in 1979.
Although most of the dates we examined were for public events that were widely covered in the media, Price also excelled at remembering less significant incidents. She remembered precisely that Bing Crosby died while playing golf in Spain on October 14, 1977. When asked how she knew this, she replied that when she was 11 years old she heard the news of his death on the car radio when her mother drove her to a soccer game. In one of the interviews, Price described how she remembers dates visually. "When I hear a date, I see it, the day, the month and the year."
In a subsequent interview, in March 2003, she retrieved from memory the dates of all 23 past Easter holidays, she had only one mistake, and told us what she did on each of these dates - and she, it should be noted, is Jewish. We were able to verify many of her claims by examining her diary, in which she wrote regularly for many years. Regarding some of her personal memories, we used our records, in which we recorded the memory tests we conducted for her. In another interview, she correctly remembered the dates of all the previous interviews we conducted with you and the details of the questions we asked her regarding her recollection of past events.
After we were convinced that Price's ability to accurately remember a diary of events from the past is a real ability, we wanted to know if this skill also includes other aspects of the remembering process. We determined that she does not have a "photographic memory" - that is, she does not remember the details of everyday life. She has trouble remembering which of her keys fits which lock. She makes lists of the chores she has to do. Also, she does not excel at memorizing facts.
However, as far as dates are concerned, Price is gifted with instant recall, and she can name the day of the week for every date in her life since she was 11 years old. Her recall excels in carefully organized, easily accessible and accurate memories of most days of her life, since pre-school age. Adolescence and beyond. Until Price entered our laboratory, this particular type of memory, which we call highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), had never been studied. Today, we are deeply investigating the psychological and biological roots of this type of memory, hoping that understanding these processes will provide us with a broader insight into the processes underlying memory in general.
Is super memory common?
For several years we mentioned Jill Price's name by the pseudonym AJ because Price did not want to be identified. After we published an article about her extraordinary memory in 2006, our work received attention across the US. The issue was given additional publicity when we appeared on the US public radio network, on April 19 and 20, 2006. Price, who until then had been hiding in the shadows, decided to come out, and in 2008, published a memoir called "The Woman Who Can't Forget".
Following the publication, we were approached by other people who thought they had, or might have, similar memory abilities. After putting them to the test in a series of rigorous tests, we identified five more people with superior autobiographical memory. On December 19, 2010, the five appeared on the American television show 60 minutes. Within a few hours of the broadcast, we received dozens of e-mail messages from people who could have been candidates for the study, and within a few days, hundreds of such messages arrived in our inbox. We put many of them on the phone and tested them with a series of questions about political and sporting events, famous people, holidays, plane crashes, and other noteworthy incidents.
We have also started more formal testing processes at our research center. We recruited several dozen control subjects, of similar ages to the group with superior memory. In both groups we included men and women in a similar numerical ratio. Some of the subjects who claimed an extraordinary memory performed less well on the tests than the control group subjects. Needless to say, it is not enough for someone to believe that they have a superior autobiographical memory to make them so.
About 40 subjects who performed well on the exam were tested, along with the control group, on another exam, in which they had to identify the day of the week on which each of ten randomly selected dates fell, and indicate news events that occurred on or near these dates, as well as a personal event that happened to them on each from these dates. As a group, the study candidates with superior autobiographical memory performed significantly better than the control group on all components of this exam.
Eleven of the subjects who excelled in the exam came to our laboratory at the University of California, Irvine for further testing. In the first stage, they were asked to answer questions about five personal experiences that we could verify: events such as their first day at university and primary school, their 18th birthday celebration, the address and description of their first place of residence after leaving home, and the date of their last final exam their in college. The eleven candidates for the study as having a superior memory performed significantly better than those of the control group and outperformed it by a large margin. The total score they received in answering these questions was 85, compared to a score of only 8 received by the control group. We concluded that these 11 subjects, ranging in age from 27 to 60, clearly had superior autobiographical memory.
In order to sharpen the distinction between this group and other subjects, we conducted several memory tests for them in our research laboratory. Subjects identified as having superior memory performed better than the control group in only two tests out of eight: one, matching names to faces and the other, which tested the ability to recall visual objects. However, in these two tests, the scores of the two groups overlapped considerably. Some additional features characterized those with superior memory. A larger number than the average, five out of the eleven, were right-handed ("left-handed"). They also scored significantly higher on a test of compulsive personality traits. Even in the one-on-one interviews, some compulsive behaviors were discovered, such as hoarding objects and extreme efforts to avoid contact with objects that may be contaminated with bacteria.
Another question that arose in trying to understand superior memory was whether these memory differences are related to differences in brain structure. MRI scans revealed that some areas of the brains of the super memorizers were different from those of the control group subjects. We found size and shape differences in some of the gray matter areas (brain tissue made mainly of nerve cell bodies) and the white matter areas (brain tissue consisting mostly of wire-like bundles of nerve cells, covered by an insulating sheath of white material called myelin). The structure of the white matter fibers in those who remember showed a greater efficiency of transferring information between brain regions.
Findings from other laboratories studying brain injury and from laboratories using functional MRI (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) indicate that the brain regions and fiber tracts prominent in the brains of those with superior autobiographical memory are involved in remembering life events (autobiographical memory). In our study group, the structure of one of the fibrous pathways, the uncinate fascicle, which transmits information between the temporal lobe and the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex, appeared to have better neural connections than those found in the control group. This finding is thought-provoking, as there is evidence that damage to this area impairs autobiographical memory.
The results of our simulations prove nothing, of course. We do not know if these anatomical differences contribute in any way to the superior memory capacity, or if they are a consequence of the extensive use of this capacity. To find out, we need to determine whether superior autobiographical memory capacity emerges in early childhood. If this skill has some genetic basis, over time we will be able to discover the genes involved in it. However, so far we have no evidence of a higher prevalence of this ability among the relatives of the subjects with superior autobiographical memory.
The profile that is revealed
Our findings allowed us to draw some tentative conclusions about these unusual people. First, the subjects identified as having superior autobiographical memory do not develop such superior memory simply because they somehow learn things with great ease. The members of this group excel in their ability to retain what they have learned. A person with an average memory can remember, for a few days, many details of what happened, say, last Tuesday, but the memory fades in about a week. This is not the case with the group of people with superior memory: their memories are preserved for a much longer time.
Second, we know that the memory systems of those with a superior memory are not precise recordings of sound and image documenting every millisecond of their lives. Moreover, their memory is not similar to that of "S", the hero of Alexander Luria's book "The Mind of a Memory Wizard: A Small Book on a Huge Memory". The book, which has been widely cited since 1968, provides a case study of one of Luria's patients, who could easily learn and retain over time a large amount of relatively meaningless data, such as, for example, rows and columns of numbers. The superior autobiographical memory is also not like the memory of experts on the subject, who train themselves, through many repetitions and use memory aids to memorize information, such as the thousands of digits after the decimal point in the Pi number.
The memories of those with superior memory are less detailed than those of Luria's patient, but they are well organized, in the sense that they are linked to a particular day and date. We also know that this skill appears naturally and without educational effort. Many of the questions we used in the tests dealt with topics such as the weather on a certain day, and it is likely that the subjects did not invest time and effort in memorizing such information. When asked how they remembered this information, the typical answer of the subjects in this group was: "I just know it." And although they enjoy tying a date to an event as a mental amusement, they often have little, if any, interest in events that occurred before their birth.
Those with superior autobiographical memory usually appreciate this special skill of theirs. In this respect, they are not at all similar to the eponymous character in the 1962 short story by Jose Luis Borges, Funes the Memorable. After Phones fell from a horse he acquired the ability to retain detailed memories of all his subsequent experiences; He could retrieve from his memory the appearance of every leaf on every tree he saw. His memories tormented him, leading him to think that his life was nothing but a pile of trash. Although Price told us that her memories were a burden to her, most of her friends relish this unmediated access to their past. Most of them lead active professional and social lives. Some of them star in the entertainment industry: actress Manilou Henner and television producer and stand-up comedian Robert Petrella have such a memory, as well as violinist Louis Owen and actor and radio broadcaster Brad Williams.
These extraordinary abilities do not grant superhuman powers to the people endowed with them and do not allow them to be ahead of their colleagues in the race of achievements in their chosen profession. Petrella had a chance to use his skill when he wrote, just for fun, "Bob's Book", in which he noted the best experience he had every day of the year, during his entire adult life. But this project was, as mentioned, just for fun and had nothing to do with the production of a TV show.
Our research work on the subject joins many studies on people with disabilities or unusual psychological abilities. The French psychologist Theodule Ribaut reported in 1881 that brain damage damaged new memories, but not old memories, which remained as they were. These studies have been confirmed in recent decades in the studies of Brenda Milner from McGill University. Milner examined the famous patient Henry Mollison, who was known for years by the initials HM. Her research has contributed to insight into what happens when a person cannot generate new autobiographical memories. After part of his brain, the frontal region in the middle temporal lobe, was surgically removed, in both hemispheres, to treat his epilepsy, Mollison lost, almost entirely, the ability to learn new autobiographical information, although his memory of previous experiences he had was almost intact, nor was the memory he retained the knowledge related to motor skills, known as procedural memory.
These findings inevitably led to the conclusion, which was revolutionary for its time, that separate brain systems are responsible for different types of memory, and as a result, the study of memory underwent a dramatic change. The new discovery that there are people who are gifted with the ability to accurately and over time remember both personal experiences and important public events has opened the door to research that may, over time, provide new insights into the way the brain stores and retrieves memories of past events.
like a muscle
Extensive evidence, beginning with psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus's 1885 studies on human memory, shows that memorizing material we seek to learn strengthens memory. Later studies conducted by Henry L. Roediger III of Washington University in St. Louis and Jeffrey D. Karpik of Purdue University found that removing information from memory, that is, bringing a memory to consciousness for a few minutes, may strengthen the ability to recall.
However, even with the help of training, those with normal memory are not expected to reach the abilities of our subjects with superior autobiographical memory. McGough spent many years doing research that found that we all remember emotionally important experiences more strongly. The new and intriguing finding is that those with superior autobiographical memory produce strong memories even of relatively insignificant events.
Despite the extensive media coverage, we identified only about 50 people with such a memory, out of several hundred possible candidates who contacted us. This is a tiny fraction of the total number of TV viewers and newspaper readers who heard about our research. If this ability helps to successfully deal with life's challenges, why is it so rare? It may be a remnant of a skill that was important in the past and today is almost lost. Before the invention of the printing press, human cultural heritage was mostly preserved through stories and knowledge passed down orally from generation to generation. In the pre-literate world, such a miraculous memory would have given its owner a senior position among his peers. The need for such an organized mental capacity is diminishing, and it is possible that the emergence of computers and smart phones makes it completely redundant.
It is possible, and perhaps even almost certain, that many of the subjects we dismissed in the early stages of the study on the assumption that they do not have superior autobiographical memory, have a different type of memory capacity that we have not yet identified. It is possible that some of them have clear memories of their past and they simply do not bother to mentally date them, as do those with superior autobiographical memory. These hypotheses may lead to new research directions. Instead of discussing mental disabilities, we and other researchers can use the opportunity presented to us in a random e-mail message from 14 years ago to better understand the way the brain works by studying the Olympic champions of human memory.
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More on the site
Something to remember and nothing to forget - Dr. Zvi Peltiel, a member of the editorial board of Scientific American Israel, criticizes some of the methods used by the authors of the article. You are welcome to review and comment: www.sciam.co.il
Remembering and not forgetting anything - reading with a critical eye / Zvi Palatial
The ability to remember many events from the distant past in a detailed way is undoubtedly a wonderful ability. Rightly so, James McGaw and Aurora LaPorte chose to investigate her. In the description of the research presented in the article in Scientific American, the personal stories of some of the subjects who were discovered to have superior autobiographical memory skills are included. Research that will discover what allows a person to remember the events of the past in great detail may contribute to the understanding of the human mind. It may also improve the condition of those who are oppressed by the abundance of memory, as well as those whose memory often betrays them.
In the article, the scientists explain how they discovered the "Super Rememberers" group, and how different they are from ordinary people such as those in the control group. The memory gap and the ability to reconstruct past events between one and the other is indeed extremely significant. When this description is combined with polished and persuasive writing, the impression is indeed created that there is a very small group (at a rate of one in a million) of people with a special quality that does not exist in other people. The description can be compared to the way in which normal people are distinguished from left-handed people, or hemophiliacs are distinguished. In different people, the rate of blood clotting varies in a certain area. However, the blood of hemophiliacs does not clot at all. In this way, they constitute a group that is clearly and distinctly different from the rest of the population. Is this the case of super-Zochori?
A perusal of the illustrations describing the method of locating and sorting super-Zochori reveals a completely different picture. From the explanation about the sorting, it appears that the researchers decided on an arbitrary threshold between super-rememberers and the rest of the population. Super rememberers are therefore the group of people at the top of a succession of rememberers. They are the one in a million who remember best. This can be compared to the best runners in the world, outstanding swimmers or athletes in other fields. There is always that one in a million of the best. It is worth investigating their skills and what brought them to this, but it certainly does not follow from the fact that they are a distinct group from the rest of the population with a unique feature that does not exist in others.
Dr. Zvi Peltiel He is a member of the editorial board of Scientific American Israel
More on the subject
The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory. AR Luria. Basic Books, 1968.
Memory and Emotion: The Making of Lasting Memories. James L. McGaugh. Columbia University Press, 2003.
Behavioral and Neuroanatomical Investigation of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). Aurora KR LePort et al. in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Vol. 98, no. 1, pages 78-92; July 2012.
About the authors
James L. McGaugh is a research professor specializing in the neurobiology of learning and memory at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on the connection between memory and emotion.
Aurora LePort is a neuroscience research student at the University of California, Irvine. She studied the psychology and physiology of people with superior memory.
in brief
About 14 years ago, a woman contacted us who claimed to have an unusual ability to recall the distant past.
Following the publication of the case, we were contacted by hundreds of other people who made similar claims about their memory capacity.
In the tests we conducted, we found that several dozen of them could describe details that happened on a certain date, decades after it.
Brain scientists are now investigating the neurobiological processes underlying the "superior autobiographical memory."
The article was published with the permission of Scientific American Israel
