Have you ever spent a whole morning searching for your car keys or that USB stick holding all your important documents? We rely on our memory, but its unreliability constantly plays tricks on us. Yet a handful of people suffer from a strange condition called hypermnesia, which torments them by making it impossible to forget even the most trivial event of their lives.
What is hypermnesia?
A person with hypermnesia has an almost perfect autobiographical memory. There are few documented cases, but those affected can recall every detail of any day of their life, down to the exact time and everything that happened minute by minute. A normal brain only records, in the long term, the events that are important to its owner.
Short-term memory is constantly being "erased", and only a handful of memories are stored permanently in long-term memory. Most of us can remember only about a dozen significant facts for each year of our lives; the rest only "surfaces" when triggered by a photograph or a reunion with a related person or object.
The case of A.J.
The term hypermnesia (hyperthymesia) has its etymological roots in "thymesis" (to remember) and "hiper" (over, above); "mnesis" is also related and means memory. Only a few cases have been confirmed. One is a woman known only by her initials, A.J., who began recalling the days of her life in complete detail from age 12. Given any date, she can say exactly what she did and which day of the week it was. In her own words: "I can choose any date from 1974 to today, and know what day of the week it was, what I was doing, and any other important detail that occurred on that date." Her friends and acquaintances call her "the human calendar".
Hypermnesia in literature
Literature also has its cases. The great Jorge Luis Borges, in his story Funes the Memorious (Ficciones, 1944), explored the theme through a man who remembered everything with prodigious accuracy. Yet Funes was not happy. Every day, seeing his own face in the mirror, he found it different from the one he had seen the day before (of which he remembered every tiny detail), and he despaired at trying to understand how it could be the same face. Moreover, recalling a whole day took him exactly another full day, which raises some interesting paradoxes. Borges would often ask, "Does a map of China as large as China make sense?" Obviously, in those terms, hypermnesia is not an advantage.
Brad Williams: a walking encyclopedia
Another well-known case is Brad Williams, a 51-year-old radio host from La Crosse, Wisconsin. Unlike A.J., Brad has lived with this gift since childhood. For him, remembering everything is normal. It was only a few years ago, while reading about A.J., that he realized his experience was not at all normal. "I've always been a kind of Google for my family," he confessed in an interview on Good Morning America, on ABC.
His colleagues adore his memory. "He's like a walking encyclopedia," they say. It was his brother, Eric Williams, who made a documentary about Brad's condition. Titled Unforgettable, it shows Brad competing with Google by answering 20 questions such as "who won the Oscar for best supporting actress in 1985" or "who married on October 6, 1991".
The winner, as absurd as it sounds, was Williams. He got 18 correct answers, finishing about 11 minutes faster than the person using the search engine. Putting aside the fact that 11 minutes seems like a long time to find 20 such answers on Google—perhaps the PC operator wasn't too "trained"—the truth is that not just anyone can remember all that information, let alone with such detail. Eric offers an explanation: "We all have the ability to store information. The difference is that Brad can retrieve it."
Temporary hypermnesia and technology
There are also cases of "temporary hypermnesia", almost always linked to traumatic experiences, in which the patient cannot avoid "reliving" the event with every detail, including smells, colors, weather, and tastes. Scientists believe this condition is related to a "malfunction" of the superficial cortex, the region where immediate memory resides. While such cases are rare, some people, like Gordon Bell, turn to technology as a kind of "crutch" to help them remember their lives. Meanwhile, the rest of us keep cursing whenever we lose our keys.
For more information, see the Wikipedia article on hypermnesia.
