9 ms·

'Super memory': Why Emily Nash is sharing her brain with science

149 points by voisin 3y ago

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
I wonder if she can index on specific details, or if a linear scan is required to answer more complex queries. If she sits down to read through the periodic table, can she look up all of the properties of any element on demand?
- prng2021 3y ago
  Isn’t that what she did? They randomly picked calendar dates and asked her to explain things that happened on each day.
  - neilv 3y ago
    Is that O(n), O(1), or something else? And is any n the total amount of information stored, distance from now, distance from start, or something else?
    - datameta 3y ago
      From what I understand, if they are asked about let's say April 17th 2009 they linearly scan through all the April 17ths. So there is a filtering step that ignores all other 364 days. But they also don't start from their earliest memories so how does that filtering work?
  - datameta 3y ago
    If I'm not mistaken, the question here is whether they will be using episodic or semantic memory in the recall of the periodic table. Meaning - can they recall learned facts as well as lived experiences? Will they linearly remember the moments of learning about each element? What is the granularity of their recall?
  - lolinder 3y ago
    That's technically different than what OP is asking about. She could have a perfect memory for dates and experiences in her life but not have indefinite perfect recall for something more fact-oriented like the periodic table. It sounds like her fact-recalling abilities are deeply tied to memories of experiences and conversations, so she could probably intentionally structure a study session to take advantage of that, but it doesn't mean she automatically can recall everything she reads. Edit—looks like in general people with HSAM do not have better than average memory as measured by other kinds of tests: > So far, the studied conducted at UC Irvine suggest that individuals with HSAM have superior abilities in autobiographical memories but are no different from age- and sex-matched control participants on standard laboratory memory tests. https://cnlm.uci.edu/hsam/ https://cnlm.uci.edu/hsam/
- criddell 3y ago
  That’s a good question. She did mention that her memory seems to be calendar based. She might be able to master the periodic table a day at a time. Jan 1, study hydrogen. Jan 2, study helium. Jan 27, study Cobalt.
- kibwen 3y ago
  Up above I linked a short story written by a man with HSAM. Here's an excerpt that's a dialogue between himself and someone else with the condition: --- “How many have you seen?” I asked her. She went on looking at the dog. She blinked a couple times. “Are you allergic to dogs?” I asked her. “Yeah,” she said. “I’ve seen sixteen Pomeranians in my life.” “Nice. I’ve seen, uh.” We were silent two minutes while I counted. “I’ve seen fifty-eight Pomeranians.” “Shit, that’s a lot of Pomeranians.” “Well, you see them on the train in Tokyo sort of a lot.” “How many poodles have you seen?” “Fourteen,” I said. “You answered very quickly.” “I counted them a few months ago.” “Why did you count them?” “I was trying to get to sleep. I count memories when I am going to sleep.” “That’s interesting.” “It’s gotten more interesting as I’ve gotten older. It’s like Memory Golf: I try to think of things that have only happened between three and five times.” “Why three and five times?” “It’s hypnotic,” I said. “Three or five times gives you a little slice of every part of your life. You can write a complete and thorough autobiography about anything that’s happened to you between three and ten times.” “Why not more than ten times?” “Then it’d be too long.” “How many cups of coffee have you drunk in your life?” “Whoa — whoa. Please don’t ask me that. I’ll start counting and then I’ll slip into a coma for a year.” “Sorry. Now I am thinking about it too. Oh no. I hate it.” “You have to be careful with this stuff. You can’t write an autobiography about all the cups of coffee you drank, or all the times you’ve used the toilet. It has to be something that’s happened between three and ten times.” “Not about something that happened twice?” “No. It might just be a coincidence.” “Not about something that happened once?” “Maybe I’m wrong.” “Maybe you’re not.” “Whenever I tell people about this, I use the example that I’ve eaten a cinnamon bun thirty-two times in my life.” “How many times have you told people that you’ve eaten a cinnamon bun thirty-two times?” “Uh, nine.” “You could write a complete and thorough autobiography about the nine times you told someone you’ve eaten a cinnamon bun thirty-two times.” “I’m going to have a stroke if I think about that.”
maxutility 3y ago
Act III of episode 585 of This American Life (a WBEZ radio show broadcast on NPR and distributed via podcast) discussed this phenomenon and spoke with a few individuals with HSAM: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/585/in-defense-of-ignorance/act-three-9 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/585/in-defense-of-ignorance... One of the individuals was a script supervisor in Hollywood responsible for ensuring continuity between scenes during filming. But it also ventures into powerful emotionally resonant territory, touching on the bittersweet implications of experiencing loss when memories never fade.
- stevenwoo 3y ago
  I re-listened to this and I think all of this episode is worth the time investment if you have not heard it. The first act is with director Lulu Wang and the real life inspiration for her movie The Farewell and the second part is an interview with Dunning behind the infamous Dunning-Kruger effect.
brandall10 3y ago
There was a great 60 Minutes on this nearly 15 years back, where they picked random facts from historical record and got pretty shocking immediate recall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zTkBgHNsWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zTkBgHNsWM
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  I found it interesting that she didn't remember everything. Notably in one example, she couldn't recall what she had for lunch, but did for dinner. I find it almost more weird that she can recall so many meaningless (in the grand scheme) details yet there is still a limit. Perhaps too meaningless?
  - datameta 3y ago
    I think where their attention is and therefore what gets encoded is similar to the rest of us. In one instance they were unable to recall what the interviewers were wearing after spending two hours with them. They remember their experiences visually, essentially. So if information was not actually recorded, it can't be searched for. On a different note, I'm curious how long people with photographic memory store the info at the same fidelity. Does their perfect recollection of a landscape they looked at for a few minutes fade somewhat after a year or so?
    - thecoppinger 3y ago
      I read somewhere years ago that each subsequent recall of a memory is remembering the last time you recalled it—in a sense, an entropy-like phenomenon called memory reconsolidation. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/memory-reconsolidation https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/memory-rec...
    - philipswood 3y ago
      Is there any solid evidence that photographic memory exists?
      - 3y ago
moffkalast 3y ago
> For Emily, it was validation that she wasn’t, as she puts, it “weird.” Being one of only like 100 people with the same superpower? Yes, not weird at all :P Wasn't there some theory that we forget things slowly in order to keep us sane or something like that? Given that these people have perfect recall and remain completely normal and functional far more likely makes it an unintentional fault that needs fixing than an evolutionarily selected-for attribute. > Those with superior memory remember the good, but they will also never forget the bad. They feel the pain as if it were today. Some with HSAM struggle with anxiety and depression as a result. Yeah and so do lots of the rest of us, doesn't seem like that much of a correlation.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  Even if you could remember everything, I am curious how you keep it straight. I may be extra boring, but a lot of my life is rote. Day 452 of Job is really similar to day 451 and 453.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Why not? It's not constant super awareness of your memory, just having all of it available if you need it. Instead of trying to remember something and drawing a blank you just remember it. At least that's my understanding of it. I honestly really envy people who can maintain long term memory without constantly refreshing it. All the classes I've ever taken soon got rm -rfed after the final exam, except for the handful of things that I needed to keep knowing on a regular basis.
fbdab103 3y ago
I suppose if she is ever on hard times, she can study for a month and cleanup on Jeopardy or a similar quiz show.
- vunderba 3y ago
  Humor aside, you'll find most Jeopardy contestants actually know the majority of the answers to any given question on Jeopardy (single and double), and the determining factors are more about buzzer technique, ability to perform on-stage, and shrewd wagering on daily doubles. Sony can't really afford to "ratchet" up the difficulty either since that would result in an arms-race of trivia questions that would drastically reduce the appeal to the mainstream viewer if they saw categories like "Descendants of the Zulu Royal Family", "Musculoskeletal Radiology", "Polymer engineering", and "Civil Servants".
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    That makes sense. The vast majority of trivia I have seen on such shows feels attainable by anyone with dedicated study.
poulsbohemian 3y ago
This is fascinating, but I’m left confused at the banality. Maybe it’s just the way the article was written, but truly, who cares that she can remember what was playing on Netflix three years ago? It does cause me to wonder if brains are attuned to certain things - like in this woman’s case, is she particularly interested in celebrities and that’s why all the examples given are out of the tabloid headlines? The article left me with a lot of questions.
- PKop 3y ago
  Yea the choice of questions to ask her was ridiculous. I mean start there maybe, and escalate to something more interesting, or go further back in time etc. Such a lack of imagination. It's almost like everyone wanted to believe and didn't want to push the limits to break their impression of it being some super power.
  - mateo1 3y ago
    Also with the other woman they used as an example, the only thing she did is say that X date was a Thrursday or something, which might simply be a trick and not a memory recall.
    - quintushoratius 3y ago
      Marilu Henner is somewhat known as a prodigy. She's a member of Mensa, things like that. The clip shown in the video was chosen poorly because it doesn't really convey her abilities. I just checked her Wikipedia page, and besides a passing mention of her HSAM its pretty spare. I seem to remember (ba-dum-tiss) that it used to be mote comprehensive.
  - criddell 3y ago
    They asked for verifiable facts. I think those answers fit that criteria perfectly.
- khazhoux 3y ago
  > truly, who cares that she can remember what was playing on Netflix three years ago? That's kind of the point, though -- she retains trivial information that 99.9999% of brains will discard.
zackmorris 3y ago
I'm curious how this relates to neurodivergent/ADHD/autistic learning where someone has weak rote-memorization skills and mainly remembers things as a fractal of associations. For me, I can't remember that I have an appointment tomorrow, but if you ask me how computers work, I'll start with explaining electron orbitals and band gaps, doping, masking, VLSI, assembly language, C, functional programming and where AI is heading from first principles. Unfortunately instead of being some kind of superpower, it's mainly been debilitating for me, because I've spent my career writing CRUD apps in an endless series of failed startups. Because most people don't think this way, and instead see only the use-case before them as a stepping stone to another goal, usually financial. It would be easier for me to design spaceships than manage my bills, but I seem to be relegated to doing chores for the rest of my life and dying penniless.
- interstice 3y ago
  I associate strongly with this, my memory is almost entirely compartmentalised. Even to the point of what happened earlier today being a fog unless I can find a leap off point. The answer is start a business, it’s a strength to be able to deep dive into all areas and leap between them at will, I’ve found.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  Wow what a whirlwind that comment was. Circling back to the main point, it seems like her recall has some manner of fractal association to it, by how she describes remembering things.
- vbezhenar 3y ago
  But you're living in US. In US you got paid crazy salaries for programming. Why do you work at failed startups? Just get some job with crazy salary, work there for 5 years and then retire.
  - oumua_don17 3y ago
    As GP refers to >> neurodivergent/ADHD/autistic >> paid crazy salaries for programming may be it's difficult to go through the typical interview loops for such jobs as they are not designed to be inclusive for ND etc despite all the diversity and inclusion BS (more often than not) at such workplaces.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Johnny von Neumann was another likely candidate for having HSAM, based on all those stories of him being able to repeat almost everything he ever read verbatim. I wonder if it had anything to do with his mathematical prowess, given that autobiographical memory is usually considered a separate thing from wherever math goes.
- IncreasePosts 3y ago
  Can this lady(or other people with HSAM) actually recite what they've read in the past verbatim? It seems like she can just tell you what she was doing or what happened on a given day, but didn't delve into how far that goes - maybe she can tell you she was reading book X, but couldn't necessarily recite passages from book X?
  - elijaht 3y ago
    From the article: Her father, Jason, said he would show Emily a series of coloured bowling pins for about 10 seconds and then spin her around, asking her to name the order they were in. “She would knock them off right away in terms of identifying every pin, in terms of, you know, red, yellow, green, blue,” he said. Her mother, Julie, discovered Emily -- at age five -- could watch a Peanuts cartoon and then recall and repeat the dialogue from any point in the episode.
russellbeattie 3y ago
What's great about Emily's life as opposed to Marilu Henner is Emily has access to Wikipedia and the rest of the Internet. It'll be interesting to see the limits of her memory in the future. Will she be able to remember every time she gets into those Wikipedia deep dives where you end up spending hours reading about some random topic, following link after link? If so, she really will be a super hero.
- khazhoux 3y ago
  > Emily has access to Wikipedia and the rest of the Internet True, but I think we've forgotten that there was actually a lot of information available before the internet. Bookstores, libraries, lots of magazines, and even TV (with fewer options but still non-stop availability). Of course, back then it was harder to pick and choose what info you had access to. But still, I'm always surprised at the amount of useless info and details that I know from --where??-- before ~1995.
dclowd9901 3y ago
I’m astonished they didn’t ask her if she remembered being born
acchow 3y ago
I imagine a huge leap in a single individual like this millions of years got us from primitive pointing to something like language.
schoen 3y ago
The reverse of this is "severely deficient autobiographical memory", which has been in the news recently as well (and I think discussed on HN too). I think it's interesting that I consider myself to have a good memory but it is by far best at verbal associations (e.g. facts about a specific topic, object, word, or concept). The autobiographical part feels quite weak for me: I often find it hard to remember experiences in my life "by theme" (e.g. "think of a time when you felt X", "think of a time when you did Y very well or poorly"), and I very often don't remember what year a particular thing happened, or who was present with me on a particular occasion, or what I have or haven't done before with a particular friend or family member. I certainly have many vivid memories from my life, but they don't seem to be indexed that well by date, topic, or person. I've been lucky enough to travel frequently, but I feel like I would be unable to answer questions like "how many times have you been to country X?" or "in what year did you first/last visit country Y?". (But I would probably be able to draw a decent map of specific places I've been, on various scales, and remember specific restaurants, train stations, landmarks, foreign language vocabulary, impressions of history and culture of various countries, etc. -- just not necessarily things like "when did you go there?". For example, my nephew recently asked me my impressions of Singapore, and I wrote him a six-page letter in reply with tons of particulars about all sorts of aspects of life/culture/politics/geography of Singapore, but I was unable to remember what years my trips there took place.) Anyway, all this reminds me that "having a good memory" is definitely not just one thing!
- progman32 3y ago
  My experience is similar. I feel like I experience past events more as modifications to my world view rather than a log of moments. I like it, to be honest. I don't need to know the exact details. The only time it gets me in trouble is people sometimes equate remembering an event as somehow "caring" about that event. I forget details fast. Sometimes people interpret that as not being interested in the people I met or the significance of the event. I'm always glad when folks of less common memory models share their experiences, I think it helps people understand that there's so many ways to experience life and consciousness.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
stabbles 3y ago
Sounds similar to folks who can memorize many digits of pi in the sense that they can visualize a landscape of numbers and they just have to play that movie in their head, similar to how ordinary people can visualize commuting from home to work when closing their eyes
LaserDiscMan 3y ago
This reminds me of Kim Peek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek) the inspiration for Rain Man. Peek supposedly memorised thousands of books, including phone directories, sports score publications etc...
typon 3y ago
This girl uses her memory superpower to remember irrelevant celebrity facts and Netflix release dates..? Not sure if this is a reflection of the wider culture but this is pretty depressing.
- HeWhoLurksLate 3y ago
  And we're generally impressed when somebody gets Doom running on a toothbrush, not much difference really
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Is it any more pointless than the minutia of baseball stats? Exactly. Pick a realm of minutia, it comes down to a value judgement based on the observer. When I was 12, I thought fighter aircraft and ordinance stats were interesting.
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
It raises a few interesting questions, Im sure there is already lot of research in the area. - What about storage? The brain seems to be limitless. - Seems like there are more mutations that improve memory, but overal our memory is terrible? Doesn't have seem to be a favourable quality, maybe that changes in an information society - So why do we forget in the first place? Bio clean up? Trauma processing? Focus?
- philipswood 3y ago
  Garbage collection...
renhanxue 3y ago
Video game personality Tim Rogers supposedly has HSAM, and described it like this: > This is a condition which requires me to remember everything that ever happens within my earshot and eyeshot. No: I describe it impressively: it turns life into noise, and it is useless. Please listen to my noise now, because if you do not, who will? I have lost the ability to hear it. He wrote a semi-fictional essay about it which I always thought was an interesting read: https://medium.com/@108/what-we-might-mean-when-we-say-a-clock-is-wrong-5f055ff631a6 https://medium.com/@108/what-we-might-mean-when-we-say-a-clo...
- kibwen 3y ago
  His short story "Just like hamburger, exactly like hamburger" also largely centers on the experience of his memory: "For thirty seconds, I remembered the time a man on the street in Oakland, California pointed a gun at me. I remembered everything I remembered the instant the man pointed the gun at me. I remembered telling a beautiful girl on a hot day in a cafe in Shin-Osaka Station about the man pointing a gun at me. I remembered telling her about what I’d remembered that day. I’d told her I’d remembered my fight in elementary school — where I’d hit, again and again, the kid who’d bullied me an entire year. I remembered telling her that when the man pointed the gun at me I remembered my fight and I wished I’d killed the kid who bullied me. I confessed to her that it made me know I am a terrible person. I remembered confessing my terrible personhood to a girl in a cafe in Shin-Osaka Station. She’d told me I was beautiful and I was wonderful. So I was in a car inside a waterfall and I was wishing that other people could make me, instead of my making myself. Then I remembered my friend and his wife and their two cats, dying in the middle of the night in their house because their 3D printer leaked carbon monoxide while they were asleep." https://medium.com/@108/just-like-hamburger-exactly-like-hamburger-5ba6f95c2b32 https://medium.com/@108/just-like-hamburger-exactly-like-ham...
- Tarq0n 3y ago
  This is also a prominent point in his review of Boku no Natsuyasumi. He's a fascinating person.
deadbabe 3y ago
How far could this ability be pushed? Could someone basically become a human database, able to run queries right from their mind? In ancient times this might have been a very useful skill for those in power to employ such a person.
- CHB0403085482 3y ago
  Isn't that effectively the mentats of Dune?
insan1d 3y ago
Jeez, she has an autobiographical memory and the best they could cone up with to exhibit this were questions like “What DreamWorks film did Jack Black voice in?” I wanted to see her recite Pi to 500 decimal places lol
1letterunixname 3y ago
An ex-gf of mine was borderline HSAM. It was ridiculous. She was essentially a walking tape recorder. TIL there's a specific term for it.
- jml7c5 3y ago
  Do you have any examples? You should tell her to get in touch with researchers. Even if she doesn't quite have HSAM, they'd probably be interested. In fact, they might be even more interested to see someone who lives in the gap between HSAM and not-HSAM.
  - 1letterunixname 3y ago
    We would "argue" about what was said anywhere from weeks to months ago, and she would replay the entire conversation verbatim.

149 points by voisin 3y ago

I wonder if she can index on specific details, or if a linear scan is required to answer more complex queries. If she sits down to read through the periodic table, can she look up all of the properties of any element on demand?

prng2021 3y ago
Isn’t that what she did? They randomly picked calendar dates and asked her to explain things that happened on each day.
- neilv 3y ago
  Is that O(n), O(1), or something else? And is any n the total amount of information stored, distance from now, distance from start, or something else?
  - datameta 3y ago
    From what I understand, if they are asked about let's say April 17th 2009 they linearly scan through all the April 17ths. So there is a filtering step that ignores all other 364 days. But they also don't start from their earliest memories so how does that filtering work?
- datameta 3y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, the question here is whether they will be using episodic or semantic memory in the recall of the periodic table. Meaning - can they recall learned facts as well as lived experiences? Will they linearly remember the moments of learning about each element? What is the granularity of their recall?
- lolinder 3y ago
  That's technically different than what OP is asking about. She could have a perfect memory for dates and experiences in her life but not have indefinite perfect recall for something more fact-oriented like the periodic table. It sounds like her fact-recalling abilities are deeply tied to memories of experiences and conversations, so she could probably intentionally structure a study session to take advantage of that, but it doesn't mean she automatically can recall everything she reads. Edit—looks like in general people with HSAM do not have better than average memory as measured by other kinds of tests: > So far, the studied conducted at UC Irvine suggest that individuals with HSAM have superior abilities in autobiographical memories but are no different from age- and sex-matched control participants on standard laboratory memory tests. https://cnlm.uci.edu/hsam/ https://cnlm.uci.edu/hsam/
criddell 3y ago
That’s a good question. She did mention that her memory seems to be calendar based. She might be able to master the periodic table a day at a time. Jan 1, study hydrogen. Jan 2, study helium. Jan 27, study Cobalt.
kibwen 3y ago
Up above I linked a short story written by a man with HSAM. Here's an excerpt that's a dialogue between himself and someone else with the condition: --- “How many have you seen?” I asked her. She went on looking at the dog. She blinked a couple times. “Are you allergic to dogs?” I asked her. “Yeah,” she said. “I’ve seen sixteen Pomeranians in my life.” “Nice. I’ve seen, uh.” We were silent two minutes while I counted. “I’ve seen fifty-eight Pomeranians.” “Shit, that’s a lot of Pomeranians.” “Well, you see them on the train in Tokyo sort of a lot.” “How many poodles have you seen?” “Fourteen,” I said. “You answered very quickly.” “I counted them a few months ago.” “Why did you count them?” “I was trying to get to sleep. I count memories when I am going to sleep.” “That’s interesting.” “It’s gotten more interesting as I’ve gotten older. It’s like Memory Golf: I try to think of things that have only happened between three and five times.” “Why three and five times?” “It’s hypnotic,” I said. “Three or five times gives you a little slice of every part of your life. You can write a complete and thorough autobiography about anything that’s happened to you between three and ten times.” “Why not more than ten times?” “Then it’d be too long.” “How many cups of coffee have you drunk in your life?” “Whoa — whoa. Please don’t ask me that. I’ll start counting and then I’ll slip into a coma for a year.” “Sorry. Now I am thinking about it too. Oh no. I hate it.” “You have to be careful with this stuff. You can’t write an autobiography about all the cups of coffee you drank, or all the times you’ve used the toilet. It has to be something that’s happened between three and ten times.” “Not about something that happened twice?” “No. It might just be a coincidence.” “Not about something that happened once?” “Maybe I’m wrong.” “Maybe you’re not.” “Whenever I tell people about this, I use the example that I’ve eaten a cinnamon bun thirty-two times in my life.” “How many times have you told people that you’ve eaten a cinnamon bun thirty-two times?” “Uh, nine.” “You could write a complete and thorough autobiography about the nine times you told someone you’ve eaten a cinnamon bun thirty-two times.” “I’m going to have a stroke if I think about that.”

maxutility 3y ago

Act III of episode 585 of This American Life (a WBEZ radio show broadcast on NPR and distributed via podcast) discussed this phenomenon and spoke with a few individuals with HSAM: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/585/in-defense-of-ignorance/act-three-9 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/585/in-defense-of-ignorance... One of the individuals was a script supervisor in Hollywood responsible for ensuring continuity between scenes during filming. But it also ventures into powerful emotionally resonant territory, touching on the bittersweet implications of experiencing loss when memories never fade.

stevenwoo 3y ago
I re-listened to this and I think all of this episode is worth the time investment if you have not heard it. The first act is with director Lulu Wang and the real life inspiration for her movie The Farewell and the second part is an interview with Dunning behind the infamous Dunning-Kruger effect.

brandall10 3y ago

There was a great 60 Minutes on this nearly 15 years back, where they picked random facts from historical record and got pretty shocking immediate recall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zTkBgHNsWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zTkBgHNsWM

unshavedyak 3y ago
I found it interesting that she didn't remember everything. Notably in one example, she couldn't recall what she had for lunch, but did for dinner. I find it almost more weird that she can recall so many meaningless (in the grand scheme) details yet there is still a limit. Perhaps too meaningless?
- datameta 3y ago
  I think where their attention is and therefore what gets encoded is similar to the rest of us. In one instance they were unable to recall what the interviewers were wearing after spending two hours with them. They remember their experiences visually, essentially. So if information was not actually recorded, it can't be searched for. On a different note, I'm curious how long people with photographic memory store the info at the same fidelity. Does their perfect recollection of a landscape they looked at for a few minutes fade somewhat after a year or so?
  - thecoppinger 3y ago
    I read somewhere years ago that each subsequent recall of a memory is remembering the last time you recalled it—in a sense, an entropy-like phenomenon called memory reconsolidation. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/memory-reconsolidation https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/memory-rec...
  - philipswood 3y ago
    Is there any solid evidence that photographic memory exists?
    - 3y ago

moffkalast 3y ago

> For Emily, it was validation that she wasn’t, as she puts, it “weird.” Being one of only like 100 people with the same superpower? Yes, not weird at all :P Wasn't there some theory that we forget things slowly in order to keep us sane or something like that? Given that these people have perfect recall and remain completely normal and functional far more likely makes it an unintentional fault that needs fixing than an evolutionarily selected-for attribute. > Those with superior memory remember the good, but they will also never forget the bad. They feel the pain as if it were today. Some with HSAM struggle with anxiety and depression as a result. Yeah and so do lots of the rest of us, doesn't seem like that much of a correlation.

fbdab103 3y ago
Even if you could remember everything, I am curious how you keep it straight. I may be extra boring, but a lot of my life is rote. Day 452 of Job is really similar to day 451 and 453.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Why not? It's not constant super awareness of your memory, just having all of it available if you need it. Instead of trying to remember something and drawing a blank you just remember it. At least that's my understanding of it. I honestly really envy people who can maintain long term memory without constantly refreshing it. All the classes I've ever taken soon got rm -rfed after the final exam, except for the handful of things that I needed to keep knowing on a regular basis.

fbdab103 3y ago

I suppose if she is ever on hard times, she can study for a month and cleanup on Jeopardy or a similar quiz show.

vunderba 3y ago
Humor aside, you'll find most Jeopardy contestants actually know the majority of the answers to any given question on Jeopardy (single and double), and the determining factors are more about buzzer technique, ability to perform on-stage, and shrewd wagering on daily doubles. Sony can't really afford to "ratchet" up the difficulty either since that would result in an arms-race of trivia questions that would drastically reduce the appeal to the mainstream viewer if they saw categories like "Descendants of the Zulu Royal Family", "Musculoskeletal Radiology", "Polymer engineering", and "Civil Servants".
- fbdab103 3y ago
  That makes sense. The vast majority of trivia I have seen on such shows feels attainable by anyone with dedicated study.

poulsbohemian 3y ago

This is fascinating, but I’m left confused at the banality. Maybe it’s just the way the article was written, but truly, who cares that she can remember what was playing on Netflix three years ago? It does cause me to wonder if brains are attuned to certain things - like in this woman’s case, is she particularly interested in celebrities and that’s why all the examples given are out of the tabloid headlines? The article left me with a lot of questions.

PKop 3y ago
Yea the choice of questions to ask her was ridiculous. I mean start there maybe, and escalate to something more interesting, or go further back in time etc. Such a lack of imagination. It's almost like everyone wanted to believe and didn't want to push the limits to break their impression of it being some super power.
- mateo1 3y ago
  Also with the other woman they used as an example, the only thing she did is say that X date was a Thrursday or something, which might simply be a trick and not a memory recall.
  - quintushoratius 3y ago
    Marilu Henner is somewhat known as a prodigy. She's a member of Mensa, things like that. The clip shown in the video was chosen poorly because it doesn't really convey her abilities. I just checked her Wikipedia page, and besides a passing mention of her HSAM its pretty spare. I seem to remember (ba-dum-tiss) that it used to be mote comprehensive.
- criddell 3y ago
  They asked for verifiable facts. I think those answers fit that criteria perfectly.
khazhoux 3y ago
> truly, who cares that she can remember what was playing on Netflix three years ago? That's kind of the point, though -- she retains trivial information that 99.9999% of brains will discard.

zackmorris 3y ago

I'm curious how this relates to neurodivergent/ADHD/autistic learning where someone has weak rote-memorization skills and mainly remembers things as a fractal of associations. For me, I can't remember that I have an appointment tomorrow, but if you ask me how computers work, I'll start with explaining electron orbitals and band gaps, doping, masking, VLSI, assembly language, C, functional programming and where AI is heading from first principles. Unfortunately instead of being some kind of superpower, it's mainly been debilitating for me, because I've spent my career writing CRUD apps in an endless series of failed startups. Because most people don't think this way, and instead see only the use-case before them as a stepping stone to another goal, usually financial. It would be easier for me to design spaceships than manage my bills, but I seem to be relegated to doing chores for the rest of my life and dying penniless.

interstice 3y ago
I associate strongly with this, my memory is almost entirely compartmentalised. Even to the point of what happened earlier today being a fog unless I can find a leap off point. The answer is start a business, it’s a strength to be able to deep dive into all areas and leap between them at will, I’ve found.
dclowd9901 3y ago
Wow what a whirlwind that comment was. Circling back to the main point, it seems like her recall has some manner of fractal association to it, by how she describes remembering things.
vbezhenar 3y ago
But you're living in US. In US you got paid crazy salaries for programming. Why do you work at failed startups? Just get some job with crazy salary, work there for 5 years and then retire.
- oumua_don17 3y ago
  As GP refers to >> neurodivergent/ADHD/autistic >> paid crazy salaries for programming may be it's difficult to go through the typical interview loops for such jobs as they are not designed to be inclusive for ND etc despite all the diversity and inclusion BS (more often than not) at such workplaces.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

Johnny von Neumann was another likely candidate for having HSAM, based on all those stories of him being able to repeat almost everything he ever read verbatim. I wonder if it had anything to do with his mathematical prowess, given that autobiographical memory is usually considered a separate thing from wherever math goes.

IncreasePosts 3y ago
Can this lady(or other people with HSAM) actually recite what they've read in the past verbatim? It seems like she can just tell you what she was doing or what happened on a given day, but didn't delve into how far that goes - maybe she can tell you she was reading book X, but couldn't necessarily recite passages from book X?
- elijaht 3y ago
  From the article: Her father, Jason, said he would show Emily a series of coloured bowling pins for about 10 seconds and then spin her around, asking her to name the order they were in. “She would knock them off right away in terms of identifying every pin, in terms of, you know, red, yellow, green, blue,” he said. Her mother, Julie, discovered Emily -- at age five -- could watch a Peanuts cartoon and then recall and repeat the dialogue from any point in the episode.

russellbeattie 3y ago

What's great about Emily's life as opposed to Marilu Henner is Emily has access to Wikipedia and the rest of the Internet. It'll be interesting to see the limits of her memory in the future. Will she be able to remember every time she gets into those Wikipedia deep dives where you end up spending hours reading about some random topic, following link after link? If so, she really will be a super hero.

khazhoux 3y ago
> Emily has access to Wikipedia and the rest of the Internet True, but I think we've forgotten that there was actually a lot of information available before the internet. Bookstores, libraries, lots of magazines, and even TV (with fewer options but still non-stop availability). Of course, back then it was harder to pick and choose what info you had access to. But still, I'm always surprised at the amount of useless info and details that I know from --where??-- before ~1995.

dclowd9901 3y ago

I’m astonished they didn’t ask her if she remembered being born

acchow 3y ago

I imagine a huge leap in a single individual like this millions of years got us from primitive pointing to something like language.

schoen 3y ago

The reverse of this is "severely deficient autobiographical memory", which has been in the news recently as well (and I think discussed on HN too). I think it's interesting that I consider myself to have a good memory but it is by far best at verbal associations (e.g. facts about a specific topic, object, word, or concept). The autobiographical part feels quite weak for me: I often find it hard to remember experiences in my life "by theme" (e.g. "think of a time when you felt X", "think of a time when you did Y very well or poorly"), and I very often don't remember what year a particular thing happened, or who was present with me on a particular occasion, or what I have or haven't done before with a particular friend or family member. I certainly have many vivid memories from my life, but they don't seem to be indexed that well by date, topic, or person. I've been lucky enough to travel frequently, but I feel like I would be unable to answer questions like "how many times have you been to country X?" or "in what year did you first/last visit country Y?". (But I would probably be able to draw a decent map of specific places I've been, on various scales, and remember specific restaurants, train stations, landmarks, foreign language vocabulary, impressions of history and culture of various countries, etc. -- just not necessarily things like "when did you go there?". For example, my nephew recently asked me my impressions of Singapore, and I wrote him a six-page letter in reply with tons of particulars about all sorts of aspects of life/culture/politics/geography of Singapore, but I was unable to remember what years my trips there took place.) Anyway, all this reminds me that "having a good memory" is definitely not just one thing!

progman32 3y ago
My experience is similar. I feel like I experience past events more as modifications to my world view rather than a log of moments. I like it, to be honest. I don't need to know the exact details. The only time it gets me in trouble is people sometimes equate remembering an event as somehow "caring" about that event. I forget details fast. Sometimes people interpret that as not being interested in the people I met or the significance of the event. I'm always glad when folks of less common memory models share their experiences, I think it helps people understand that there's so many ways to experience life and consciousness.
- 7thaccount 3y ago

stabbles 3y ago

Sounds similar to folks who can memorize many digits of pi in the sense that they can visualize a landscape of numbers and they just have to play that movie in their head, similar to how ordinary people can visualize commuting from home to work when closing their eyes

LaserDiscMan 3y ago

This reminds me of Kim Peek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek) the inspiration for Rain Man. Peek supposedly memorised thousands of books, including phone directories, sports score publications etc...

typon 3y ago

This girl uses her memory superpower to remember irrelevant celebrity facts and Netflix release dates..? Not sure if this is a reflection of the wider culture but this is pretty depressing.

HeWhoLurksLate 3y ago
And we're generally impressed when somebody gets Doom running on a toothbrush, not much difference really
1letterunixname 3y ago
Is it any more pointless than the minutia of baseball stats? Exactly. Pick a realm of minutia, it comes down to a value judgement based on the observer. When I was 12, I thought fighter aircraft and ordinance stats were interesting.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

It raises a few interesting questions, Im sure there is already lot of research in the area. - What about storage? The brain seems to be limitless. - Seems like there are more mutations that improve memory, but overal our memory is terrible? Doesn't have seem to be a favourable quality, maybe that changes in an information society - So why do we forget in the first place? Bio clean up? Trauma processing? Focus?

philipswood 3y ago
Garbage collection...

renhanxue 3y ago

Video game personality Tim Rogers supposedly has HSAM, and described it like this: > This is a condition which requires me to remember everything that ever happens within my earshot and eyeshot. No: I describe it impressively: it turns life into noise, and it is useless. Please listen to my noise now, because if you do not, who will? I have lost the ability to hear it. He wrote a semi-fictional essay about it which I always thought was an interesting read: https://medium.com/@108/what-we-might-mean-when-we-say-a-clock-is-wrong-5f055ff631a6 https://medium.com/@108/what-we-might-mean-when-we-say-a-clo...

kibwen 3y ago
His short story "Just like hamburger, exactly like hamburger" also largely centers on the experience of his memory: "For thirty seconds, I remembered the time a man on the street in Oakland, California pointed a gun at me. I remembered everything I remembered the instant the man pointed the gun at me. I remembered telling a beautiful girl on a hot day in a cafe in Shin-Osaka Station about the man pointing a gun at me. I remembered telling her about what I’d remembered that day. I’d told her I’d remembered my fight in elementary school — where I’d hit, again and again, the kid who’d bullied me an entire year. I remembered telling her that when the man pointed the gun at me I remembered my fight and I wished I’d killed the kid who bullied me. I confessed to her that it made me know I am a terrible person. I remembered confessing my terrible personhood to a girl in a cafe in Shin-Osaka Station. She’d told me I was beautiful and I was wonderful. So I was in a car inside a waterfall and I was wishing that other people could make me, instead of my making myself. Then I remembered my friend and his wife and their two cats, dying in the middle of the night in their house because their 3D printer leaked carbon monoxide while they were asleep." https://medium.com/@108/just-like-hamburger-exactly-like-hamburger-5ba6f95c2b32 https://medium.com/@108/just-like-hamburger-exactly-like-ham...
Tarq0n 3y ago
This is also a prominent point in his review of Boku no Natsuyasumi. He's a fascinating person.

deadbabe 3y ago

How far could this ability be pushed? Could someone basically become a human database, able to run queries right from their mind? In ancient times this might have been a very useful skill for those in power to employ such a person.

CHB0403085482 3y ago
Isn't that effectively the mentats of Dune?

insan1d 3y ago

Jeez, she has an autobiographical memory and the best they could cone up with to exhibit this were questions like “What DreamWorks film did Jack Black voice in?” I wanted to see her recite Pi to 500 decimal places lol

1letterunixname 3y ago

An ex-gf of mine was borderline HSAM. It was ridiculous. She was essentially a walking tape recorder. TIL there's a specific term for it.

jml7c5 3y ago
Do you have any examples? You should tell her to get in touch with researchers. Even if she doesn't quite have HSAM, they'd probably be interested. In fact, they might be even more interested to see someone who lives in the gap between HSAM and not-HSAM.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  We would "argue" about what was said anywhere from weeks to months ago, and she would replay the entire conversation verbatim.