Why Can Some People Recall Every Day Of Their Lives? Brain Scans Offer Clues

npr.org

23 points·tokenadult··6 comments

Of course now we're all saying: Wow, wouldn't it be great if we had this skill in addition to all that we can already do.

What I find interesting though is that most notable people in the world's history didn't have any pathological brain conditions. For example, you could reasonably expect the worlds best artists to have a photographic memory.

It seems like you don't need a superpower be successful in what you do.

Edit: typo

There's an argument to be made that it's generally a disadvantage to remember every day of your life. Brains are finite in resources (memory and processing abilities), and if you remember too many unimportant details, you might be wasting lots of those resources.

I would think an efficient brain compresses and abstracts the important information out, and ignores the minutiae.

That would only be true if can max out our memory over a century. Has anybody ever actually "reached capacity"?

I'm not an expert, but here's what makes the most sense to me: at any given time, we are probably "at capacity" and our brains are constantly dumping out and/or compressing old information to make room for new information.

According to A.J. (aka Jill Price) herself, it is more a curse than a superpower: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoxsMMV538U

"We can say time heals all wounds," said Price's mother. "Doesn't for her."

These people are OCD about their memories, cleaning and pruning the recorded data so it can be reassembled correctly at a later time.

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