This is news...?

The University of CA at Irvine has discovered a woman with apparently perfect memory, and has slated a series of tests to try to discover how she does it.

She's certainly not a savant, extraordinarily proficient in one area but mostly deficient in others.  The's a "fully funtioning person," they say.

James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped.

McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago.

Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.

Like any good scientist, McGaugh was initially skeptical. But not anymore.

"This is real," he says.

...[H]e asked her out of the blue if she knew who Bing Crosby was.

"I wasn't sure she would know, because she's 40 and wasn't of the Bing Crosby era," he says.

But she did.

"Do you know where he died?" McGaugh asked.

"Oh yes, he died on a golf course in Spain," she answered, and provided the day of the week and the date when the crooner died.

When the researchers asked her to list the dates when they had interviewed her, she "just reeled them off, bang, bang, bang."

And then...

She also told McGaugh that on the day after a particular interview, which took place several years ago, he flew to Germany.

"I said what? I went to Germany? I couldn't even remember what year I had gone to Germany," he says.

Shucks, people—this is nothing new.  I've been married to a woman with perfect memory for nearly 30 years.  Scout's honor.

And yes, I have our anniversary date tattooed on my forearm.  (Ok, just kidding about that last thing.  But I have been known to set my personal event alarm for 17 Apr, just in case.  And I have a secret stash of terrifically mushy anniversary cards for emergencies...)

(Hat tip to Ralph Bristol.)

Comments

[Phoenix]

At some point in my life I had about a 98% photographic memory. I had no clue, but I underwent a battery of tests, and that's how I found out as one of the tests was for that. The man giving the test was amazed. Turns out that when I sat in class to take a test, my mind produced for my perusal, the exact page of notes I needed for the information. If someone said to me, "Remember when I told you...." I would remember sounds, smells, what house we were passing in a car, what was on the radio, the expression on whoever's face, fuzz on the car seat..... anything and everything. I never thought about it. I do recall my mother commenting on it a couple of times when I was young, but it meant nothing to me. At birthday parties there was a game we'd play where the host would bring out a tray with lots of small items on it and we'd get a minute to look at it remember it. I won all those games. Still, it never ocurred to me that there was anything special about it.

In a graduate course our professor started out our lesson by handing out a piece of paper to each of us. On the paper were seven lines. Each line was made up of letters - seven in the first sentence .....all the way to fifteen letters in the last sentence. She said, "Okay...you have three minutes to memorize this." I did it in two minutes and had to sit and wait. The professor said, "Time's up. Who got it?" I raised my hand ready to recite the letters in perfect order and she went right on with laughing with the rest of the class members who just figured... no way. She didn't notice me. On that one, I did use a mnemonic - I made a story from the order of the letters and saw the story in my mind.

In another grad course, the teacher handed out a lined drawing of an artist's rendering of a three-quarter view of woman from shoulders up. They put the picture down in front of each of us and put it down upside-down and said you have two minutes to copy this. We all went to work. At my table sat the art teacher. The teacher stopped us at two minutes and our pencils went down. She picked up all the papers, about forty, and then we all went into howls laughing at the renderings. The original was full-page. Some people had actually copied it into a two-inch by one-inch corner of the paper. Just amazing! They came to mine and held it up and said, "All right..who handed in the original??" Big laugh. I held my hand up and handed over the original. They held them together and they were identical. They superimposed them and it looked as if I'd traced it. But there was no chance of that as we were not allowed to touch the original at all. The art teacher's was all askew and hilarious. But mine was perfect..... ? My mind saw the lines in space and distance from one another.

I had another cool story of my 'weird' memory.........but I forgot it! :)

I have paid a price, however, for this. I do not exist in time. I cannot tell you the year, the day, anything involving the passage of time about anything. I labeled my son's baby book with the wrong year. ! Yes. I did that. I simply do not exist in time. I exist in visual memory.... in images.