I wonder whether she really remembers every minute detail of every moment of her life, or just has the ability to imagine plausible details and an inability to know what she doesn’t remember, instead her imagination seamlessly filling in the details?
Great question. idk about Sharrock but:
Individuals with hyperthymesia can recall extensive details of their own lives, along with public events that hold personal significance.[7] They often describe their memories as uncontrollable associations: when presented with a date, they immediately “see” a vivid depiction of that day without conscious effort.[8] These memories are strikingly detailed but not literal recordings of experience. In the case of Jill Price, anonymised as “AJ” in the 2006 study by Parker, Cahill and McGaugh,[1] her recollections resembled a movie running in her mind, yet she could not remember incidental details such as what her interviewers were wearing hours earlier.
It should be easy enough to verify using books.
People with this condition remember every detail. Phone number in a piece of paper 20 years ago.
I think its quite insane and I wonder what exactly is preventing everyone else from this. If I had a perfect memory, I would love to learn so many things.
i give about equal odds that either there’s some evolutionary downside to it (requires more energy, or makes you more vulnerable to brain injury somehow), or it’s just completely irrelevant to our survival and so it’s neither selected for nor against.
It would be very funny and miserable if the only thing holding humanity back from perfect memory is evolutionary indifference.
Sounds like a fucking nightmare
Yeah that’s where my head went too. I’ve dealt with a pretty middle-of-the-road amount of hardship… wasn’t born with a silver spoon up my ass or anything, but no Hollywood-esque trauma arch either. Still, looking back over even just the past decade, there’s a lot more bad than good popping into my brain.
And the cool part? I already can’t recall details from a lot of that shit. Just fuzzy concepts that my brain has filed into the fuck-it box and now I don’t have to worry about them cuz I’m literally incapable! Woohoo!
Being fully conscious of all that, all the time… that would absolutely destroy my mental health. Fuck that!
Yeah. Remembering when a loved one died as vividly as if it happened yesterday… For decades. No thank you.
I doubt the condition means that every bad moment is always there to hurt you eternally. I mean, I have some traumatic memories but I don’t think about them 24/7.
It also sounds like it’s going to get tragic with age. The brain is finite in its capabilities, and memory pruning is something that happens automatically, she won’t get to choose what she forgets…
i don’t think this is even remotely true whatsoever, there are people who have lived their entire lives with like 10% brain mass and barely noticed a difference.
I’m not a neurologist, I’m not going to make any grand claims with absolute certainty.
But, from what I’ve heard from scientists, the brain does do a sort of passive pruning, memories (or at least the neural pathways and patterns that represent those memories) are left to disconnect if they go unused/unaccessed for long enough. And conversely, when neural pathways are used more often, those synaptic connections are reinforced. And when those synaptic connections no longer exist, that’s data loss (forgetting).
To be clear, I think there’s a lot about memory that is still not well understood, and my description is simplified and I certainly may have remembered some parts wrong, but from what I’ve read and been told about how the brain works, that’s the gist of it.
She won’t have unlimited storage. If she has’ish, other functions will degrade. Finite is as finite does.
This was a condition in a novel I read and it was described as a curse. The book was A Short Stay in Hell and the protagonist could remember every detail of his life and every day in the “hell” he was sent to. He would meet someone knew and within a few centuries they’d have every variation of conversation they could by remembering everything so they’d grow bored of each other and look for someone new.
The 12 day bit appears to be highly contested given humans aren’t generally able to form memories for some time after birth.
Either way, seems useful, curious, and painful.
