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Proffessor James Mcgaugh of UC Irvines Nueralbiology departmant

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Proffessor James Mcgaugh of UC Irvines Nueralbiology departmant

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This  a blog about people who have extraordinary autobiographical memory also known as HSAM or hyperthemisia .

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This  a blog about people who have extraordinary autobiographical memory also known as HSAM or hyperthemisia .

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In 2006, Parker, Cahill and McGaugh reported the first known case of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) in a research participant known as "AJ". When provided with a date, AJ could specify on which day of the week it fell and what she did that day. Since then, more people with this extraordinary ability have been identified ( click here to view a "60 Minutes" episode on them or here for another Psychology Today blog post on this), and researchers have now discovered structural brain differences in people with HSAM compared to people without it ( LePort et al., 2012). This is especially interesting given that people with HSAM do not show exceptional memory in other domains besides autobiographical memory. Among the brain differences that the researchers note is "amplified white matter tract coherence" (p. 12), which they suggest may indicate that the transfer of information among connecting neural regions is enhanced in participants with HSAM and that this may contribute to their superior autobiographical memories.

As LePort and colleagues point out, however, whether the structural brain differences that they discovered are a cause of HSAM or the result of activities that themselves cause HSAM is not yet known.

It might be easy to jump to the conclusion that people with HSAM are simply born with brains that differ from normal brains and that innate structural differences in the brains of people with HSAM are what allow for their exceptional autobiographical memory abilities. For example, maybe they are born with enhanced connectivity among brain regions critical to autobiographical memory.

A more interesting possibility, however, is that the brain differences (as well as the remarkable autobiographical memory ability) result from unique experiences that occur during development.

Experiences themselves cause changes in the brain to take place. For example, it has long been known that the brains of rats exposed to an enriching environment during development differ from those of rats exposed to an impoverished environment-rats in an enriched environment show increased cortical weight and numbers of glial cells and also show benefits to memory ability.

Research on musical training is an excellent example of how experiences can impact the structure of the human brain, as discussed in this New York Times article and this Scientific American blog and reviewed here. Researchers have known for some time that the brains of musicians differ from those of non-musicians, but researchers have questioned whether this is due to innate differences between musicians and non-musicians. However, recent evidence suggests that musical training itself contributes to the brain differences between the musically trained and untrained. One study showed that children given 15 months of musical training exhibited structural changes in their brain relative those that did not. More recently, researchers at Northwestern showed that neural changes that appear to result from musical training in childhood persist into adulthood.

If structural brain differences between the musically-trained and untrained in adulthood can result from childhood training in that domain, then what type of experience or training could potentially underlie the brain differences shown in people with HSAM?

Actress Marilu Henner, who was one of the participants in the research by McGaugh and colleagues (as shown in this " 60 Minutes" episode), may provide some clues in her book on her experience with HSAM and on autobiographical memory. In it, she describes a pastime of hers during childhood. "I decided to play a little game with myself, in which I tried to remember every day that had led up to that moment starting with the most recent What did I do a week ago? Two weeks ago? Three weeks ago? I even started to go back to the previous years and the year before that, remembering specific days from first grade and kindergarten. Over time, this exercise became not only my routine to fall asleep, but also a way to mentally challenge and exercise my brain to the point that I could 'time-travel' back to: What did we do each day of our vacation? What was I doing when I was exactly the day my younger brother Lorin's age? My Niece Lizzy's age?"

It seems plausible that this type of "training" or memory practice during childhood could lead to structural changes in the brain that are detectable in adulthood and correlated with HSAM.

As McGaugh and colleagues suggest in their article, future research on children with HSAM might shed light on this issue. But perhaps an approach similar to that taken with recent research on musical training could be taken as well. Specifically, maybe children could be randomly assigned to either a no-memory-training control condition or to an autobiographical memory training condition in which they receive a daily autobiographical memory training exercise similar to what Marilu Henner describes in her book. Would structural brain differences be shown 15 months later? If so, would they still be shown in adulthood? Would characteristics of HSAM be found? This would be an interesting study indeed.

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Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) is a very rare condition marked by an extraordinary ability to recall one's past experiences. Give them a date and a year, and people with HSAM can tell you exactly what they were doing on that day and what day of the week it was.

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In the Nature of Things documentary The Memory Mirage, we learn that even our most precious memories may not be as accurate as we thought. Our brains change our memories, altering details and adapting them over time.

But what if you could remember everything from your life - from what you ate for breakfast every single day to how you felt during every painful moment? While most humans have limitations around recalling and retaining details from their past, there are some people who have unusual and seemingly perfect powers of memories.

"I remember everything": HSAM

Teenager Tyler Hickenbottom has a rare condition known as 'HSAM' (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) and is featured in The Memory Mirage. It allows him to remember every day of his life like it was yesterday.

The condition was first identified by neurobiologist James McGaugh when a woman named Jill Price approached him with questions about her unusual memory abilities. When offered a particular date, Jill was able to recall what she did that day and what day of the week it fell on, with incredible accuracy. She became the first person to be diagnosed with HSAM.

Since then, more than 50 other people have been identified as having HSAM, including Taxi actress Marilou Henner. What is the secret to their incredible memory?

Based on MRI brain scans, the parts of the brain associated with autobiographical memory creation are enlarged in HSAM subjects. Researchers know that these same brain areas are also linked to compulsive behaviours, something HSAM subjects exhibit. Hickenbottom, for example, remembers the ID numbers of every garbage truck he has ever seen, records them on video and shares them on YouTube. Other HSAM'ers are known to be germaphobes or to compulsively categorize their closet.

Researchers aren't sure if the brain structures are the cause - or the result - of the condition, Some wonder if HSAM individuals share the same memory capabilities as the average person, only they have a much better way of retrieving them.

Photographic memory

The term "photographic memory,"- also called eidetic memory - describes the ability to recall visual information by taking a quick mental snapshot that can be reviewed later. But scientists disagree about the existence of true photographic memory and argue whether or not humans are capable of creating mental snapshots with perfect precision.

That doesn't make eidetic memory any less impressive. Stephen Wiltshire is a British artist who draws incredibly detailed to-scale cityscapes on giant canvases. As a child, he was diagnosed with autism and was unable to communicate verbally. At the age of five, Stephen began drawing - the only pastime he enjoyed. It became apparent that drawing was his way of communicating with the world. Today, Stephen's art is highly prized, with some of his pieces fetching more than $20,000.

Wiltshire took a 20-minute helicopter ride over New York City, then sketched a 5.5-metre long aerial scene over seven days - all from memory. His recreations are so detailed, buildings even include the correct number of windows.

Kim Peek was the inspiration for Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man character. According to his father, Peek was able to memorize things from the age of 16 months and read and remembered thousands of books. He scanned the left page with his left eye, and the right page with his right eye and could finish a book in an hour. According to the New York Times, Kim could recall the contents of at least 12,000 books.

Memories in our DNA

Within our own lifetimes, our memories change and re-shape with time. But perhaps we all have the ability for total recall, just not in our brains - over generations, we may be able to retain very old memories from our past ancestors.

Phobias are defined as " an extreme or irrational fear or aversion to something." Most are fears of something harmless, like open spaces, or spiders; but new research suggests that they may not be irrational at all.

Human learning is passed on through teaching, from generation to generation. A recent study in Nature suggests that we may genetically inherit memories from our ancestors. Stressful or traumatic events can cause chemical changes in our DNA, and these changes can be passed down to our offspring, affecting their brains - something scientists call "ancestral experience."

To prove this, researchers created a fear of cherry blossom scent in mice. After allowing those mice to breed, their offspring showed the same fear response to the scent, even though they had never been exposed to it. This fear response continued down through generations as the offspring mice had babies of their own.

MORE:
We change our memories each time we recall them, but that doesn't mean we're lying
Partial recall: Why we can't trust our own memories

Although this hasn't conclusively been documented in humans yet, researchers believe irrational fears could be a defence mechanism, memories that were burned into the DNA of our ancestors long before we were born.

For more about human memory watch The Memory Mirage.

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Total recall: some people can remember every day like it was yesterday - The Nature of Things: Science, Wildlife and Technology

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In the Nature of Things documentary The Memory Mirage , we learn that even our most precious memories may not be as accurate as we thought. Our brains change our memories, altering details and adapting them over time.

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Total recall: the people who never forget

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If you ask Jill Price to remember any day of her life, she can come up with an answer in a heartbeat. What was she doing on 29 August 1980? "It was a Friday, I went to Palm Springs with my friends, twins, Nina and Michelle, and their family for Labour Day weekend," she says.

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This is David Eaglemans book about the story of you which is his findings/ experiments

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Read 1,725 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Locked in the silence and darkness of your skull, your brain fashions the rich narrative...

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When I was a child, my grandfather often told me how he'd seen mutinying Russian soldiers from the battleship "Potemkin" march right by his house in Odessa, Russia in 1905 - one of the famed moments leading up to the Russian revolution.

It was a wonderfully colourful tale, but later in life, I realized he'd been less than a year old when it happened - not nearly old enough to mentally record these details. He'd obviously heard the tale from his parents so often it became part of his memory.

I've always wondered how my grandfather came to believe his own imagined memories - and it's part of what led me to spend a year working on The Memory Mirage, a Nature of Things film that shows us that our memories are far more fragile and faulty than we ever thought.

Scientists have demonstrated that, as the years go by, much of what we think we remember is false. It seems our brains can't store every detail we experience, so we recall the gist of events - enough to create a story that makes sense to us. Every time we recall a story or tell it to others, we change small bits depending on whether our audience looks fascinated, or bored. Then the next time we retell it, we only remember the last version we told - and the errors compound as in a children's game of broken telephone.

MORE:
Partial recall: Why we can't trust our own memories
Total recall: some people can remember every day like it was yesterday

Working on this film has made me look at historical accounts differently. CBS TV's main nighttime anchor Brian Williams and Hillary Rodham Clinton were both accused of repeatedly lying about coming under military attack in foreign countries. Williams told stories about being under fire in a helicopter in Iraq; Clinton about when she was on a mission to Bosnia accompanied by the military. It was eventually revealed that neither person came under attack, they were both just visiting dangerous places where gunfire is a constant threat.

It was speculated that Williams and Clinton were both deliberately exaggerating their stories to enhance their public images. But now I wonder if they just retold and tweaked their war zone stories so many times they gradually came to believe them. Is it possible they both think they are telling the truth?

"I've learned it's wise not to argue with my spouse about who-said-what-to-whom seven years ago. Science suggests that we're probably both wrong about many events in our memory album."

One scientist told us this happens to some war heroes on tour. They gradually enhance their exploits as they move from audience to audience, city to city, until the anecdote is so heroic it's barely recognizable.

Once our brain has a new version of a story, it forgets and erases the former versions. Even the most sophisticated MRI brain scans can't distinguish between truth and fiction when people believe what they're saying.

Closer to home, I've also learned it's wise not to argue with my spouse about who-said-what-to-whom seven years ago. Science suggests that we're probably both wrong about many events in our memory album. I should enjoy and bask in my memories, but not necessarily believe in their truth, any more than I do my grandfather's colourful old tales.

Watch The Memory Mirage.

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We change our memories each time we recall them, but that doesn't mean we're lying - The Nature of Things: Science, Wildlife and Technology

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When I was a child, my grandfather often told me how he'd seen mutinying Russian soldiers from the battleship "Potemkin" march right by his house in Odessa, Russia in 1905 - one of the famed moments leading up to the Russian revolution.

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Times article on the people who live with HSAM Highly superior auto biographical

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The Downside of Having an Almost Perfect Memory

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Fewer than 100 people have been diagnosed with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). Here's what that means