People With Super Memories Remember Nearly Every Detail of Their Lives … A Blessing or a Curse? © 2018 Health Realizations, Inc. Update
People with super memories are able to recall, in detail, nearly every day of their lives. They can recall with stunning accuracy events that occurred on dates decades earlier, or name the exact dates and day of the week upon which major events have occurred.
So far only four people with super memories have been identified.
On the flip side, while they can remember things in striking detail, they are unable to do something that comes quite naturally to most of us: forget.
What Causes “Super Memory”?
So far, scientists have verified four people with rare super memories. After conducting MRI scans on Jill Price, who was the first person confirmed to have a super memory, according to USA Today, they found two “abnormally large” areas in her brain.
According to Larry Cahill, a neuroscientist at the University of California-Irvine who co-leads a project on people with super memory, the two enlarged areas are the caudate nuclei, which is used for memories of automatic habits, and part of the temporal lobe that stores facts, dates and events. It may be that the two areas of the brain are working together and making recall of every day as automatic as routine habits like brushing your teeth, the researchers told USA Today.
The discovery could help uncover some of the mysteries about how memories are formed and kept, or help people with memory disorders.
Three of the four people who are identified as having a super memory, all men, seem unbothered by the unusual skill. But according to Price, the vivid memories torment her.
Cahill told USA Today, “She sees daily life in a kind of "split-screen," with present-day events, songs, smells, even TV programs cuing her back to detailed memories that she can't squelch.”
It could be that gender differences in men’s and women’s brains are accounting for the differing opinions regarding having a super memory.
Sleeping helps your brain to “solidify” newly learned skills.
What Can You do to Improve Your Memory?
For the bulk of the population, the problem is not an overly vivid memory, but rather one that can be foggy. Generally, your memory starts a gradual decline around the ripe old age of 25, according to University of Michigan psychologist Denise Park.
"Younger adults in their 20s and 30s notice no losses at all, even though they are declining at the same rate as people in their 60s and 70s, because they have more capital than they need," says Park in Scientific American.
Though the gradual loss of memory is nothing to worry about, you may begin to have trouble recalling certain facts or multi-tasking when you reach your mid-60s and beyond. Fortunately, there are numerous things you can do to keep your brain, and your memory, in tip-top condition.
"Apples have just the right dose of antioxidants to raise levels of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that's essential to memory and tends to decline with age," says Tom Shea, PhD, director of the University of Massachusetts Lowell Center for Cellular Neurobiology and Neurodegeneration Research, in Prevention.
Sources
USAToday.com
Prevention.com
Scientific American
