If asked about the specifics of a random day in their life, most people would struggle to answer without flicking back through a journal, or digging into their Instagram story archive – but that’s not the case for everyone. For people with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), or hyperthymesia, they can instead recall the most minute of details to an almost unbelievable degree of accuracy using their memories alone.
What is highly superior autobiographical memory?
According to the University of California (UC) Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory, HSAM is a memory phenomenon characterized by “a superior ability to recall specific details of autobiographical events.”
“Autobiographical” is a key point there; as far as current research suggests, this impressive ability to almost never forget doesn’t extend beyond an individual’s own life, they have to have experienced something themselves.
“I can’t just memorize things,” Markie Pasternak, one of the youngest people with HSAM, explained to Reader’s Digest. “That’s not how it works. I have to see it. I have to be there. I have to live it, or it doesn’t affect me.” False memories are possible with HSAM too.
Those who have HSAM – a figure thought to be between 60 to nearly 100 people – also “tend to spend a large amount of time thinking about their past and have a detailed understanding of the calendar and its patterns.”
The phenomenon was first officially reported in 2006 – though may even have been described as far back as 1871 – by researchers at UC Irvine, in a 35-year-old woman referred to at the time as “AJ”, whom we now know to be Jill Price.
Price had contacted UC Irvine neuroscientist Dr James McGaugh in the hopes of getting a better understanding of what was going on with her memory. Alongside Drs Elizabeth S. Parker and Larry Cahill, McGaugh was able to demonstrate that “if given a date, [Price could] tell you what she was doing and what day of the week it fell on,” and could do so “with considerable accuracy and reliability.”
Like other people with HSAM, Price was able to recall this information without the help of techniques like mnemonics, as used by people with other types of superior memory.
How does it work?
How those with HSAM experience the process of sifting through their memories to identify specific information varies between people. Pasternak, for example, told Reader’s Digest that she sees hers as a “Candy Land board”, with particular colors of squares representing specific months, while weeks are represented within those squares as a pie chart.
As for the underlying neuroscience of HSAM, researchers are still figuring that one out. The first group study of HSAM back in 2012 performed whole-brain structural MRIs on participants, with the preliminary results identifying multiple structures with different anatomy to those in the brains of people without HSAM.
Since then, other studies have continued to investigate if there are particular structural differences underlying HSAM. A recent systematic review of research on the condition found that while some had contrasting results to that initial study, finding no significant anatomical differences, the overall data suggest there may be differences in structures in the brain’s medial temporal lobe and where the temporal and occipital lobes meet, all of which have roles in memory.
Figuring out how HSAM works also isn’t just a matter of scientific curiosity or helping those who have it get a better understanding of what’s going on inside their brains.
“The study of HSAM could significantly inform on how the brain can optimize or enhance its processing of memories,” the UC Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory explains, “knowledge which can be used to reverse engineer the process such that we can use it to prevent or treat memory disorders.”
All “explainer” articles are confirmed by fact checkers to be correct at time of publishing. Text, images, and links may be edited, removed, or added to at a later date to keep information current.
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