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Rebecca Sharrock, one of the only people in the world with Hyperthymesia She can remember virtually every single day of her life in vivid detail, including being in her crib at just 12 days old. (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/interestingasfuck@lemmy.world
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[–] 54 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

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?

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  • [–] 28 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    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.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia

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  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Shit think I have this! I too can do that, and my earliest memory is from when I was 6 months old. Yes I can pull them up with great details. But to ask the same questions how can I know if it totally real or my imagination filling in the details? Guess we can't know but I can pull up great details of all of my childhood. The bad and the good so really sucks remembering everything with that much detail.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    You should contact some of those researchers. There's only a couple hundred people with this characteristic, they might have a survey or interview for you. It's a pretty interesting cognitive ability to study, it'll probably lead to some insights into human cognition in general.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago* (1 child)

    That description of being shown the event seems to me like not a memory but more like being shown what happened.

    Of course we will interpret that as a memory but it may not be. It could be a literal connection to what happened at that time. We only think it's a memory because that's the closest thing we know.

    Just thoughts about it.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago

    I was thinking it's kind of like an AI "hallucination". It's a plausible (but not necessarily accurate) representation of what happened. I wonder in what ways those memories change over time.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    People with this condition remember every detail. Phone number in a piece of paper 20 years ago.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 hours ago

    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.

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