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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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Great question. idk about Sharrock but:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia
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.
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.
Hmm interesting maybe I look into it. Thank you.
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.
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.