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[–] 28 points 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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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