We misremember and forget the events of our lives all of the time. But a small number of individuals seem to have exceptional recall for the mundane details of their personal lives without even trying. Give them a date, and they can bring to mind the sandwich they ate for lunch, the sneakers they wore, the soft rain that fell in the afternoon.
In 2006, the first clinical case of such a person was identified, and the condition was given a name: Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, or HSAM. Some experts propose that there may be no more than 100 or so people on Earth with the condition. Read more: “Faulty Memory is a Feature not a Bug” Recently, the parents of a young woman in Atlanta who seemed to have such a superior memory brought her to the attention of a team of scientists, who invited her into the lab for study.
They found that her exceptional recall seemed to begin at age 12, shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic, and that she scored especially high on standardized tests of involuntary memory. Voluntary and involuntary memory seem to be distinct processes, and this rare form of superior memory, they believe, may be closely linked to the latter. They published their results this year as a case study in the journal Neurocase.
I spoke with study author Anne Cleary, a psychology researcher at Colorado State University, about the memories of the girl from Atlanta, what her condition has to do with COVID, déjà vu, and creativity, and what impact her remarkable memory has had on her life. Can you tell me about the woman you studied? She was 16 years old at the time I met her.
Her parents realized that her memory was truly phenomenal, so they started looking into it, and they came across some of the blog posts and publications that are out there on this phenomenon known as HSAM. Her parents learned about what that was, thought that she might have it, and wanted to have her tested for it. They wanted to make sure that it wasn’t going to affect her wellbeing.
I heard about her through a colleague at Emory University in Atlanta, and I ended up traveling to Atlanta in 2024 to meet with the girl, who we called EE, as well as her mother. It was the summer of 2024. There’s no great standardized method of testing for HSAM, but James McGough, one of the authors of the very first case report on HSAM that had come out in 2006, let me know his method at that time and over the years.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
