A gift of memory!?
Everybody knows that memory is a very important element to success either in work and life. For most of the people, even the most important moments can be faded of our lives with time. People who hyperthymesia, will not experience this “washed way” or “let it go” moment. Is it a gift with a blessing or in a totally contrast way?
Individuals who have hyperthymesia can remember every detail in their lives. Once they encountered the date, it is like playing a recall movie in their head, without any hesitation, days in the past come alive. AJ(Real name Jill price), the first documented hyperthymestic, she can remember every detail of her life since she was fourteen years old. “Starting on February 5th, 1980, I remember everything. That was a Tuesday.” Her brain was subject to the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex were reportedly normal. What a dream gift that everybody wants, however it not fully true. “I still feel bad about stuff that happened 30 years ago,” Price said. “And I really live it and feel it.”
What more astonished to me is, in fact, AJ was not good at the memory at all, according to the study published in Neurocase.
In our lesson, we learned about long-term memory. There are two kinds of long-term memories, Episodic memories and semantic memory I am wondering if it tied to her memory system and brain function.
Nowadays, since it is a rarely people diagnosed with hyperthymesia, the scientist still doesn’t know the reason of it. Hopefully our science can find out the reason and cure them if they do not take them as a blessing gift.
Shafy, Samiha. “An Infinite Loop in the Brain”. The Science of Memory. Spiegel Online. Retrieved 6 December 2011.
Parker ES, Cahill L, McGaugh JL (February 2006). “A case of unusual autobiographical remembering.”. Neurocase. 12 (1): 35–49