Aspies For Freedom

I thought I might type in this article from the newspaper today since it was interesting.   I am not going to type the whole thing.

Scientists awed by 'human calendar'

California researchers have uncovered a woman with a memory so detailed and unusual they have quite literally never seen anything like it.  

Give her a date and sew can tell you what took place - whether it was the final episode of the television soap-opera Dallas, the day actor Robert Blake's wife was killed, the day of the Lockerbie plane crash.................She can tell you what she was doing at the time.  She remembers the weather.  .....

These findings are reported in an article in the current edition of the journal Neurocase.  The woman is identified only as AJ.  Her unique ability to perfectly and instantly recall details of her past has led researchers to propose a name for her condition:  hyperthymestic syndrome,  based on the Greek word thymesis for remembering and hyper, meaning more than normal.  ....

They hope to perform an MRI to determine whether there is something unusual about the structure of her brain.

They also hope that bringing her story to the public will encourage others with the same ability to come forward. .......

McGaugh (researcher) said AJ wrote him for help six years ago....

Despite her fabulous remembrance of things past, the woman cannot remember what the five keys on her chain are for; she is bad at recognizing faces; she did poorly at rote memorization tasks and never excelled in school - her grades were mostly Cs.  She collects TV guides, displays obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and admits to a facsination with the macabre.  

She has suffered from depression, and takes Prozac.....

The woman told researchers she had always had a richly detailed memory for episodes: Her earliest memory is of being in her crib at 18 to 24 months and being woken by her uncle's dog; she remembers her brother's birh when she was three.  

She reports that several people on her father's side of the family have excellent memories, but none so good as hers.

She believes there was a change in her memory when at age 8 her family moved from the east coast to the west.   Traumatized, she began making lists of old friends, looking at pictures of her house, and ruminating about the past.  Not long afterwards, she began keeping detailed diaries.

She became obsessed with writing things down, making entries as often as six to seven times a day.  

"Some people call me the human calendar while others run out of the room in complete fear,"  she told reserachers.  "Most have called it a gift, but I call it a burden.  I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!"  

She also told researchers she wouldn't change it if she could.  "I treasure these memories, good and bad.... it's part of me."




This is interesting.  But what is bad about it is that she asked for help and she is just being studied.  I hope she can get some help that she wants.

Sounds unfortunate.  People hang on to all kinds of things post traumatically.  It divorces them from their feelings, which can become unhealthy.

Episodes of Dallas don't cause that much trauma do they?


I think shes on the spectrum.

My husband is definitely NT but he has the most incredible memory for faces.  He'll see somebody in a shopping centre that he might have met casually or at work ten years ago for perhaps half an hour, and go up and begin talking to them.  He'll remember their name, the names of their family members, whereabouts they lived at the time, their pets names, etc.

While I will quite blindly walk past my own sister at the mall without recogition unless she calls out to me!
Alison

Honest with some women i know, I wouldn't be suprised. :wink:

I have read the Neurocase paper, and it does appear to me that the researchers consider that A.J., the woman with the great memory, may have something like autism ("anomalous brain lateralization", "neurodevelopmental, frontostriatal disorder", "deficits in executive functioning"), but they state that she isn't autistic. I'd like to know their reasoning for this conclusion.

The really interesting thing about this case is that the researchers have studied this woman for "more than five years" (!) and have missed an obvious and important aspect of this case; she has a form of synaesthesia that is involved with her mental organization of year dates. Her freaky skill is her autobiographical memory as retrieved by date, so any synaesthesia involved with dates is likely to be an element of her exceptional memory skill. We know that one of the greatest examples of a person with exceptional memory skills was a synaesthete ("S" the mnemonist who was described by Luria). How the heck could these researchers have failed to notice that their subject of 5 years of study is also a synaesthete? They wrote a decription of her synaesthesia in their journal paper apparently without even realizing what they had written about! (I roll my eyes)

Apparently the subject of this study is soon to release her autobiography, and someone is making a documentary about another case of "hyperthymestic syndrome".

Marie Curie was also known to have a God-like memory, if I read it right she even retained memories from 5 months after birth.

I can also remember a few things from my babyhood - but that doesn't make my memory God-like!

I'd settle for Goddess-like!

Sometime I cannot remember what someone has just said to me long enough to work out the meaning, and have to ask them to repeat themselves.

I recognise faces (although I cannot recall them from memory) - but cannot remember how I know the person if I see them in a new situation (e.g. a neighbour at the library, a shopkeeper in the street )

It's still a fact that remembering anything before the 12 month mark is very rare.  In fact that may have been an understatement about Curie... if I remember right the example was more like, "remember the time when I was 2-3 months old and you put my diaper on backwards?"

It was an example that simply blew my mind, because I didn't know that people could do things like that... basically.  It's fitting though--Curie went on to achieve some pretty monumental stuff.

Quote from the book "How the mind forgets and remembers: the seven sins of memory" by Daniel Schacter:

"For most of us, earliest memories date from three to five years of age; there is no evidence that people can remember incidents that occurred before they were two years old, most likely because the brain regions necessary for episodic memory are not yet fully mature until that age."

The book then goes on to describe how people can be induced to believe they remember earlier memories by suggestive techniques.

Are intellectually gifted people like Curie different? Do their brains develop earlier? I am sceptical.

I can certainly remember things that happened before I was three.

Hope has an amazing memory if it is something that really resonated with her. This afternoon we went walking along the pier, then ducked into a nice restaurant for wine (me) and ginger ale (her). She then proceeded to tell me in great detail about the young woman who sat near her on the one cruise she has been on (to Mexico, Cayman i
Islands, etc.)

She remembered how the girl wore her hair, the color of her hair and what she ate that night. Hope was approx. 7 when we went on this trip. She even recountered what they talked about (this girl was sitting with either her parents or grandparents).

She was intrigued by her beauty and has never forgotten her!