Never Forget: Hyperthymesia
by Emjay Rosales
"Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I
remember, and remember more than I have seen."
- Benjamin Disraeli
“When did you watch the 134th episode of One Piece?”
“It was October 7, 2003, after I came home from school with cookies in my hands.”
This might be a scenario for someone sharing a talk with a person having a syndrome called hyperthymesia. Despite the minority of details and triviality of the date for an ordinary person, for a hyperthymestic, it was just as vivid as if the scenario just happened yesterday.
WHAT IS HYPERTHYMESIA?
Hyperthymesia or the Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) is a rare neurological condition in which a person is extremely capable of clearly recalling every big and small detail of his life. It came from the Ancient Greek words “hyper” meaning “excessive,” and “thymesis” meaning “remembering.”
University of California researchers James McGaugh, Larry Cahill, Elizabeth Parker, and Dr. Paul Tejera defined that there was a distinction between people with remarkable memory and people with hyperthymesia. The former only remember his past events that are significant and influential, while the latter automatically perceive memories without employing mnemonics or tactics. Their memories are involuntary and have an uncontrollable association.
LIVING WITH HSAM
For hyperthymestic person, their brain is like a computer. They store incredibly large amount of information, big or small, and they just overflow automatically. It’s like seeing a 70's movie and still recall how the protagonist fell in love with his muse one rainy evening in a coffee shop.
They still have similarities with average people—receptive to false memories and the thinking processes are still quite the same.
Average people process information into the short-term memory for their recent experiences. If something remarkable happened, they get stored in long-term memory. This situation applies for people with hyperthymesia as well, although through the period of time, they still get so vivid.
AJ—then revealed as Jill Price—is an American woman from Southern California who became the first one with hyperthymesia case known to public through the journal Neurocase in 2006, and she’s the first to receive such diagnosis. For people, it’s a blessing of having an incredible memory capacity, but for Price, it’s become too much she often feel exhausted.
“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,” said Price when he first sent an e-mail to McGaugh.
jill price
HABIT-FORMING BEHAVIOR
In the July 2012 issue of the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, a research has claimed that their 10 HSAM participants’ whole brain structural magnetic resonance imaging scans revealed to be morphologically different than those having an average memory function. An example is the increase of parahippocampal gyrus—a cortical region located in the medial temporal lobe which is engaged in retrospection of emotional memories. Another one is the increase of uncinate fasciculus which is responsible for encoding memory and retrieval.
The findings revealed HSAM participants have a habit-forming behavior. In AJ's case, she used to store her personal belongings in an organized way, like other HSAM subjects having obsessive behaviors.
In the case of Price, a portion of her medial temporal lobe and caudate nuclei were disproportionately large. Temporal lobe collects and retains facts while caudate nucleus processes “automatic habits” (Cahill, 2009).
Amygdala can be a certain part of the brain that is responsible for the condition. There were studies on HSAM subjects where their right amygdala is much larger. Amygdala affects our emotional and self-referential responses, and is involved in our memory.”
Unfortunately, there were still no conclusive evidences that would establish the exact reason why hyperthymestic people are able to store information in a near-perfect plot over the course of their lives.
Hyperthymesia has been adopted in different literature and films, just like the storyline of one the most popular 2015 South-korean television series Remember: War of the Son, where the protagonist suffers from the same condition but then begins to lose his memories due to Alzheimer’s disease—the slow decline of memory.
The breakthrough of McGaugh, et. al’s research will further help the future insights about the condition. Researches and studies are still growing and unfolding.
A gift or a curse, hyperthymestic individuals are the ones who would decide.