Tuesday Newsday – Four People With Super-Memory

If you have never checked out the website www.mentalfloss.com, you are denying yourself the greatest internet experience of man’s recorded history.  Ok, that might be overselling it a little, but it’s at least worth giving a good look-see.  Check out some of the shirts they sell (Disclaimer:  I have no connection or relationship with the developers of this site.  If they make money from my links here… good for them!):

It’s a shame that the T-Shirt in general doesn’t make it into my wardrobe as much anymore, because I would love to stock it with these babies for sure.

The reason I wanted to bring the website to your attention today is because of an article that was featured on Yahoo News on Monday.  The title of the article is “Four People with Super Memory”.  It won’t take you more than 6 minutes to read the entire thing.  All four of these “Super Brains” have been involved at studies at Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine.  I’ve constantly wondered what would happen if I could remember everything that I had ever perceived and experienced…. instantly.  With some of the information from this article, I’m still not sure whether the ability would ultimately be a blessing or a curse.

Baron uses his super memory to win stuff. Although unemployed, he’s extremely resourceful and is constantly entering, and winning trivia contests.

Who's the big winner?

I’m pretty sure that Rick Baron would chalk up his memory skills as a gift.  I mean, if you asked this guy what he does for a living, he could honestly answer:  ”I’m the big winner!”  Its kind of interesting.  For whatever reason, businesses are willing to part with money or prizes in order to let people display their memory skills.  Admit it, if you don’t play those cheesy trivia games in sports bars, its probably because you aren’t interested in losing, right?  Because of the social and/or economic gain involved, we tend to enjoy sharing our memory with others.  Heck, others will even take time to watch us if we are especially adept at it, as evidenced by Brad Williams’s appearance on Jeopardy.  Which, by the way, doesn’t look to be his only brush with fame due to his memory:

“Growing up, I never really had reason to think I wasn’t like everyone else,” he has said. A feature-length doc on his life, titled “Unforgettable“, is presently in production.

Fame, by it’s definition, involves a perception of superiority or uniqueness in some regard from the rest of the community or the population.  It sounds sort of nice, but there are countless stories of the loss of privacy that occurs with fame (see exhibit A:  Jon and Kate Gosselin).  Williams may enjoy his status as a walking date encyclopedia, but if the majority of the people he meets greet him with a date in history and then wait for him to perform, I can imagine that becoming tiresome quickly.  He may loathe the idea of meeting new people who know him for his memory skills.

I can sympathize with Jill Price, who:

in her memoir, she describes super memory as a nuisance, partly because she can’t seem to forget painful events, like when someone she was crushing on rejected her.

Now, almost everyone over the age of 17 has experienced pain deeper than having a crush reject you.  Imagine if a single stimulus such as a date would bring you right back into the toughest pain of your life thus far.  In truth, our thoughts and feelings are just chemical reactions based on the perception of our senses.  Our sight is just our brains translating light reflecting off of objects.  Our memories can be jogged back to an experience in our past and it can vividly feel like living it anew.

The idea that “time heals all wounds” is true because of our lack of memory recall.

As we continue with life after a traumatic experience, new stimuli are perceived and our minds bring them to the forefront of our thoughts.  We usually give people a certain amount of time to grieve a loss, but eventually encourage them to “get over it” and “move on with life”.  We would never say something like that to someone immediately following a tragedy.  We know that perspective is often gained after contemplation.  This is an organizing of our memories and placing the new experience in it’s appropriate place in the story of our life.

As Sean O’Neil would tell you, everything that we have ever experienced is located somewhere in our minds.  It’s just a matter of finding the right stimulus to recall the details.  For many of us, it takes a number of different stimuli.  For Bob Petrella, it doesn’t take much:

when it comes to the Pittsburgh Steelers, his favorite team, you can show him a single freeze frame from most any game that he’s seen, and he can tell you not only the date of the game, but the final score.

It’s probably fortunate that this guy is not an Arizona Cardinals fan.  Honestly, you have to have a selective memory or rose-colored hind-sight glasses to be one of those.  ;)

Ultimately, I believe that the blessing or curse of  Super-Memory is determined by your overriding emotional view of life and the experiences of it.  While the kid in the room full of toys may complain, the kid in the room full of horse crap may keep digging through it looking for the pony.  In order for us to be responsible, we must still be able to choose what we think about or how we think about it.

I’d like to leave you with a picture of my favorite t-shirt from Mental Floss and ask you: how is your memory?