How many people remember everything

And yet The first case was reported in the journal Neurocase in Researchers from the University of California, Irvine spent five years interviewing her and testing her abilities before the paper went to press. The patient later revealed herself to be a woman named Jill Price. She published a memoir about her life with hyperthymesia in Some studies have found that hyperthymesiacs might have variations in the structure of their brains , while others argue that it might have behavioral components.

I had to study hard. For instance, Price can label what day of the week virtually any calendar date fell on. Short-term memories last seconds to hours, while long-term memories last for years. We also have a working memory, which lets us keep something in our minds for a limited time by repeating it. Whenever you say a phone number to yourself over and over to remember it, you're using your working memory. Another way to categorize memories is by the subject of the memory itself, and whether you are consciously aware of it.

Declarative memory, also called explicit memory, consists of the sorts of memories you experience consciously. Others consist of past events you've experienced, such as a childhood birthday. Nondeclarative memory, also called implicit memory, unconsciously builds up.

These include procedural memories, which your body uses to remember the skills you've learned. Do you play an instrument or ride a bicycle? Those are your procedural memories at work.

Nondeclarative memories also can shape your body's unthinking responses, like salivating at the sight of your favorite food or tensing up when you see something you fear.

In general, declarative memories are easier to form than nondeclarative memories. It takes less time to memorize a country's capital than it does to learn how to play the violin. But nondeclarative memories stick around more easily.

Once you've learned to ride a bicycle, you're not likely to forget. To understand how we remember things, it's incredibly helpful to study how we forget— which is why neuroscientists study amnesia, the loss of memories or the ability to learn.

Amnesia is usually the result of some kind of trauma to the brain, such as a head injury, a stroke, a brain tumor, or chronic alcoholism. There are two main types of amnesia.

The first, retrograde amnesia, occurs where you forget things you knew before the brain trauma. Anterograde amnesia is when brain trauma curtails or stops someone's ability to form new memories. The most famous case study of anterograde amnesia is Henry Molaison , who in had parts of his brain removed as a last-ditch treatment for severe seizures. While Molaison—known when he was alive as H.

Ask Nima Veiseh what he was doing for any day in the past 15 years, however, and he will give you the minutiae of the weather, what he was wearing, or even what side of the train he was sitting on his journey to work. He had always had a good memory, but the thrill of young love seems to have shifted a gear in his mind: from now on, he would start recording his whole life in detail. Needless to say, people like Veiseh are of great interest to neuroscientists hoping to understand the way the brain records our lives.

And this research might even suggest ways for us all to relive our past with greater clarity. Jill Price kept a diary to try to lay her intrusive memories to rest. As a bonus, her notes have now allowed scientists to verify her claims Credit: iStock.

Emailing the neuroscientist and memory researcher Jim McGaugh one day, she claimed that she could recall every day of her life since the age of Could he help explain her experiences? Intrigued, McGaugh invited her to his lab, and began to test her: he would give her a date and ask her to tell him about the world events on that day.

True to her word, she was correct almost every time. Luckily, Price had also kept a diary throughout that period, allowing the researchers to verify her recollections of personal incidents too; again, she was right the vast majority of the time.

In an instant, she reeled off a list of their appointments. Nor are they necessarily better at remembering a round of drinks, say. They can be primed to remember world events that never actually occurred, for instance. Memory is a collaborative effort within the brain. Image courtesy of Flickr user alles-schlumpf. At last count, at least 33 people in the world could tell you what they ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner, on February 20, Or who they talked to on October 28, Pick any date and they can pull from their memory the most prosaic details of that thin slice of their personal history.

Others, no doubt, have this remarkable ability, but so far only those 33 have been confirmed by scientific research. These are not savants who can rattle off long strings of numbers, Rainman-style, or effortlessly retrieve tidbits from a deep vault of historical facts. In fact, they generally perform no better on standard memory tests than the rest of us.