What If You Perfectly Remembered Every Day of Your Life? Turns Out, It’s Not So Nice.

4 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Though subjects with hyperthymesia, or HSAM, have been studied for their incredible memory before, involuntary memory was an aspect of this condition that needed more analysis.A Polish teen contacted a team of researchers about his extraordinary memory, and they found that his involuntary memories were actually a distraction for him.This was the first time involuntary autobiographical memories were studied in a lab, and while the mechanisms behind HSAM are still unknown, this study has revealed one more layer.Most memories end up lost in the ether. As moments come and go, the ghosts of trivial things usually vanish as we instead hang onto significant events in our lives. But there are rare exceptions. Those with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), also known as hyperthymesia, can replay episodes, most of them oddly specific, from an incredible vault of autobiographical memory. What is behind this almost supernatural ability is still a mystery.Last year, researchers were impressed by a French teen who was able to recall an astonishing amount from her life, which she described as being stored in specific folders that were further organized into mental file cabinets. Another team of researchers has found out even more about this condition from a young Polish subject referred to as KCL. At 16, he claims to still have fragmented memories going all the way back to when he was three months old, with conscious and continuous memories starting around the age of 3. He is able to remember events from at least half the days of his life, and while specific dates can spur the uncanny ability for such recall, it isn’t only limited to the calendar. It’s also possible with minimal and simple prompts, such as photographs, songs, other sensory impressions such as smells, or details most people would almost immediately forget.“Memories can be readily accessed, often in response to internal or external cues, with calendar dates being particularly effective in eliciting specific recollections,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Cortex. “People with HSAM are able to accurately identify when events occurred, including precise temporal information such as the day of the week, and their recollections are typically vivid, detailed, and confidently reported.”When KCL picks up certain cues, memories come to him involuntarily. It requires no effort for him to relive events that most of us would struggle to recall. Memories that randomly come to mind occupy his thoughts 5 to 7 hours of each day. Because his memories can be brought back so easily, he is often distracted by them, since things that appear ordinary to most of his peers will transport him back in time. He never purposely memorized dates or used mnemonic devices. Strangely enough, while he reported his memory to be highly superior to that of his peers, he felt that other aspects of his memory were similar to theirs. These include semantic memory, which refers to knowledge accumulated throughout life, and prospective memory, which entails remembering to follow through on a plan in the future.Having HSAM apparently does not give KCL an academic advantage. Sometimes, the distraction caused by so many triggers pulling up memories is an experience similar to daydreaming or mind wandering, which spontaneously interferes with his efforts to listen in class and understand the material. His voluntary and involuntary autobiographical memory was assessed by the researchers using both tasks and personal reports. What KCL reported himself was analyzed with the Involuntary Autobiographical Memory Inventory (IAMI). This is a scale intended to measure the frequency of these types of memories, along with involuntary future thoughts. The researchers also looked at cognitive and emotional factors, differences between KCL and his peers, déjà vu, and how aware of his thought processes he was.Déjà vu seems to have a link to involuntary autobiographical memories and other spontaneous experiences. Because déjà vu may be triggered by cues in a person’s surroundings, recent studies suggest that people with hyper memory experience it more often than average—a link researchers long overlooked.KCL was given a déjà vu questionnaire that is still being analyzed. When he was screened for performance on other aspects of autobiographical memory, the results far exceeded what is considered average. He was able to recall random dates and the dates of publicly known events so well that he qualified for the extreme upper range. It is also the first time evidence of frequent involuntary autobiographical memories was analyzed in a lab.“These findings suggest that HSAM may be best understood not as a form of generalized memory superiority, but as a shift in the dynamics of retrieval, characterized by heightened cue sensitivity and a lowered threshold for accessing autobiographical information,” the researchers said. “Involuntary remembering—and, more broadly, direct forms of retrieval—may play a central role in the HSAM phenotype.”Elizabeth Rayne is a creature who writes. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Ars Technica, SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Den of Geek, Forbidden Futures and Collective Tales. She lurks right outside New York City with her parrot, Lestat. When not writing, she can be found drawing, playing the piano or shapeshifting.