Dani Garavelli: Total Recall

Hyperthymesia

The condition Marilu Henner has – hyperthymesia, or superior autobiographical memory – is so rare it affects between just six and 20 people worldwide and was only recognised in 2006.

Give Henner any date over the last 40 years and she will be able to tell you what day of the week it was, what she was doing, what she was wearing and even what was on TV.

Scientists hope research into hyperthymesia may throw more light on how memory works.

They believe there are at least two types of memory, short-term and long-term, but opinion is still divided on how much information moves from one to the other. Some believe short-term memory acts as a “sorting office”, sending some information to long-term memory and discarding the rest. Others believe all information is retained somewhere and it is just a question of learning to access it.

Hyperthymesia suggests the latter interpretation is more likely; that the capacity of our memory is more or less infinite and that we might be able to develop strategies to retrieve more of our past.

To Henner, who recently appeared on Celebrity Apprentice, the condition has been a gift, allowing her to tap into the good times. But to another sufferer, Jill Price, from New York, who has been the subject of a study by researchers at the University of California, it has been a curse, which has led to years of depression. She describes her life as a split-screen television, with one side showing what she is doing in the present and the other showing the memories she cannot hold back.

“Some memories are warm and give me a good feeling,” Price has said. “But I also recall every bad decision, insult and excruciating embarrassment. Over the years it has eaten me up.”

Flash-bulb memories

Flashbulb memories are highly detailed, exceptionally vivid “snapshots” of the moment and circumstances in which unexpected and consequential news was heard. They may relate to important autobiographical events, such as the death of a loved one, but are more often connected to world events, such as the death Princess Diana. What makes the flashbulb memory special is the emotional arousal experienced at the moment involved.

Often, the individual’s memory of the moment has a photographic quality and they are able to recall exactly what they were doing, where they were and who was with them.

Events commonly held to have produced flashbulb memories include 9/11, the deaths of Bob Marley, Elvis Presley, and Kurt Cobain and, of course, the assassination of John F Kennedy.Savant Syndrome

Savant Syndrome became an international talking point in the 90s following the release of the film Rain Man, which stars Dustin Hoffman as an autistic man with an amazing facility for mathematical calculations.

According to experts, about half of those with Savant Syndrome are autistic and about half have another disability, mental retardation, brain injury or disease.

However, a handful of savants have no apparent abnormalities, other than their eidetic memory.

An eidetic memory is the ability to recall images, sounds, or objects in memory with extreme precision. The world’s most famous savant – Kim Peek, the man who inspired Rain Man – could read and memorise books from the age of 16 months. By the time he died in 2009, he had memorised around 12,000 of them.

Although, at 87, his IQ was below average, his amazing memory made him a repository of a vast quantity of information on subjects such as history, literature, geography and music. As an adult, Peek, from Utah, who had a genetic condition called FG Syndrome, could also remember music he had heard decades before. In the UK, Daniel Tammet, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, speaks ten languages and holds the European record for reciting Pi from memory to 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes. He learned conversational Icelandic in a week, demonstrating his achievement by conducting a TV interview in his new tongue.

Tammet’s phenomenal memory is aided by the fact he has synaesthesia, a neurological condition in which the stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to an involuntary response in another; thus numbers and words may have their own “personality”.

For Tammet, each positive integer up to 10,000 has its own unique shape, colour, texture and feel and he can intuitively “see” results of calculations as synaesthetic landscapes.

A savant’s facility for remembering is not necessarily confined to words and numbers. Artist Stephen Wiltshire, from London, can draw a landscape after viewing it once, as he proved when he recreated the entire New York skyline in intricate detail from memory after taking a helicopter ride over the city.

Amnesia

When we talk about amnesia we tend to focus on retrograde amnesia – the type which leaves the sufferer locked out of the past, with no recollection of personal or world events in the months or years leading up to their injuries/illness/emotional trauma, or wandering the streets with no idea of their own identity.

In 2005, Jonathan Overfeld was sitting on a park bench in Hamburg when he realised he had no idea who he was. After discovering he could play the piano, and performing a piece by Bach, he began to recall a childhood spent in care where he suffered extensive sexual abuse, though his adult years remained a mystery to him.

But injuries or illness may also cause anterograde amnesia – a condition which prevents the sufferer forming new memories. After surviving two car crashes 20 years ago, Michelle Philpots, from Spalding in Lincolnshire, was diagnosed with epilepsy and her power of recall started to fail. Now her life is like Groundhog Day, with her memory wiped clean every 24 hours. Every morning, she wakes up believing it is 1994, the last year she can remember. Time after time, her husband has to show her photographs to prove to her they are married and her fridge is covered with the dozens of post-it notes that she needs in order to cope.

Musician and conductor Clive Wearing has suffered from both retrograde and anterograde amnesia since contracting a virus which attacked his brain in 1985. Because the hippocampus was damaged, the part of the brain required to transfer memories from short-term to long-term memory, he is unable to store new memories for more than a minute. Wearing spends every day “waking up” every 20-30 seconds, “restarting” his consciousness once the timespan of his short-term memory elapses. He remembers little of his life before the virus struck; he knows he has children from an earlier marriage, but cannot remember their names. His love for his second wife Deborah, whom he married the year prior to his illness, however, is unaffected. He greets her like a long-lost lover every time they meet, even though she may have just left the room to fetch a glass of water.

Another form of amnesia – global transient amnesia – involves the sudden, temporary disturbance in an otherwise healthy person’s memory. Naomi Jacobs, a single mum, was suffering from stress when she woke one morning to find she had forgotten everything that had happened in the previous 19 years. She had no memory of giving birth to her 11-year-old son and didn’t know what words like Google and YouTube meant. Within eight weeks her memory began to return to normal, although it took three years for her to piece everything back together again.

Mnemonics

As far back as ancient Greece, it was understood even people with no special powers of recall could develop strategies to help them to learn long lists of information. These techniques are called mnemonics. Most of us have come into contact with mnemonics at some time in our life, for example using the sentence My Very Early Morning Jam Sandwich Usually Nauseates People to recall the planets of the solar system in order of their distance from the sun. Various studies have shown that the human brain is capable of remembering only a limited number of arbitrary items in working memory; grouping these items into chunks permits the brain to retain them more easily in our minds.

But large groups of numbers can be remembered by creating a sentence where the number of letters in a word corresponds to the number in the same position in the sequence. Thus the first 15 digits of Pi - 3.14159265358979 – might be remembered with the words, “How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.”

Mnemonics can also be helpful in learning a foreign language, for example by adapting a hard-to-remember foreign word to a phrase in the learner’s native language. Linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann has proposed many Anglo-Hebraic lexical mnemonics for English-speaking students of Israeli Hebrew. For example, to remember the word ohel, the Hebrew word for tent, Zuckermann suggests: “Oh hell, there’s a raccoon in my tent”.

When memory man Andi Bell is facing a memory challenge involving a deck of cards, he starts by walking past a set of London landmarks committing his route to memory. He has already learned to associate each card with a particular image – he memorises the order by imagining those images in groups of three or four at the different landmarks along the route.

In recent years, brain-training games designed to improve memory and cognitive skills have proved popular with the over-50s, but so far studies have provided conflicting evidence on their effectiveness.

World Memory Championships

Every year for the last 20, master mnemonists have been meeting to pit their skill against each other at the World Memory Championships. Participants have to compete in ten events, which involve memorising as much information as possible in a given period of time. Contests include the largest number of whole numbers learned in an hour; the largest number of binary numbers learned in half an hour; and the number of names and faces in 15 minutes (world record 195 names).

Although savants, including Trammet, have entered this competition, it is almost always won by those whose memory skills have been developed through strategy and practice.

Co-founder Dominic O’Brien who, in 2002, won a Guinness Book of World Records entry after he memorised a random sequence of 2,808 playing cards (54 decks) after looking at each card only once, has won it eight times.

The most recent British winner is accountant Ben Pridmore who is also famous for his mental calculations and has taken part in the Mental Calculation World Cup. Pridmore, however, met his match in Ayumu, a chimpanzee from Japan, who beat him in an experiment which involved memorising numbers which flashed in front of them for a fifth of a second.

But can it make money?

In Rain Man, under the influence of his brother Charlie, Dustin Hoffman’s character Raymond takes his skills to Las Vegas where he counts cards until the casino bosses become suspicious. Shortly after developing his skills, O’Brien too tried his hand at card-counting becoming very good at blackjack before being banned from casinos on both sides of the Atlantic.

Instead, O’Brien, a dyslexic with attention deficit disorder, has made his fortune writing books, including How To Develop A Perfect Memory and The Winning Hand. Like other “memory men”, including Bell, he has appeared on science documentaries and chat shows and he works as a trainer for Peak Performance Training, which aims to help people to pass exams and improve their performance at work.