“I go back to the day and I just see the day and what I was doing.”ĪJ compared it to a split-screen television, where she’d be talking to someone and suddenly a vivid scene would pop into her head.

“Give me the day and I see it,” she told the researchers. But as McGaugh noted in his study, AJ’s superhuman recall abilities have their drawbacks. Not to be confused with photographic or eidetic memory, or professionals who use sophisticated mnemonic recall strategies, HSAM describes individuals who spend an “abnormally large amount of time” thinking about their past, and who have an “extraordinary capacity to recall specific events from their personal past,” as McGaugh first defined the condition. In his seminal Neurocase study, McGaugh described “AJ,” a 42-year-old woman “whose remembering dominates her life.” Known as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), or hyperthymesia, the condition-such that it is-was first chronicled by University of California-Irvine neurobiologist James McGaugh in 2006. The ability to remember every moment of your life sounds like an amazing proposition, but for the very few people who actually have this ability, it comes at a cost.

Eidetic memory superpower