Ep80 "What's it like to never forget?"

we find beautiful? What is intelligence? Why do brains become depressed? And one of my favorites, why do we see the dress differently? Thank you so much for being part of Inner Cosmos, where we get to take a deep dive together to better understand our lives, our choices, and our experiences. I'll see you next month. What would it be like to have a vastly better memory than you do now?

What if you could remember what you were wearing on any day back twelve years ago, or who you were with, or what that conversation was, or whether it rained, or what you heard on the radio. Would this be a blessing or a curse? Or could it be a balance of the two. And if you're forgetting a lot of your life, what might you do to better remember it?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we dive deeply into our three pound universe to uncover some of the most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode is about memory, and specifically the most extraordinary capacities for memory that we have witnessed on the planet. Now. It happens that one of my favorite authors is Jorge Luis Borges, and he wrote a short story in nineteen forty two

called Funes the Memorius. This is about a young man who falls off his horse and hits his head, and as a consequence of this accident, he develops an extraordinary ability to remember everything. He can no longer forget anything. Fus's memory becomes so vast that he can recall every moment of his life and every nuance of what he perceives, down to the exact positions of the clouds on any given day. Now, obviously, keep in mind this is a

story of fiction. Borjes was a great writer of fantasy and the genre that came to be known as magical realism. So back to the story, this ability becomes, for Fuse more of a burden than a gift. He finds himself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, and he becomes incapable of thinking abstractly because he can remember all the fine details of everything. He drowns in a world of

infinite detail. In story foodates can no longer even sleep, as he recalls quote every crevice and every molding of the various houses which surround him end quote. It's a great fictional short story, and very creative. But there's a debate in the literature about whether Borhaes made up the story whole cloth, or whether instead he knew about a Soviet neuropsychologist named Alexander Luria, because Lauria had for a couple of decades at this point been studying a man

named Solomon Shrishevski. Now Sharyshevski came from a modest background and you wouldn't think he'd become internationally known and immortalized. But everything started in the mid nineteen twenties when Sharyshevski was working as a journalist and attended a meeting and afterwards his editor reprimanded him for not taking any notes, and the editor was then astonished to find out that shar Arshevski was able to recall every detail of the

meeting word for word, just from memory. So that led Sharyshevski to get referred to Lauria, who is one of the most prominent neuropsychologists of the time, and Lauria studied Sheryshevski and his remarkable memory over the course of several decades. Lauria eventually wrote a book called The Mind of Aneminist. Now a neminist is a term for a person who just has an untaxable memory. Because the key was that

Sharyshevski could memorize essentially anything. He could memorize whole strings of random numbers, or long lists of nonsense words, or really any kind of data presented in any kind of random order. He had nearly perfect recall. So Lauria tested him over time, and Sharyshevski could even recall these random sequences years later, and this led Lauria to conclude that Sharyshevski's memory was virtual, limitless, and this was of course a very rare phenomenon. Now you may know that my

laboratory has studied synesthesia for many years. Synesthesia is a harmless condition where people have a blending of the senses. You can check out my books and episodes on that. So it turns out that Sherishevski had a very rich combination of synesthesias and this is what gave him his memory abilities. For him, numbers would appear in colors and shapes and with personalities, Sounds triggered textures, words evoked images where they might feel heavy or light. Here's an example

of Sharyshevski's internal experience as he described it. Quote, take the number one. This is a proud, well built man. Two is a high spirited woman. Three is a gloomy person. Six is a man with a swollen foot. Seven is a man with a mustache. Eight is a very stout woman, and so on and all. This sensory overlap allowed him to store information in a rich multisensory format, which in

turn enhanced his recollection. So if you're not synesthetic, just think about your own examples of how a second sense helps you with recall. So, for example, you might have a hard time memorizing a poem. But if it's put to music, then we call that lyrics, and you memorize all the words perfectly because now you have some other data stream the music that you can tie it to. So what Schershevski had was one example of an extraordinary

memory where he could memorize these random lists. But more recently in history, there's been the discovery of another type of off the charts memory. And this began in two thousand and six when my colleagues at U SEE Irvine came in contact with a very special woman named Jill. Jill can recite details of every day of her life from the time she was about fourteen years old that she does this in great detail. Her specialty is in

autobiographical memory. That means memory about your own life, like what you did and who you were with, and what you were and what happened to you. This is called autobiographical memory. It's not about random chess positions or the details of the history of Cambodia. It's about you and what has happened in your life. Now, if you are like most human beings, your autobiographical memory is reasonably good,

but it's not that good. You can't really remember what you were wearing on October fifth, twenty seventeen, or what you heard on the radio on April twenty first of two thousand and nine, and so on, because generally speaking, the brain is tuned to drop as many details as it can if they're not highly important. In other words, forgetting is often as important as remembering. But for Jill Price, her autobiographical memory was way, way, way above average, so

the researchers termed her condition hyperthymesia. But since people thought that sounded something like a disease, they later termed it highly superior autobiographical memory or HSAM for highly superior autobiographical memory. Now, most of us can remember significant events in our lives, like the birth of a child, or a graduation or a nice vacation, but those memories eventually fade where they blur, where they become harder to pull up details as time passes.

But for a person with h SAM, they have the ability to recall nearly every day of their lives with extraordinary clarity. They can tell you what they were doing on some random Tuesday fifteen years ago, down to the weather, the clothes they were wearing, even the smallest details of conversations they had. Their memories aren't just stored, they're accessible

on demand with incredible richness. Maybe you have a reasonably good memory, but almost certainly you can't remember what the weather was like on October fifth, twenty nineteen, or precisely what you chose out of your closet on that day, and whether it rained or not, what piece of news you've heard on the radio that day. But some people can.

Now this highly superior autobiographical memory is very rare as right now, there's only been about one hundred people who have been diagnosed with h SAM, And so I wanted to find someone one of these rare people with h SAM who I could talk to about this for the show. And it turns out that one person who has this is also someone you might have heard of for a different reason. She's a famous actor, and that is Mary

Lou Henner. You may know that Mary Lou became a well known stage actor in nineteen seventy one, appearing in the the original production of the musical Grease with John Travolta on stage, and then in seventy seven she began in the movies, and in nineteen seventy eight she had her breakthrough role on the television sitcom Taxi, where she played a single mother who was working as a cabby,

and she got several Golden Globe nominations for that. She later had co starring roles in a number of films through the eighties nineties, and she continues to appear on screen through the present day. Now, most of you will recognize her face. But the thing that not everyone knows about Mary Lou is that she is one of these one hundred people. She has an extraordinary autobiographical memory, remembering every day of her life. So here's my interview with

Mary Lou Henner. So, Mary Lou, we all assume that everyone is having the same experience on the inside that we are, but you, at this point in your life, know that most people have a different sort of memory than you do. So, so can you tell us what is it like to have a memory like yours? What is your experience?

clan of the family historian. And at six years old, I started falling asleep at night plan of doing what I call time travel. You know, I would think what did I do when I was exactly all week ago, two weeks ago, when I was this day in kindergarten, when I was my little brother's aid, And it was something that I became very good at doing. Now there is no doubt in my mind that I was born with something unusual. You know, They've wired me, put me

through an MRI. They took three hundred measurements of my brain. They found nine areas ten times larger than the normal rain. But it was definitely something that was that was nurture as well. So there was nature and nurture because I just loved having this. It was so it was so unusual and it was kind of fun. And you know, people would say you're such a little lo at all and they'd say, no, I'm a remember it all, you know. So It was kind of my claim to fain give.

a great memory. But I had this date thing I had, you know, just the specificity of what I remembered was so intense. And so what happened was my sphere got bigger, and I realized, well, my friends don't have this either, you know. And finally, when I was around eighteen years old, a friend of mine said to me, when are you going to realize that nobody else has this crazy memory. So people in college knew that I had something unusual. And in fact, I'm on my third and final husband.

But we knew each other in college, went to University of Chicago. He was my roommate's boyfriend, but he knew that I had this unusual memory, and so we make jokes about it. Now. We always says, well, when you're eighteen and you remember, you know, if you remember your life, that doesn't seem down unusual. So he didn't like, let onto the whole idea of it as much as he has now that we spent twenty one years together.

had this unusual memory. So when a story came up for Leslie Stall, who was a friend of mine because I worked with her husband, Aaron Latham, I'm a movie perfect she called me and she said, I want you to have lunch with me. So we had lunch together September twenty in two thousand and six. It was a Wednesday. We went to the slune and she's naming, Oh, when did we meet? When did we do this? Blah blah blah,

and then her her producer said oh. She mentioned that she had gotten married on June the fifteenth of nineteen, nineteen ninety eight, and I said, oh, my god, that's so unusual. Why did you get married out on Monday? And she was like, oh, she is it. I said, what's going on with you guys? She said, well, we've been offered a story at sixty minutes about a woman by the name of Jill Price who came to doctor Legau and she had a very unusual memory and she

never forgot anything. So they did all this testing on her and they offered the story to sixteen minutes and I told him, forget it. My friend, it's not that unusual. My friend married a vender has the exact same memory. So that was in two thousand and six, and then in two thousand and nine, Leslie callin. She said, oh, because they gave the story to Primetime Live in Diamond Sawyer. So in two thousand and nine, Leslie called and she said, she said, I want you to be tested. It's very unusual.

They have found very few other people, so we're going to have you tested on camera. And on camera they tested me. They didn't use it all, but they tested me for everything, sequencing, everything that you're talking about. The list of items. They had me look at something for fifteen second and then identify what corner was it. They had me look at a face with all any hair or you couldn't even tell what gender it was, and

they told me names associated with it. I scored high on everything pretty much, but I really of course the autobiographical stuff. I answered over five hundred questions within the day, and then they did their wiring and asking questions and so how it's fired up and stuff. So yeah, so it's like it's a different part of the brain than is the sequencing or anything like that. But I did still, especially as an actress, I trained myself to be sort

of like a script supervisor. I mean, I'm sort of a frustrated script supervisor where I can notice something's off or where something is. In fact, they showed us a fifteen minute movie and then asked us specific questions that you might not notice an issue or a script supervisor or somebody with HSAM. So yeah, there were a lot of different types of testing that went on that day.

Most people, if you ask them, remember or eight to eleven events within any given year, and people with h SAM we remember two hundred to three hundred and sixty five. The criteria cut off was two hundred all though I scored in ninety nine percent off for three sixty five because I can do a whole year. But you know, it's like, it's like if people try to remember what their year was like, they can probably come up with eight to eleven and that's all, which is insane to me,

you know, because there's somebody who never loses anything. It's like, I mean, except my assins or something key. So I mean that I, as an actress, have trained enough to be able to look at a script a couple times and have it down. But I'll also remember where I was when I read the script, what the character's life reminds me of in my own life, you know, what the weather was like, things like that.

had that day and what the score was. And also you know places that people's children. I've heard everything from food to clothes to baths. There was a guy who was obsessed with baths and new light fag information. So that's called your primary trap and the jigsaw puzzle of your life. What are the hardage pieces by which you can inter other memories. Then everyone I believe has a dominant sense. Everyone is a site cell, touch taste or

smell person. And if you can figure out what you are site cell, touch taste or smell, you can figure out how you receive and you cross connected with your primary trap. You can figure out how you receive, retain, and then retrieve memories. Because we just happen to have an extraordinary retrieval system. Everything you have been through in your life is on your emotional hard drive, and it

makes you behave in certain ways. So you might walk into a room go like, oh my god, this smells like my grandmother's or wow, that song on the radio that reminds me this. Do you know what I mean? So you people do this all day long. But people with ASAM we remember everything in first person, in our

bodies looking out. You know, if I asked you, if I said to you when you woke up this morning, describe your warning, you'd probably be in first person and talking about it, and you could say, oh, I got to a bathroom or make coffee, or I walk my dog or whatever but if I asked you, like three weeks ago, you probably would be a third person. Most people when they go back three weeks or beyond, they're

in third person. I gave a whole speech to all these three hundred doctors in a cedar siginer, and nobody had ever described the things that I'm describing from the inside out. Now, I also believe that memory comes to us in four different ways, what I call horizontally, vertically, mushrewingly, or sporadically. So if I said to you, hey, how is that wedding you went to a couple of weeks ago, and you said, oh, man, it was brave. Friday night, we went to the bar, we all had a drink,

there was a rehearsal dinner, we had a drink. The next morning, I got up in jog and you start telling me the whole weekend, sort of a linear horizontal, you know, kind of a narrative way. If I said to you, that would be a horizontal him. But I said how is the wedding? And you said, oh, my cousin and I got into a whole discussion at the wedding, and you could probably just a pinpoint, a specific on a line and go deep into a memory. So that's kind of like a vertical memory. And if I said,

how is that wedding? And you said, oh, my gosh, there was somebody I met. We decided to have lunch. Two weeks later we're going to do a project together. That's like a mushrooming memory. That means it came out of the event I asked you about. But if mushrooms somewhere else. And then if I said to you, oh, how is that wedding and you said, oh my god, there was a guy there who looked like when my old boss, and I was instantly back and when I off is thinking about what a jerk this guy was

because he took credit for my work. So that's a sporadic memory. So all day long, we do memory like that, especially people of age Sam, And you can ask about some specific day and it can be told in a linear horizontal way, or a vertical way, or a mushrooming way, or a sporadic way, do you know what I mean. Yeah, So we go all over, so you have to not think the way it happens differently for us. It just is And it's not even like we're all consistent but this is how it happens for me.

one second in my life. But I always say, but it's a curse for my husband, which is probably why I'm on my third and final because you know, like we just had to fight two days ago, and he said something and you know, in March of twenty twenty two, and I went, no, it didn't it had been on No, Michael, it had been on September the twenty third of twenty twenty two. You know that I was wearing this you were talking about. He was like, well, you know, and then it became this. I said. It's not like I

have to be right. I just believe in accuracy. And if you're talking about something that happened in this season, you're in the wrong season, you know. But it's funny because yeah, so he but he always says, what man ever loses an argument against his wife anyway, at least he has excuse because I sech an individual memory, you know. But no, it's always been it's always been a blessing for me. Here here's the thing, as you know, and

doctor Rabaut proved this. Doctor James mcgobre does the whole study. He memories tied to adrenaline. So people are going to remember the highs like getting married, having a baby, you know, a promotion at work, a fabulous something or other, buying a house, whatever, and they're also going to remember the lows, whether it's you know, whether they've been embarrassed or a breakup or a death of someone. You know. So those highs and lows are being recorded constantly by us people

with h SAM. We're lucky enough to have all those middle of the road kind of our tone moments recorded and kept and talked about, you know, I mean that, and they're available to us. So I'm always trying to help people. You know, I don't have to show off my memory anymore. It's just it's the way it is. People stop me at the airport and until throw dates

at me and stuff I means hilarious. And the thing is that's it's really you know, I'm what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to help people bring back those little summers nights, you know, the little fabric of their lives kind of thing, things that they may have forgotten because they didn't get recorded on those high tone or low tone scales.

better future. I work with people all the time on memory. I work with people who have like a roadblock somehow and trying to get them past a roadblock, or women who pick the same kind of guy all the time because they're not noticing the red flags they're wind to them, you know. So I mean I do one tree with people. One of the things I love to do the most is for like school auctions or any kind of you know,

any kind of option. I will option my self off as a memory person who will take people back and do memory sessions with them. And it's really farm, it's really amazing what happens in a couple hour hours.

And then at the end of the month, if you've taken thirty pictures, you think like, oh, what were some of those pictures? And see how many you can bring

forward again, because it's really a muscle, you know. And the thing is, if you're only remembering eight to eleven events within any given year, which is just so sad and pathetic to me, I feel like, if you can bring three forward and carry them with you, you'll have at least thirty six in the first year that you do it and maybe the following year you'll have even more, you know, seventy two or something. You know. So, yeah, I'm always helping people with their memories.

seems like, wow, the year disappeared. What do you feel like you have a different experience than other people in terms of how long your life has been going on or the past year was or the past month.

and it's like fun and refreshing. There's always something when I go through it where I go like, oh, yeah, you know what I'm gonna call that person? Or damn, where is that blouse? You know? Or oh there's you know, things like that, and it's just there's always something that's revealed to me like oh, yes, that's why I had this reaction later, you know, things like that.

I just have a better computer system, do you know what I mean? Yeah, I probably well last time because I know where things are and I can always access them.

Some things take longer than others, you know what I mean.

sort of see what I see in their own lives. Possibly, you know, when people come to me go, oh my granddaughter has this or oh my son has this, I'll go get them into acting class. If you're really troubled by it, because as an actor, you will celebrate being able to access your emotional your emotional drive. You know. It's like we used to do a sense memory exercise in class, talk about to sits on touch, taste, smell.

You'd have to bring in an object or a scent or a piece of music or or you know, we just one for each sense and people would say, okay. The teacher would say, okay, go back in the memory. And instantly I could cry, if you go, how'd you get there so fast? And I'd say, how could you not if that's what you're thinking of some painful memory?

you know, how they talk about that turning point. And people tell the most unbelievable stories, and you see the life changing things happen over the course of the class because people have gone back and processed it. Because you know, I'm always saying, if you let memories become emotional boogeymen,

then they control you. But if you process them, it's like how many times can you see a scary movie without going Okay, Now I can see the camera was at that angle when there's probably a craft service table and on the corn. You know where you start processing it different and you don't. It doesn't have quite the same impact. I mean, I'm making a joke about being on a set, but it's like it doesn't have the same impact on your life when you process it. Otherwise it's far away.

Is at night, when you're brushing your teeth, it's just supposed to do it for true med Just scroll through your day, just see what was maybe worth remembering from your day, because that second time through might steer it in a little more indelibly, you know, because we just we walk around with such a fog. People are in a fond these dayscase they paying no attention to anything that's not on their own, and it's kind of scary. We're not living our lives.

Nobody remembered. I said, okay, I'm going to give you some prompting questions, because it's about prompting sometimes, And so within within fifteen minutes, every single person except for to me, just didn't want to play. Every single person had their freshman in high school schedule.

unambiguously good. But I just want to note that we each live in our own heads, and you can never really run a control experiment. Would you be happier or less happy if you had a different memory, better or worse than what you have now? We can each speculate, but we can't really know. I will say that other people with h sam, like Jill Price what I mentioned before, she feels pretty clearly the opposite of Mary Lou. She feels like it is a burden and let's return to

the Jorge Luis Borges story. Funes the memorious Borhes uses the character to suggest that while perfect memory might seem desirable, it comes at a cost. The character is cast down in a flood of memory and loses an ability to generalize or abstract or find appropriate meaning in the world that has too many details. Now, again, that was a fiction author's interpretation, But maybe fictional stories are as close as we ever come to running a control experiment on

our own line. It is the case that Jill Price, the real woman who can Never Forget, has stated that she liked the character of Fuones is cursed by her inability to forget. Whatever the case, all this points to the possibility that forgetting is actually a useful thing. It points to the possibility that natural selection has tuned the amount we remember and don't remember to be roughly optimal, at least in the environments in which humans evolved over

the past several million years. It at least encourages us to consider that forgetting is an essential feature of memory, rather than a flaw. Our brains are constantly bombarded with information every site and sound and experience we have, and most of it if it's not emotionally salient, really doesn't matter, like where I parked my car at the airport in twenty nineteen. As the writer Honora de Balzac said, memories

beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable. However, on the flip side, I was moved and inspired by what Mary Luce said about the importance of putting some effort into remembering our lives. After all this, I've published and argued in other episodes the apparent duration of your life, In other words, how long you think it's been since

last summer, or last year or last decade. This depends on how much memory you can draw upon, And what tends to happen to us as we get older is that we lay down less and less new memory, and so we end up thinking, gosh, where did this year go? We're already pulling up to the end of a new year, and it feels like this one went by in the

blink of an eye. But if we have rich memories that we can draw on from the year, then we think, oh, well, let's see, there was this event, and oh and then there was that, and there was that, and the whole thing doesn't seem like it disappeared in a blink anymore. One of the most important things from the point of view of brain plasticity is to keep your brain well

exercised and not falling into routine. And one of the things that I recommended in a different episode is that when you brush your teeth, you should try it with your other hand, because that gets your brain out of its routine and forces it to confront a little novelty.

So I loved Mary Lou's suggestion about thinking through your day while you brush your teeth and really writing down mentally what you did so tonight and hereafter, I would like to suggest that you brush your teeth with your other hand while recounting your day from beginning to end. This will not only kick your brain off its natural path of least resistance, but it will also lock down a little more memory in your life. I'm not telling

you here how to live longer. Instead, I'm suggesting how to make it seem as though you have lived longer by internally writing down more of your health human journey so that you have more of its richness to draw from.

Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading, Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check out on Subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos