Hey, please take a second and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast.
Thanks a lot.
Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio Hoe Cham and today we're talking about super memory. There are people out there that can memorize over one hundred thousand digits of pie. Others can read a series of books and then recite them by hears and still others can remember what they did every single day of their lives, some reportedly as far back to the day they were born. How are they able to do that? Is it a superpower or is it something that anyone can learn to do.
We're going to talk to a couple of memory scientists who are going to break down how memory works, what are its limits, and whether being able to remember everything is a gift or a curse. So get ready for a memorable episode about memory, one that you won't soon forget. Enjoy. Hey, everyone, So there are some people out there with amazing memory. For example, there's Akira Haragucci, who broke the world record
for memorizing and reciting the most digits of pie. You know pie, It's that math number that goes three point one four one, five, nine, two, six, five, three, five, eight nine, seventy nine three two, three, eight four, and so on and so on. That's just twenty digits of it. But Akira Haragucci was able to memorize and recall one hundred thousand digits of it, a record that to this day is still unbroken. Then there's famous savant Kim Peak. Peak was the inspiration for the character in the movie
rain Man. He could recide from memory over six thousand books he had read, and he could tell you the ZIP code and aera code of pretty much every city in the United States. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm a little forgetful sometimes. So the fact that there are humans that can have this level of memory is absolutely mind boggling to me. To learn more about memory and how super memory works, I reached out to
an expert in the field, doctor Daniella Palombo. Doctor Palombo is a professor at the University of British Columbia or UBC, who studies people with extraordinary memory. Now, before we got started hearing that she works at UBC, there a memory in my head.
I've been to the UBC a couple of times.
I think, yeah, nice campus.
I rememory of being there. I've been going skiing at night.
Oh yeah, probably app in Whistler.
Uh no, just above the city there's a ski slope.
Oh yeah, Well that's a good segue into our conversation about memory. You were you out Cyprus or maybe.
Gross gosh, it was a long time ago, and I've been to about four hundred universities.
You didn't know I was going to grill your memory today.
That did such detail a memory of us snowboarding down a mountain in Vancouver mid night.
Amazing?
Like I said, I would not be the poster child for people with super memory. Okay, doctor Palumbo is going to talk to us about super memory, memory athletes and people who can remember every single day of their lives. But first I wanted to ask her a basic question. What do we know about our memory? Is it like a computer hard drive that sits in one place in our brain? Does it store things as files with holders
that we can just look up whenever we want. It turns out there's a lot we don't know about how memory works. First of all, I was curious to know how does memory work?
Yeah, that's a very big question. So first, memory is not just one thing. When we remember our past, we can do so with different forms of remembering. So you may have heard the our memory systems.
Okay, The first thing to know about memory is that there isn't one kind of memory. There are several types of memory. The first kind is the kind that we are most familiar with, called episodic memory or basically flashbacks.
Yeah, so episodic memory is our memory for specific events. So for example, if I asked you to remember your first date, or if I asked you to remember something unusual that happened to you, you'd be able to conjure up details that are specific to that event, like where you were sitting, what you were wearing, how you were feeling at the time. So we can really sort of it feels like we're reliving these events from our past,
like we're playing back a recording. And that's very different from other forms of memory, like our semantic memory or memory for facts knowing that Paris is the capital of France, for example, or that Vancouver is in British Columbia.
I see Episodic.
Memory and semantic memory a are part of a broader sort of umbrella within our memory systems called declarative memory. Some people refer to it as explicit memory.
So there are two basic types of memory. The first, declarative memory is basically what you consciously remember, facts, things that happen. You can bring them up in your brain and think about them. The second type of memory is the kind you remember unconsciously. It's what gets today call ball knowledge.
And that's another form of remembering called implicit memory. And so, for example, do you play any instruments?
I do, Yeah, little piano, little guitar, great, there's some drums.
Okay, So when you sit down at the piano and you start playing, that kind of just comes back to naturally, you don't necessarily remember every piano lesson you had, but nonetheless you're able to perform that incredible feat of playing music. Another example is the first time you learn to ride a bike. Many of us don't remember that event, but we can hop on a bike kind of at any age, and we can ride.
And you never forget, as they say, how to ride a bike.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And so we think of that as being a more implicit form of memory. So or memory for how to do things.
Yes, there are different kinds of memory. Another interesting thing we know about memory is that it doesn't just sit in one place in our brains. It's kind of all over the place, depending on what you use it for. If it's your memory for how to physically do something like ride a bike or the baseball, that memory is in the motor areas of your brain, sort of across
the top of your brain. If it's your ability to remember a song or remembering what something tastes or smells like, then it's in your sensory cortex, which is closer to the back of your head, kind of where the swirl of your hair is. And if it's your vivid dream type of memory or your memory of facts, scientists think those are kind of diffused all over the brain. In other words, there's no one central hard drive for story
memories in your brain. Okay, The last interesting thing doctor Palombo says we know about memory came up when he asked me if I remember the first date.
I ever went on.
I do not remember my first date, but I do remember the first date I had with my spouse, So I think that's yeah, that worked it right.
Yes, that is that is very good. That is very good.
Yeah. Ohether it's debated still whether it was a date or not.
So I'm sure you have some good stories about that, and I would imagine that if you and your partner were to exchange details about that event, some of the details you would be the same, and some you'd have you have very different versions of what actually happened. And that's fascinating. So one of the things that's kind of interesting about memory is this idea that we playback events
like we're playing our memories back on a recorder. Memory actually doesn't work this way at all, and in fact, when we're remembering those events like the first time we had a pomegranate, we're actually remembering a combination of what actually happened and a bunch of other stuff. And that other stuff is the general knowledge we have about the
world how events should work. We're filling in the blanks of our memory, and what we ultimately remember is a combination of these two things, what actually happened and the inferences and generalizations we have about the world.
I Meanan, we remember part of what happened, and part of what we remember is what we think.
Happened exactly exactly, and it happens very seamlessly, so we don't really realize that we're filling in the blanks this way.
In other words, memories aren't perfect. They're kind of fuzzy, at least for most of us. Okay, now we're going to get to super memory, because some people they remember a lot and sometimes quite perfectly.
Well, that brings me to the topic of people who have super memory. Yeah, I guess I'm Christine. Some people, for example, are able to memorize, you know, one hundred thousand digits of pie, or you know, he can memorize the works of Shakespeare.
Yeah, it is such an interesting topic, and I guess I'll start a little bit broad by saying that there are many sort of types of superior memory.
According to doctor Palombo, there are two basic types of super or superior memorizers. The first type are called memory athletes. In the second are people with something called highly superior autobiographical memory, or h SAM. And in each of these kinds of super memories there are surprising facts that tell us a lot about how memory works in our brains
and how memory shapes who we are. So when we come back, we'll tackle the first type of super memory, memory athletes, and we'll talk about how maybe you can become one. So stay with it, don't forget.
We'll be right back.
Hey, welcome back. We're not going to talk about the first type of super or superior memory, which is a kind found in memory athletes. As I mentioned before, one of the most extreme examples of super memory are people who can memorize the digits of pie. For example, there's Akira Haraguchi, who memorized over one hundred thousand digits of it,
and he's not alone. According to the Pie World Ranking List website, there are at least ten people who have memorized over thirty thousand digits of it, including Paul HEARDing, the US record holder, who is said to have memorized thirty thousand, four hundred and forty eight digits of pie.
There's even an annual event called the World Memory Championships, which which is like the Olympics of memory in it, memory athletes compete in timed events like who can memorize a random deck of cards the fastest, or who can memorize the most random numbers in one hour. Last year, in twenty twenty five, the overall winner was narranzul Ot gon Uhlan, a sixteen year old girl from Mongolia, who
absolutely blew away her competition with an astonishing performance. She was able to memorize a sequence of three thousand, six hundred and twenty three random numbers in one hour. She memorized a six thousand, six hundred and seventy two long sequence of random ones and zeros in thirty minutes, and it only took her twenty four point two seconds to memorize the complete sequence of a shuffle deck of cards.
I mean, I have a hard time remembering those six verification digits they give you every time you have to log in somewhere now and memorizing a ten digit phone number these days, or get it. But here's the amazing fact about memory athleticism. According to doctor Daniella Palombo, anyone and be a memory athlete.
And in fact, you can take a random selection of people from the population and you can train them to be memory athletes.
Yes, anyone can train to be a memory athlete and be able to memorize really long sequences of numbers or playing cards, or names or objects. Remember Akira Haragucci, who memorized one hundred thousand digits of pie. According to interviews, he was neither a prodigy growing up or even particularly good at math. He just one day decided to start training his memory. The same goes for Alex Mullett, the first American to win the World Memory Championship, who went
on to win it three years in a row. He never thought of himself as having a good memory, and none of his friends or family growing up would say that either. But one day he saw a ted talk talk about memory athletes and he decided to try it. He started to train himself, and initially, when he was able to memorize a twenty item shopping list, he was blowing away. Eventually he was able to do amazing things like memorize twenty eight decks of randomly shuffled cards in
one hour. Now, I know what you're thinking. Surely these people had a gift for memorizing things, right. I Mean, it's true any one of us can learn to play basketball, but we can't all play in the NBA?
Can we? Is their research saying that anybody can get to that level? Or is it sort of like playing at the NBA you need inherent talent to sort of make it to the NBA.
Based on the research that's done, researchers believe that the best explanation for this type of superior memory is practice. That's not to say that innate abilities or curiosities are not at play. So, for example, if there are individual different in one's interest in organizing information, this might help use those strategies to remember leader I see. So we're still working out the details.
According to doctor Palumbo, there's even been studies of the brains of memory athletes to check whether there's something special about them, and it turns out there isn't.
There's a really interesting study that was done a few years ago where they took a group of people who would fall into this category or so, these memory athletes, and they scan their brains, and then they took a group of individuals who are not memory athletes and train them up. So the one finding is that when you look at the brains of people with superior memory, the structure of their brains, they don't look different from other individuals who are not superior.
Memorizers, really huh.
But when you look at the function of their brains, so how their brains activate when they're doing a task or when they're at rest, then you see differences between individuals who have superior memory and those who do.
Not what are these differences in functionalities.
What we tend to see is that the way these brain regions are talking to each other looks different. In people with superior memory, the connections between brain regions are often they're more tightly connected. They're kind of talking to each other more. And if you train everyday people like yourself or me to engage in these strategies for hours and hours, then you see a similar pattern of functional differences to those superior memory. And so that points us
to the importance of training. It's not to say that inateabilities are not at all at play. We don't know for sure, but it certainly points to evidence that training is part of the story.
Yes, you could train yourself to potentially play the NBA of memory athletics if you wanted to. The only caveat is that memory athletes have to train a.
Lot, They have to put in a lot of effort. But you can get them trained up, and so you could be trained. For example, you refer to yourself as being somewhat forgetful, but I bet if you put in the time, you would actually impress us all.
What I would have to remember it to practice.
That's right, Yes, that's the first step.
Okay, so what is this training that you have to do to become a super memory athlete. According to doctor Palombo, the training involves learning and practicing mnemonic strategies or memorizing tricks.
So what we know about these types of individuals that they are actually using strategies to remember a lot of information very quickly. And so, for example, many use a strategy you call the method of low SI. So imagine a memory appet needs to memorize long string of digits, which is quite difficult. So what they'll do is they'll take those digits and they'll associate them with some form
of imagery. So maybe the digit io is associated with an image of a tiger, and so they'll build this image associations because images are easier to remember than strings of digits. They'll take those images and they will place
them in a familiar space in their mind's eyes. So, for example, somebody might picture their home and all the rooms in their home, and they will place the images in different rooms, and they'll form a pathway in their mind's eye as they're visiting the different rooms in their house.
Let's say this is a well known method for memorizing things Let's say you want to memorize a random sequence of words like key, woman, kangaroo, hair dryer, dinosaur. Those words are a little hard to memorize on their own, so you might instead picture your house or the house you grew up in, and then imagine yourself walking through that familiar space and finding each of the items in a different spot. For example, I walked in the front door, and I saw a key right next to the entrance.
Then I went into the living room and so a woman standing there. Then I walked to the kitchen and saw a kangaroo, and so on and so on. And now imagine extending that walk around your house, adding more things to remember in every corner. You can now remember long sequences of information, and this works because you're essentially associating the things you want to remember do something familiar.
At The idea is that you're linking kind of arbitrary information that doesn't mean a lot to an individual to something that's more personally relevant. So picturing your house, for example, is something that is personally connected to you. And we also know that people do best somewhat better at remembering spatial information or visual information, so rich images or rich spatial scene is maybe somewhat easier to remember than a string of digits.
I see. Put it in context that my brain likes yeah.
Yes.
And another way to remember things more easily is to make the things you're trying to remember more about you.
And so there's another phenomenon called the self reference effect. This is separate from superior memory. This pertains to all of us. We tend to remember information better when it's self referential. And so if we are learning, let's say we show up at a lab and they present us a list of words, and later we're tested. The words that are personally meaningful to us are the words that we're going to tend to remember better from that list than the ones that don't have kind of a personal
attachment to them. So, if I give you a list of traits and a memory test, and some of those traits resonate with you, so it could be funny, or it could be the word dad, or it could be the word partner, et cetera, and my professor, those words were going to remember better than words that don't have kind of a personal connection to us. And that's called the self reference effect.
Oh I see, Yeah, we're all a little narcissistic.
That's right, exactly.
It.
So those are memory tricks that memory athletes use. They're more, of course, but the idea is that if you use them enough and you practice enough, then you could also become a memory athlete and memorize potentially thousands of digits of pie. Now what's interesting about memory athletes is that it really is athletic. You have to train for it, you get better over time, and if you don't use it, you lose it.
And so a lot of these individuals will participate in these kind of memory championships. Yeah, and before they even get there, they're doing a lot with the memory to prepare, just like any type of athlete, but prepare for an important game. And they do this over and over again. They'll practice and it takes hours and hours of training. So by the time they get to these memory championships, they're very well prepared to remember a lot of information really quickly.
It's interesting that you paid the analogy to athletes and that they have to train and prepare for events, meaning like if they stop or they'll train, then they won't perform or remember as much.
Yeah, they actually have to engage in what's called maintenance, so they have to keep at it. It's not just sort of one and done you train for you know, one hundred hours. They actually have to, you know, train every day or often to keep up those skills.
Okay, so here's a quick recap so far. Memory athletes are one type of super memory, and it's something anyone can learn to do. It's about picking the right mnemonic device that works for you, then scaling that up, and then keep on training. Even you can get to the point where you can memorize incredibly long sequences of random numbers or words or playing cards. And a big trick is to find ways to make what you're trying to remember relevant to you, which brings us to the second
type of super memory. Imagine that you could remember not just some things that are relevant to you, but you could remember everything that happens to you. And now, I imagine what would happen if you couldn't turn it off with your head explode. Would it be a gift or a curse. When we come back, we'll get to that type of super memory, assuming we don't forget. So stay with us. We'll be right back. Hey, you remember, Welcome back.
We're talking about memory. And so far we talked about one kind of super memory, which is the one found in memory athletes. As we learn from doctor DANIELA. Palumbo, a researcher in memory, anyone can be a memory athlete. The ability to memorize thousands of digits of pie, or to memorize a deck of cards in twenty seconds is something that, according to brain studies, can be mostly attributed to practice, which means you can be a memory athlete too. In fact, one of you could be the next World
memory champion. Now, as we learned, a trick to memorizing long sequences of abstract numbers or words or playing cards is to turn the information into something personally relevant or experiential. You can imagine, for example, turning a sequence of numbers into animals or objects you're familiar with, and then imagine yourself walking through a house or a palace and remembering
running into those animals or objects in different rooms. It's a way to turn semantic information into something closer to episodic memory, which brings us to the second type of super memory, people who remember everything that happens to them. We all think we remember what we did in the past, but if I asked you, for example, what you had for lunch twelve days ago, you would probably say, I have no idea, But there are people on this planet
that would remember that. And not only that, if you asked them about any date in the past, say they're ready to forty years, they could tell you what day of the week it was, where they were, what they read in the news or saw on TV that day, and yes, what they had for lunch. It's a characteristic of some people called highly superior autobiographical memory. Here's how doctor Palumbo describes it.
So you can give them a date, virtually any date, and they will tell you what happened to them in their life that day. And they're also really good at remembering what happened in public, so they can remember media events really well. Is in addition to remembering their own personal experiences.
Wow.
Yeah, So that's the really interesting thing about ah SAM is that those with age SAM remember all of it. And so they remember they're really kind of inconsequential moments of their lives, including what they were wearing an event that they went to.
They have a memory of what they were wearing.
Yes, exactly. They have a really strong memory of what they were wearing and what others were wearing as well. So here you have these individuals who remember almost everything from their lives.
Imagine if you remembered everything that ever happened to you. But here's the amazing thing. We don't really know how many people out there are able to do this.
How common was this phenomenon of people with age?
Sam?
Is it the one and a million, one and a bini? What do we know about how often it happens?
Yeah, so I hate answering with an I don't know, But we know how many people have been identified for research studies, which is less than one hundred. So there's a very small group of individuals who have participated in research studies, and some of those studies have been published and some of them are forthcoming. But we don't know if it's more common than that.
That's right, we don't know how often this phenomenon happens. Now you might be thinking, can we just figure out who has it and count them? Well, it's not that easy.
That's because, at least based on the accounts of people who have been identified, many of them did not realize that their memory was any different from others until they were adults. Or in adolescents, And so it could be that a lot of people are going around with this really amazing memory ability, but they don't realize that other people don't have it as well.
They didn't realize other people can't remember everything about their lives.
Wow.
Yes, if you happen to remember everything that ever happens to you, you know that's not common. You should contact a scientists right away so they can study this better. Okay, I had a lot of questions about this. First of all, how is this possible? What's going on in the brains of people with h SAM that gives them this superpower? Is there a limit to what they can remember? And is this a give or a curse? Will start For the first question.
How is this possible? Like how can an individual fit so much in their heads?
I know, it's fascinating, right, It's a big puzzle. So the why question is what stumps a lot of researchers. There's some hints and so, for example, one group of researchers looked at whether individuals with h SAM differ in the way they remember memories that are recent, let's say a week ago, versus events that they encoded a month ago, six months ago, et cetera.
So this is a pretty cool experiment. Scientists ask people with and without highly superior autobiographical memory to remember something that's happened to them a week ago, you know what they remember? How much detail they remember, And it turned out that there wasn't much of a difference between the two groups.
H SAM individuals did not differ from non h SAM individuals in their memory for events that were really really new. So those memories that were a week or less than a week old, what do.
You mean, they didn't differ. What does it mean?
So they were conjure up just as many details, the same amount of details as a person who does not have ah SAM.
So for recent memories, things that happened just a few days ago, you and I are just as good as people with h SAM super memory and remembering what happened. But then in the experiment, they also asked people to remember things that happened further back, say a few weeks ago.
However, when they looked at those older memories, so the memories that were more more than a week old, then you saw very large differences between individuals with h SAM and individuals without. And so the folks without ah SAM were forgetting a lot of those details, whereas the individuals with h SAM were holding on to those details for
a longer period of time. And so that's really important finding because it hints at this idea that perhaps individuals with h SAM don't encode memories differently from those who do not have ah SAM, but there's something about laying down those memory traces so that they're more permanent that may differ in individuals with h SAM.
Wow, meaning that people with a SAM are just as good at getting memories. They seem to be better at keeping memories.
Exactly yes, that's a perfect way to put.
It, oh fascinating, meaning that they're just good at not forgetting exactly yes, exactly.
So this is interesting because it tells you that people with this kind of super memory taking the world pretty much the same way the rest of us do. It's not like they experience more or they pay attention to more details or have a heightened sense of going through life. They process the world just like we do, except whereas for most of us, most memories just fade away, for people with AHSAM, it all sticks. We'll talk more about how the brain encodes memories later, but here's another fascinating
thing about people with this kind of super memory. People with ah SAM are extremely good at remembering what happened to them, but they're not particularly good at remembering other things.
The h SAM is quite unique in that individuals who have it are really good at remembering autobiographical content, and they don't necessarily excel when it comes to remembering other kinds of information. And so, if you bring individuals with h SAM into the laboratory and you give them memory tests, for example, tests that involve words or images, et cetera, then they do not perform any better than individuals who
do not have aach SAM. Wow, so it has to be autobiographical in nature for them to remember it.
Well.
Now, I know what you're probably thinking right now, which is, if you remembered everything that ever happened to you, why didn't you run out of space in your head for all those memories?
Like?
What's the limit of this super memory? I asked doctor Palombo this question.
How can to be in your room in the brain to remember everything you do in your life?
That is such a good question, and I think we just don't know. And so it's surprising that individuals can remember this much information.
Do you think there's a limit to how much we can you remember in our brains?
We used to think so, but I think people with h SAM make us.
Question that maybe the limit is much higher than you think. Yeah, exactly, Okay.
The last question I asked doctor Plumbo about this type of super memory was whether being able to remember everything that's ever happened to you is a gift or a curse.
If you talk to different individuals, what they have in common is that they all remember events in rich and vivid detail. But the way that they feel about having really good memory differs from one individual to the next. So some will refer to their age SAM as a gift, and some feel less enthusiastic about having such a good memory.
For example, there's one individual with h SAM named Mary Lou Henner, and she's a famous actress, and she describes her ah SAM as a gift, and she describes that it is something that she uses in her occupation as an actress, that she has fun with it. She really just enjoys having a really good memory, and so for her it is something that she really appreciates.
So some people really like having this kind of super memory. But others describe it is a bit of a curse. One well known person with h SAM, a woman in her fifties from Los Angeles called Jill Price, can remember what she did almost every single day of her life. She even says she has memories of being a toddler in her crip. It's like she has the camera record
button on all the time. And she describes the experience of having this kind of super memory as quote, NonStop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting.
There are some individuals who do feel that way, yes, and that sometimes their memories can be really distracting for them. So what is common across many individuals with h SAM is the automaticity of their memories, so they come back
to them really, really easily and very quickly. But there are times when remembering is not the task at hand, when we have to pay attention in the classroom, or when we have a very demanding job, and so for some individuals they have described it as distracting and even difficult because all their memories are really vivid, including the bad ones.
And that brings us to the topic of forgetting. Oh wait, I forgot to tell you. This is actually a two part episode about super memory. We talked about people with amazing abilities to remember a lot of things, but what about the opposite, What about people with amazing abilities to forget or with the lack of ability to make new memories. Do you remember watching the movie Memento or finding dorri
Well that happens to real people. On our next episode, we'll talk about how the brain forgets memories, what it's like to live completely in the moment without memory, without the burden of the past. So don't forget to come back see you next week. You've been listening to Science Stuff production of iHeartRadio, written and produced by me Or Hitcham, credited by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram. And you can follow me
on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.