What if you finished reading this article and remembered every detail of it for the rest of your life? That’s the problem people with super-autobiographical memory face—and yes, it’s often referred to as a problem, not a gift. Their minds are like a computer hard drive that retains everything: dates, middle names, license plate numbers, even what they eat for lunch on a daily basis There are only four confirmed super memory cases, a disorder experts say is somewhat related to OCD, though no doubt there are plenty others who haven’t been identified yet.
So who are the four individuals who’ve all recently been the subject of a study at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine? Let’s meet them and find out…
1. Bob Petrella
A Los Angeles based producer for the Tennis Channel, Bob Petrella may remember every number in his cell phone, but it’s his ability to recall sporting events that’s most remarkable. Give him a date, like March 30, 1981, and he could tell you not only that it was the day Reagan was shot, but also that Indiana beat North Carolina for the NCAA championship that evening. Even more impressive: when it comes to the Pittsburgh Steelers, his favorite team, you can show him a single freeze frame from most any game that he’s seen, and he can tell you not only the date of the game, but the final score.
According to a piece on ABC news, Patrella “remembers all but two of his birthdays since he turned 5. He recalls where he was and what he did with high school buddies. Grainy images of the 1970s are vivid pictures in his head. ‘I remember all my ATM codes,’ he said. ‘I remember people’s numbers. [I] lost my cell phone Sept. 24, 2006. A lot of people, if they lost their cell phone, they would panic because they have all these numbers. I didn’t have any numbers in my cell phone because I know everybody’s numbers up here [in my head].’
2. Jill Price
Probably the best known of the four, Jill Price has described her ‘gift’ as “nonstop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting.” She was the first to be diagnosed with the condition, and recently published a memoir, The Woman Who Can’t Forget. Price remembers most details of nearly every day she’s been alive since she was 14 and compares her super memory to walking around with a video camera on her shoulder. “If you throw a date out at me, it’s as if I pulled a videotape out, put in a VCR and just watched the day,” she has said.
Like Bob Petrella, Price calls California home, though working as an assistant at a Jewish religious day-school, she’s about as far from Hollywood as you can get. And although people she meets at parties are impressed with her ability to remember everything from the date of the Lockerbie plane bombing (December 21, 1988) to the last episode of Dallas, (May 3, 1991), in her memoir, she describes super memory as a nuisance, partly because she can’t seem to forget painful events, like when someone she was crushing on rejected her.
3. Brad Williams
For every Jill Price, there’s a Brad Williams, a Wisconsin radio anchor who embraces his super memory and enjoys having it tested. Ask him what happened on November 7, 1991 and he’ll tell you that it was the day Magic Johnson announced he was HIV positive. But Williams does not stop there. “It was a Thursday,” he once said in an MSNBC piece. “There was a big snowstorm here the week before.”
Unlike Bob Petrella, Williams has a tough time with sports, but excels at pop-culture trivia. For instance, he could name you every Academy Award winner and even nailed all five questions in the category “1984 Movies” when he appeared on Jeopardy! in 1990.
Although the folk at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine don’t agree, Williams says he never saw his ability as anything out of the ordinary. “Growing up, I never really had reason to think I wasn’t like everyone else,” he has said. A feature-length doc on his life, titled Unforgettable, is presently in production.
If you’re interested in the subject, remember to check it out once it hits theaters.
4. Rick Baron
A Cleveland, Ohio native, Rick Baron came out and announced his super ability directly to USA Today, after reading a piece the newspaper publish on Jill Price. Unlike Price, Baron uses his super memory to win stuff. Although unemployed, he’s extremely resourceful and is constantly entering, and winning trivia contests. His list of rewards include restaurant gift cards, tickets to sporting events, even all expense paid vacations (Baron has won 14 of them). Baron claims to remember every detail of his life since the age of 11, and is usually pretty successful at remembering the day-to-day going all the way back to when he was seven.
According to the USA Today piece on Baron, his sister claims he shows signs of hardcore OCD. “He organizes and catalogs everything. He even keeps his bills in order of the city of the federal reserve bank where they were issued and also by how the sports teams in that city did.”
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Jill Price seems to get her memory from the constant coding and recoding she does as she keeps extremely detailed journals. She says her memory is painful, yet her diary is her greatest possession and she wouldn’t give it up in a million years. Most of her memories are related to personal events in her life and seem to be stored as she writes in and rereads, reliving the events, in her journal. It appears to be more a case of extreme OCD in recording every moment of her life than an inability to forget. When having her short term memory tested she does not seem to be extraordinary in any way.
posted by BioloBri on 9-21-2009 at 9:43 am
This is really interesting. My 7 year old son has Aspergers and has extrodinary memory, almost to a scary degree. He tells me detailed accounts of things I said and did with him when he was 1 and 2, he told me of a plane we missed when he was 28 months old, and frequently comes home from school and recites his teacher’s lessons word for word.
It’s bizarre because he’ll even add in interruptions and you can tell the lesson he’s reciting isn’t his own words/phrases. He’ll be talking a mile a minute telling me the lesson, then stop and say “and this is where Michael put up his hand to go to the washroom” and then continue on.
posted by Amanda on 9-21-2009 at 11:38 am
Amanda, I worked with an autistic boy once who was similar. He couldn’t recite class to you (although I bet he’d have that ability if he found it interesting) but he can recite every routine that Jeff Foxworthy ever did, word for word. Apparently before I knew him, he did the same thing with his elementary school textbooks. His teachers before me had to train him when it came to the comedy though…he had to learn to insert beeps instead of just saying whatever it was that the comedian said verbatim :)
posted by Fruppi on 9-21-2009 at 12:23 pm
Also amazing are the Rain Man twins, Flo and Kay.
They remember every detail of their lives. Given a specific date they can recall what they ate, the weather, what Dick Clark wore on American Bandstand that day!
When given a song they can say the artist, the date it was released and what day of the week it was.
There was a TV documentary done on them (Discovery, I think). It is also on YouTube separated into 6 parts.
posted by Nerak on 9-21-2009 at 2:25 pm
Isn’t that why people were trying to create computers? I thought scientists needed ways to store reliable information and produce effective feedback from it. But if a human can do what a machine can do then… the human is not a human? But isn’t Artifical Intelligence modeled after Natural Intelligence?
This is my first time learning about the people and their experiences. As for Mr. Baron.. if he likes to organize and catalog, he’d be a great librarian cataloger. Seriously. I hope he likes dewey and the LCC.
And how is being good at “memory” a sign of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? If anything, the older people become, we worry about their “memory”.. yet, these people have some really good memories, and we complain how our machine computers always need upgrading and increase in memory space.
Who thinks those people are “problematic”? I think it’s amazing. They do something I can’t do.
posted by Christy Nini on 9-21-2009 at 5:29 pm
I believe this has something to do with the ability to organize events into a sequence, which they can quickly scan through, which is the way that most of memorize things most efficiently.
Think about it. I doesn’t take any special ability for people to memorize every single word to dozens of their favourite songs, because they’ve memorized the sequence. If you say, “quick what’s the 10th word of the 3rd verse”, the only way they could answer that is to sing the song in their head.
Similarly with language. The easiest thing to learn in any language is counting to 10, because the sequence stays in your memory. Picking out a number at random is a little harder to do.
This is a great trick for taking memorization tests by the way. Find a meaningfull sequence for the answers and you’ll do great.
posted by TheBear on 9-21-2009 at 6:52 pm
BioloBri is correct about Jill Price. Her “gift” was debunked a few months ago in Wired Magazine. She has an extreme form of OCD that causes her to rehash her life experiences during every waking moment of her life. Of course she remembers what she did 10 years ago on a particular day. She reviews her diaries compulsively and obsessively repeats her experiences in her mind’s eye over and over and over.
posted by jellyfish on 9-21-2009 at 7:20 pm
This would SO be a gift to me! My memory sucks!
posted by Sara in AL on 9-21-2009 at 8:00 pm
No Kim Peek the inspiration for the movie “Rain Man”? BAH!
posted by MeNotYou on 9-22-2009 at 11:12 am
@ Christy Nin:
Memory is related to OCD in that it is a compulsion for some of them to record and/or review the events of their day, week, month, etc. over and over. The same part of the brain is believed to be involved.
These people are exceptional cases and not the norm. Normal human aging often comes with memory loss. Most people store memories not as a static image or series of images (like a film reel) but as a series of connections. Memory for most of us is fluid and ever-changing, which is why 2 people standing next to each other experiencing the same event can recall very different things years later when they attempt to access that memory. Memories additionally can be influenced by the words one uses to trigger the memory. (Asking, “how fast was the car going before it crashed/bumped/collided/hit/etc the other car” will yield very different responses) This contributes to memory problems in aging (though it is certainly more than that, having a lot to do with tissue degradation and an loss of ability to store new memories
Finally, the super memory storage is considered a problem by the people who experience this because they cannot easily forget even the most painful memories. Haven’t you ever wanted to just forget something happened? For the rest of their lives these people remember those events (and every other event) so clear it’s as if it just happened.
posted by BioloBri on 9-22-2009 at 12:33 pm
To: BioloBri
Thanks for your response.
In your words: “Finally, the super memory storage is considered a problem by the people who experience this because they cannot easily forget even the most painful memories. Haven’t you ever wanted to just forget something happened? For the rest of their lives these people remember those events (and every other event) so clear it’s as if it just happened.”
I understand how failure to “erase” certain memories can be a problem. For us, do we really forget our painful memories? Or, do we bury it in our subconscious only to discover we never really forgot it because we discovered an event that “triggered” an emotional response from our painful past?
If the 4 people in reference are not “the norm”, is it possible to create a system for them to cope with painful memories? We, “the norm”, can’t tell them “just forget about it.” The study shows that they “can’t forget”, so what “can” they do to healthily respond to their painful memories?
posted by Christy Nini on 9-27-2009 at 4:18 am
Having read this article I can say that I have some of the same effects as those mentioned above. I took a B12 supplement for about 2 years and realized that I could remember things as far back as 1966 when I learned to read at the age of 2, by watching the TV news, and reading newspapers with my grandmother. I’ve memorized many mathematical formulae that I haven’t used for 30 years, since high school, and I don’t use them at all anymore.
posted by Michael DesJardins on 12-28-2009 at 9:33 pm
I discoved I had this couple of years ago, just need to no do people with this
skill feel there age means nothing, and
found they feel and act a lot younged then they are?
posted by john on 5-1-2011 at 8:13 pm