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What’s it like living with a phenomenal memory and can it be learned? | Memory | The Guardian www.theguardian.com

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Glowacki is on the autism spectrum and has superlative memory and calendar recall skills.
Coldest in Germany? “Minus 45.9 degrees, in a sinkhole in Bavaria on December 24, 2001.” I sit there blinking. At this point I actually laugh. Her memory is so good, it’s preposterous.
He then, almost alarmingly, rattles off every Melbourne Cup winner, in chronological order, in the frenetic style of a horse race commentator. Later, he sends me a video of him singing a megamix of every UK Christmas No 1 song.
I’ve barely finished the question before she verbalises her confident response: 50.8C. Correct. Every hair on my arm stands up.
For those born without the natural gift of phenomenal recall, there are tricks and techniques that train the brain into a better memory muscle.
Glowacki relates to this. “Some events I’ve seen or heard I’d just like to forget, but I can’t,” she says. “When bad things happen to me, when I had arguments that escalated or when I misbehaved.”
The memory techniques, known as mnemonics, use imagery to aid encoding and retrieval. Another, the memory palace, dates back to the fifth century BC and “places” abstract things on to actual objects, narrativising memory.
3 years ago
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