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LA CROSSE, Wisconsin (CNN)—Give Brad Williams a date, and he can usually tell you not only what he was doing but what world events happened that day. He can do this for almost every day of his life.
Brad Williams has hyperthymestic syndrome, experts say, and remembers what he did on allmost every day of his life.
1 of 2 Williams is one of only three people in the world identified with this off-the-charts autobiographical memory, according to researchers at the University of California-Irvine who gave the condition its name: hyperthymestic syndrome, from the Greek words for excessive (hyper) and remembering (thymesis).
Unlike most people whose memories fade with time, much of Williams’ life is etched indelibly in his mind.
“It’s just there,“ said Williams, 51, who reports the news for a family of radio stations in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
The California researchers are studying Williams and the two others with hyperthymestic syndrome, a man in Ohio and woman in California, hoping to gain new insights into how a superior memory works.
The goal of the study is to find a way to help people with failing memory.
Williams didn’t realize how exceptional his memory was until his brother Eric told him about an article published two years ago in the journal Neurocase, describing a woman referred to by the initials, A.J.
“My brother in California saw this and said, ‘She sounds like you. Why don’t we talk to the folks at Irvine?‘“ Williams said.
At Irvine, researchers quizzed Williams, as they have the two other hyperthymestics, about a series of dates, asking for the corresponding event, and vice-versa.
“The speed with which they do this is part of why I find this so amazing because it seems to indicate there’s no—or not much—intentional calculation going on. It’s boom, boom, boom, there’s the answer,“ said Larry Cahill, a fellow at the university’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. “Remember, these are questions they had no idea what we’re going to ask them.“
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Looks pretty legit to me, and it does make sense. Savant Syndrome (formerly called Idiot Savant) has been known about for a while now where people with severe disabilities can show remarkable abilities usually tied to memory. Things like remembering the weather on an given day in the last hundred years, or being able to memorise and play a musical piece almost to perfection after hearing it only once.
Personally, I worked with an autistic boy who could remember everything he had ever heard, seen or been taught on a computer, but otherwise was very challenged.
If these abilities can exist in people with dissabilities, I can only imagine that they would exist in the general population.
