The Ones Who Never Forget

Ever had trouble recalling where you kept the keys to your car or where you left the remote last time you switched off the TV? While most of us struggle sometimes with recalling the most obvious details we observe in our day-to-day life, Actress Marilu Henner can tell you exactly where she was and what she was doing on any day of her life. Actress Marilu Henner has a condition possessed by only about 100 other people worldwide, called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). This condition was first identified in another woman Jill Price and was brought to light in 2006 by James McGaugh, Ph.D., founding chair of the department of neurobiology and behavior and founding director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California-Irvine. After six years of working with Price, Dr. McGaugh and his colleagues published "A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering" in the neuropsychology journal Neurocase in February 2006.

Dr. McGaugh and his team have identified some key differences in both the brain structures and the brain function of people like Henner and Price. An area in the region of the striatum and a region in the parahippocampal gyrus is larger. A fiber pathway connecting the back of the brain to the front of the brain appeared to be more active as well. These regions play an important role in imagery, learning, and memory. Another interesting observation is that the performance of such individuals on standard memory tests is pretty ordinary but where they truly excel is at recalling the events of their own lives and those around them, and the dates and days when those events happened suggesting that they have an extraordinary long-term memory while their short-term memory is just the same as an average person.

While we may already be wishing we had such a trump card up our sleeves to breeze through our exams, HSAM can be very frustrating and overwhelming. Individuals with this condition explained how they were unable to stay ‘in the moment’ and the slightest hits of certain words or numbers would flood their brains uncontrollably with memories, making it exhausting and leading to many sleepless nights. In a 2015 study published in Neuropsychologia, scientists identified people with the opposite condition, called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM).

People with SDAM can remember the facts of the events of their lives, they don’t have amnesia, but they can’t remember what it was like to be there. Henner is very keen on helping people with memory disabilities and has participated in the UsAgainstAlzheimer's Uniting Communities for a Cure summit on brain health and has advocated before Congress for more funding for brain research. "Your memory is your story, it's your life, it's everything," she says. "What's more important than creating memories with people, spending time with them, and relating to the world in a certain way that's uniquely yours?"