Bob Petrella can remember every single detail from his past. Name any date and he can tell you what he had for breakfast, what the weather was like, who else was there. He is one of a rare group of people with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). It’s a phenomenon that has only recently been studied by psychologists. The first case study of the condition was conducted by the memory researcher James McGaugh and published in 2006 about a woman, referred to as AJ (real name Jill Price). She remembers everything since she was 14 years old.
McGaugh and his team have researched the phenomenon. In a recent study (LePort et al. 2016) they compared people with HSAM to those without. They found, for example, that when both groups of people were given unexpected recall tasks the two groups had equal recall when asked to remember events from a week ago but going further back people with HSAM had far superior recall. This suggests that the ability is not related to initial storage but rather, to a superior ability to retain memories.
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