Unthinkable

by Helen Thomson

  While impressive, Koltanowski did not have a memory that was naturally superior to yours or mine. Instead, he learned ancient parlor tricks such as mnemonics, which help you to associate information you want to learn with something more fun and memorable, like a funny image, or a rhyme or ditty.

  Which is why, when I first heard about Bob—a man who could remember every day of his life—I assumed he must be doing something similar. But something didn’t add up. Surely there wasn’t enough time in the day to remember everything that has happened using rhymes and ditties? I looked back through the medical literature to find mention of anyone who had his talents, and discovered that until very recently the idea of having a perfect memory of your own past was unheard of.

  That was until the American neurobiologist James McGaugh received a very odd email.

  * * *

  In 2001, McGaugh was puttering around his office when his computer pinged. It was an email from a woman who had googled “memory” and had hit upon his name. The woman, who was later revealed as Jill Price, a school administrator from California, told McGaugh that she had a strange memory problem and that she’d like to meet with him. McGaugh, an expert in the field of learning and memory, but no longer practicing medicine, responded simply by referring her to a specialist memory clinic. Jill replied immediately. She said, “No, I’d like to talk to you—because I don’t forget. Anything.”

  I just hope somehow you can help me. I am thirty-four years old and since I was eleven I have had this unbelievable ability to recall my past, but not just recollections . . . I can take a date, between 1974 and today, and tell you what day it falls on, what I was doing that day and if anything of great importance occurred on that day . . . Whenever I see a date flash on the television I automatically go back to that day and remember where I was, what I was doing, what day it fell on and on and on and on and on. It is nonstop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting.6

  Jill went to McGaugh’s lab on a Saturday morning that spring. He took a large book from his shelf and opened it at random. It was a present he had been given that Christmas, and it contained newspaper clippings from every day of the past century. McGaugh randomly chose a date from Jill’s lifetime and asked her what had happened on that day.

  “She did an incredible job,” says McGaugh, recollecting that first meeting for me. “I’d give her an event and she’d tell me which day and date it happened on, or I’d give her the date and she’d give me the event.”

  McGaugh also asked her to give the dates of the last twenty-one Easters, which she did without error. She even told him what she did on each of those days, an even more remarkable feat, given that she was Jewish.

  Was it just a trick? Had Jill figured out how to apply the mind games that served Koltanowski so well to remembering periods of her own life? To find out, I decided to learn a few tricks of my own.

  * * *

  If you’d told Alex Mullen a few years ago that he was capable of remembering a whole pack of cards in less time than it takes to tie a pair of shoelaces, he would have said you were being ridiculous. His memory wasn’t anything special, “below average” even.

  “What on earth happened?” I asked him.

  “I read this book,” he said. “It was called Moonwalking with Einstein.”

  The book was written by Joshua Foer, a journalist who had attended a U.S. memory championship to write about what he thought would be “the Super Bowl of savants.”7 Instead, he found a group of people who had trained their memory using ancient techniques. Foer started practicing the techniques, and went on to win the competition the following year.

  Mullen, an American medical student, was spurred on by Foer’s story. He too started practicing. Two years later, he found himself in Guangzhou, China, in second place in the final round of the 2015 World Memory Championship. The competition consists of ten rounds of mental challenges, which include memorising as many numbers as you can in an hour, remembering as many faces and names as you can in fifteen minutes, or committing to memory hundreds of binary digits. The final event is always the speed-card round, where competitors memorize the order of a shuffled pack of cards as fast as possible—it was one of Mullen’s favorites. That day, Mullen memorized all fifty-two in 21.5 seconds—one second faster than Yan Yang, the current competition leader—earning him just enough points to creep into first place and to win the entire championship.

  These feats of memory may seem outrageous. But according to Mullen, anyone can do it. “You just have to create a mind palace,” he said.

  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Sherlock Holmes, a mind palace is an image in your mind’s eye of a physical location that you know well. Perhaps it’s your house or your route to work. To remember many items, be it cards or groceries, you just walk through your mind palace and drop off an image of each item at specific places along the way. To recall the items you merely have to retrace your steps and pick them up again.

  This was the technique developed by Simonides of Ceos after the banquet ceiling fell to the floor. His ability to identify the bodies, based on remembering where they had been sitting, led him to discover that the best way of remembering anything is to attach an image of it to a familiar and orderly location.

  Try it now with some of the things around you. Since I’m sitting at my desk at home, I think about memorizing my stapler, a cup of tea, my printer, my notepad and so on. My natural mind palace is my route to work. So I give the stapler to the woman at my local petrol station, who, in my imagination, uses it to staple my receipt together. I leave my cup of tea at the bus stop, placing it underneath the seats so it doesn’t get spilled. I lug my printer all the way to the station, where I leave it with the ticket seller, before getting on the train and wedging my notebook between two seats. Not only should you be able to remember your items in the order you dropped them off, you should also be able to travel backward and name them in reverse.

  If you want to remember large groups of numbers, though, you’re going to have to learn another trick. Our memories haven’t evolved to store all types of information equally well. Experiences that are more important to our survival stick around more easily than those that are less essential—and numbers, not being vital to our immediate well-being, are low down on the list. To get around this problem, we have to convert such information into visual imagery—pictures that our memories prefer to store. To remember a whole set of playing cards, Jonas von Essen, a student at the University of Gothenburg, and a former world memory champion, told me that he links each numbered card with an image. He then groups these images into sets of three before placing them around his mind palace. For him, the four of hearts, the nine of hearts and the eight of clubs instantly transform into an image of Sherlock Holmes playing the guitar while eating a hamburger.

  As soon as von Essen tried the technique, he realized he could “memorise more things than I ever dreamed possible.” Next year, he’s hoping to break the world record for memorizing pi—his aim is to reach one hundred thousand digits.

  Was it really that simple? I wondered. Could anyone use this technique to become a memory champion? Or was there more to it? Researchers at University College London wanted to know the answer, so they scanned the brains of ten people who had placed at the highest levels of the World Memory Champion-ship. As is usual for such tests, they also scanned the brains of similar-aged people who had regular memory skills. By taking a look inside their brains, they hoped to identify whether the super-memorizers had any structural brain differences that predisposed them to having such an extraordinary talent.

  As expected, when asked to memorize sets of three-digit numbers, the super-memorizers performed much better than the control group. But when it came to memorizing close-up images of snowflakes, neither group did very well. When I asked Eleanor Maguire, the lead researcher on the study, what they had discovered, she said that their tests could not establish any difference in intellect, nor any structural anomalies in the brain. But there
was one vital difference between the two groups: while recalling sets of numbers, the memory champions appeared preferentially to use three brain regions that are associated with spatial awareness and navigation.8 In other words, she said, the super-memorizers were better at remembering purely because they were walking around their mind palaces.

  “Does it work every time?” I asked von Essen. “Doesn’t your memory ever go blank?”

  “No,” he said. “If you’ve put it in your mind palace, it’s always safe.”

  THE PROBLEM FOR McGAUGH was that Jill didn’t seem to be using any of these parlor tricks. Time and time again Jill said that her memory was automatic and not strategic. Her memories came to her like images in a movie, full of emotion, under no conscious control. McGaugh believed her, noting that her answers to his questions were “immediate and quick, not deliberate and reflective.”

  McGaugh spent the next five years working out just how special Jill’s memory was. Luckily, she had written detailed diaries from the age of ten to the age of thirty-four, which allowed his team to verify her account of thousands of personal events.

  What became clear was that, despite her unprecedented memory for personal experiences, Jill wasn’t that great at any other kind of memory task. She couldn’t remember strings of numbers or items on a table any better than others her age. She hadn’t excelled at school; she said she found it hard to remember facts and figures. It was unexpected: Jill didn’t have a photographic memory—she had an exceptional autobiographical memory.

  McGaugh wondered why Jill’s memory of the events of her own past was so vivid while the other types of memory were mundane. As far as he was aware, there was no one else like her, and barely any scientific literature about such a superior form of memory. It was like a detective story, he said. To find more clues he needed more evidence, and that meant more people. So he published a paper on Jill, and named the condition “highly superior autobiographical memory” (HSAM).9 His paper got picked up by the international press, and he was inundated with people claiming to have a similar talent. He and his colleagues began the long process of testing them all. Only five people passed their rigorous examinations. One of those was Bob.

  * * *

  “Sorry I’m late,” says Bob. “I forgot where this place was.”

  It is early evening in L.A., I’m severely jet-lagged and haven’t even dropped my suitcase off at my hotel. I laugh uneasily.

  Bob and I are at Truxton’s American Bistro in Westchester. We take a seat at the bar and order a glass of beer. Bob, a sixty-four-year-old TV producer with thin black glasses, has a crooked smile and a slightly nasal voice that reminds me of a cartoon.

  As it turns out, he wasn’t joking—Bob actually had forgotten where the restaurant was. Like Jill, having a great memory for his own past didn’t make him any better at remembering other kinds of facts. But ask him to remember any day in his life and it’s a completely different story. He can remember a day from forty years ago as easily as a memory of yesterday. The day comes flooding back as a rich, multisensory experience, complete with smells, tastes and emotions.

  “It’s like watching a home movie,” Bob says. “When I think back to a day in my past, I feel exactly how I felt. I can feel the weather—if it was hot and sticky I’ll remember how tight my clothes were and what I was wearing. All of my senses are triggered and I’ll remember who I was with, even what I was thinking, my views or attitudes. Sometimes I’ll remember something from when I was younger and think, ‘Wow I really thought that?’—everything is stirred in my imagination.”

  As our waitress guides us to our table, Bob tells me about his childhood. The middle of three brothers from western Pennsylvania, he was a young teenager when he first noticed his memory was different from other people’s. “I would talk to my buddies about something that had happened when we were kids,” he says. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, remember, it was on February fourth, it was a Friday.’”

  It became a bit of a party trick. “People often misunderstood it. They called me Rain Man, but it was just a weird quirk to me—you know, like being left-handed or something. I didn’t think it was rare, I assumed maybe a few million people had it.”

  I wanted to test Bob for myself. In 2013, I’d had a quick chat with him over Skype, while researching an article about memory. At the time, I’d asked him what had happened two years earlier, on November 7, 2011.

  “Okay,” he’d said. “Do you remember what you did that day?”

  I’d thought for a second and said no. Despite having picked the date of my birthday, I didn’t remember.

  “Well, it was a Monday,” Bob said. “It was the day after my favorite team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, had lost to the Ravens on Sunday night. I remember waking up on Monday and feeling bummed out about that. I was working up at Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, wrapping up on a show called Reel Men. That evening I emailed an ex and she replied the next day.”

  Back in 2015, sitting at our table in Truxton’s I decide to ask Bob about that same day, November 7, 2011.

  “That was a Monday,” he says immediately. “It was the day after the Steelers lost a close game to the Baltimore Ravens. I was working on a job in Cape Cod. A show called Reel Men about fishermen searching for giant tuna. I couldn’t get to sleep that night, and sent an email to an ex-girlfriend. I was hoping she would send me a response back, and the next morning she did, and I felt content the rest of the day.”

  I am startled. What on earth is going on in his brain that isn’t happening in mine?

  * * *

  To find out, we have to go back to the 1950s and into a surgical room at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital in Canada. There we find Wilder Penfield, a pioneering brain surgeon wielding electrical currents alongside his scalpel. While performing operations on people with epilepsy, Penfield made use of the fact that their brain was exposed while they were fully awake to find out what happened when he stimulated different areas with a small electrical current. During one operation, he stimulated an area overlying the hippocampus within a young woman’s temporal lobe. Suddenly she spoke: “I think I heard a mother calling her little boy somewhere,” she said. “It seemed to be something that happened years ago . . . in the neighborhood where I live.”

  Penfield stimulated the spot again, and once more the mother’s voice cried out. He moved the stimulus a little to the left, and the woman heard different voices. It was late at night, she said, they were coming from around a carnival somewhere—some sort of traveling circus. “There are lots of big wagons that they use to haul animals in.”10

  The tiny jolts of activity applied by Penfield seemed to be bringing to life long-forgotten memories—like reaching into a dusty album and picking out a photo at random.

  The current theory accepted by most neuroscientists is that memories actually live at synapses—the gaps between neurons where electrical impulses pass from one cell to the next. When these impulses pass repeatedly between two neurons, that particular synapse is strengthened, and any further activity in the first neuron is now more likely to stimulate the second. It’s a bit like walking through a dense wood. The more people walk along the same path, the more it becomes clear and the more likely that path will be used again. It works the other way around too, if neuronal pathways aren’t being used, they degrade just like real pathways. And that’s why we find ourselves forgetting things that we don’t practice or think about time and time again.

  Much of this activity occurs in the hippocampus, but it doesn’t work alone. Think of being handed a bunch of flowers, for example. Henry Molaison proved that forming a short-term memory of this event wouldn’t involve the hippocampus at all. In fact, this event would be processed by parts of the cortex that are responsible for touch, vision and smell. It is when these events need to be remembered for more than thirty seconds or so that the hippocampus springs into action and we see the connections between relevant areas of the cortex and the hippocampus strengthen and grow, helping us
permanently scribe the memory into the architecture of our brain.

  The hippocampus seems to glue different aspects of a memory together. Indeed, when people attempt to learn new associations and recall them later, those whose hippocampus generated the most activity while learning the associations are best at recalling them later. It’s as though they managed to stick them together better in the first place.

  As such, I tend to imagine our memories as a kind of spidery web of neurons—one that stretches across different areas of the brain and that strengthens and weakens over time. The stronger and more numerous the connections, the more vivid that memory will be and the more easily you will recollect it. Break that web and your memories disappear forever.11

  * * *

  Although Bob’s memories appear to be more tightly knitted together than mine, just like my memories some days feel more vivid to him than others. For the majority of us, our most vivid memories are those that have some kind of emotional content. When we feel aroused by love, stress or fear—anything mildly stimulating—our brain releases stress hormones that stimulate the amygdalae, two almond-shaped structures involved in our emotional behavior. The amygdalae then send messages to many brain regions to increase the strength of synapses at work at the time. They essentially tell the rest of the brain, “these events are important, remember them.” This in turn makes the memory of that event more easily recalled at a later date.

  When I think of my most vivid memories, one of the first things that comes to mind is a Bon Jovi concert back in 2013 in Hyde Park. It was midsummer and a beaming hot day. I was with two of my best friends, there was prosecco, sunshine and an electric atmosphere. I remember feeling extraordinarily happy. The next moment that comes to mind is seeing my eldest sister try on her wedding dress in front of my parents in their bedroom. I had to walk out of the room, overcome with emotion. Suddenly I am holding my husband’s hand at our own wedding, watching our nephews play football outside a giant teepee while our friends mingle in the sun.