Feb 25 2008
Would You Want A Perfect Memory?
Brad Williams has a phenomenal memory. Give him a date, even decades ago, and he will give you numerous accurate details about the events of that day. He is not the first person to crop up with such verifiable preternatural memory. The existence of such persons generates many questions. What is it, exactly, that is different about their brains that gives them such astounding memory? Is this enhanced memory due to superior memory function itself, or some other aspect of information processing? Do most people have the capacity for such memory that is being inhibited somehow, or do their brains contain new anatomical or neurophysiological features that most people lack? Why doesn’t everyone have similar memory? Is having such a memory a boon, a bane, or a little of both?
I wish I had the answers to these questions. Dr. James McGaugh, who is studying Brad Williams, is quoted as saying:
You want the Nobel Prize right now? Tell me that answer and I’ll publish it. We don’t know. We do know that he carries this information with him, that it’s detailed, that it’s just there. That’s what we want to know — why is it there?
I am sure we will learn some very interesting things about Mr. Williams and those like him, but right now we do not have the technology to image brain function with sufficient resolution to probe where the answer likely lies. Brain function is dependent upon the pattern of neuronal connection and the details of their synapses, receptors, and neurotransmitters. But what can we infer from what is currently known?
Brad Williams reports that his memory is especially good for dates, he seems to remember easily when things happened. This implies that perhaps his mnemonic skill is not something generic with memory but perhaps has to do with the processing of information related to events and dates. Perhaps this is similar to those chess masters who can remember every move of a complex game – stemming more from their talent and knowledge of chess than raw memory power. There is also the Japanese man who recited pi from memory to 83,431 digits – clearly a superior memory but with a special affinity for numbers.
At first blush is makes more sense (or at least it is more aesthetic) to hypothesize that this super memory is a new ability in these individuals, rather than a talent most humans possess but is inhibited. Why would our brains contain such a ability only to inhibit it in all but a few? But there is some reason to give this notion some attention. In 2004 Young et. al. published their study which showed that by interrupting the function of the frontotemporal lobes with magnetic stimulation they were able to reproduce savant-like memory ability in some ordinary subjects.
The implications of this are extremely interesting. If this finding holds up to future research it means that our brain to contain hidden ability. There is also evidence that animals, particularly our closest cousins, may have superior skills at certain memory or processing tasks. Why would this be? There are several possibilities.
First, we should not assume that the only measure of memory is its fidelity. We must consider what the purpose of memory is from an evolutionary point of view. Our memory provides for us useful information to help us survive – to avoid mistakes we or others have made in the past, remember our friends and enemies, etc. The evolutionary purpose of memory is to guide our future behavior. For this purpose perhaps it is best that the emotion, theme, and implications of a past event is well remembered, but the details are often not important. In fact, human memory significantly favors emotional stories over details.
If many of the details that get crammed into our brains are not useful that would still not necessarily favor their forgetting, unless they were a detriment. Another subject being studied by McGaugh, a woman known only by her initials AJ, recounts:
Most have called it a gift, but I call it a burden. I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!!!
So perhaps loads of useless details are more of a distraction than a help. This accords well with our general model of how the human brain processes information. We miss most of what happens, focusing our attention only on certain bits we deem relevant or important. We filter the rest out as a distraction. The inability to filter sensory input is a terrible dysfunction – so perhaps it is the same with memory.
Another possibility (not mutually exclusive) is that as our brains evolved in the last few million years we added higher level processing of information in our greatly expanded frontal lobes. This increased complexity of processing slowed down the whole process and made some of the components of information processing (like numbers or dates) less efficient and the memory of such things less accurate. The advantages of being deeper thinkers may have come at the expense of the quickness and fidelity of certain types of memory.
The existence of these rare individuals with incredible memory for certain details will likely be useful to teach us about human memory and brain function in general. But they also remind us of the strength and weakness of ordinary human memory. Our memories are not primarily for remembering details. In fact almost everything we remember about our past is likely to be highly inaccurate in detail. Our memories are primarily for telling ourselves stories about our past. Human memory is a flawed and subjective narrative filled with moral and practical lessons – it is not a recording of what actually happened.
This knowledge of human memory is something no skeptic should forget.
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27 Responses to “Would You Want A Perfect Memory?”
Memory is fascinating I agree, whilst the examples given are unusual I am not sure they are that extraordinary. If I think of all the song lyrics I recall, and say maps and moves in video games, directions in real life, names, faces useless trivia etc, it’s an awful lot of stuff in there. If you are a doctor doesn’t that expand your vocabulary by many 1,000’s of words, what if you are bilingual? The examples given are unusual by the accuracy and the focus of their memories, but maybe not by their capacity. I remember in school memorising the logarithmic tables using a visualisation technique, it wasn’t particularly hard to do, but it took effort to maintain. You had to review the memories to make them stick. I think these people are reviewing these memories in a systematic way. Something that the average person wouldn’t spend time on.
It’s a very simple problem that dualists have long-since solved.
Memory is a property of the soul.
You don’t believe me? Then how do you explain that the deceased can answer any question posed by mediums in great detail, uh?
@decius: are you joking? Where is the evidence for this?
Of course I am joking, Aaron. I thought the nonsense was apparent.
The notion that savants are just paying more attention to details has been considered and rejected experimentally. It seems that their brains are hard-wired differently, and the evidence is pointing to the conclusion that their savant abilities are common in humans but are normally inhibited by frontotemporal lobe function and in savants it is not inhibited.
But it is true that their abilities do not necessarily represent an increase in raw memory power over average humans.
A good memory is a curse.
@decius: remember, this is the internet. You cannot assume a lower limit of stupidity. There is a joke that no matter how stupid you try to make a YouTube comment, people will still take it seriously ;D
“Our memories are primarily for telling ourselves stories about our past. Human memory is a flawed and subjective narrative filled with moral and practical lessons – it is not a recording of what actually happened.”
Yes, definitely. Memory is not an end in itself. We store every detail, but the information is organized, and retrieved, in terms of stories with morals, as you say.
And forgetting is just as important as remembering, since most of our experiences are just clutter without relevance to our priorities or practical survival needs.
Actually, the current conventional wisdom is that we do not store every detail. There is the common assumption that memory deficits are entirely caused by problems with retrieval, when the evidence supports the conclusion that there are deficits with perception, storage, persistence, and retrieval. However, the relative contribution of these sources of error is a matter of ongoing research.
Steve, do you have a link to that Young et al (2004) study, please? The link in the body of the text is not working and I’d like to read some more about it.
Many thanks.
Short term memory systems supposedly assess the significance of various observations and emphasize that significance in passing or transferring items to long term memory systems. The concept of intelligence involves in part the ability to make that discernment, and ability to recognize which items belong in various pattern formations that will have added to their own significance as a result.
Perhaps part of the problem (it that’s what it is) is in the ability to discern and filter out items that have the smallest chance of adding anything of value to this pattern recognition process.
There’s a lot more that could be said about this, obviously, but I suggest much of the answer will be found in examining how memory functions work in the most primitive life forms – including those where evidence of an actual brain or even a memory bank is noticeably absent.
It is not that unusual for me . I can remember dates , events as a picture in my mind. Details of as far as weather , what was playing on the radio, news events , family events as far as forty years ago and earlier. But as some comments a memory can be a bad thing.
“It’s a blessing…and a curse.”
– Monk.
I actually earned my PhD under Dr. McGaugh and I know that he often made comparisons to the famous case by Alexander Luria in the early 1900s. Luria studied a man called “S” who had a severe form of synesthesia. S would encode information with mutliple senses so that certain facts had “flavors” or “odors”. He used this as a way to remember details of an event using multiple sensory modalities. S had an amazing ability to remember, but his life was very frantic and unhappy because he would often find everyday events to have unpleasant associations with them.
I don’t think that AJ or Mr. Williams have anything to this degree, but I think the scientific consensus still believes that people with super-memories usually describe them as a burden as opposed to a gift.
Aaron, I think you have a point there.
Pec, you have a gift for getting everything wrong, whatever the topic.
one concept useful for thinking about memory is that “memory” resides in the field, loosely correlated with brain locations…
and in support of the last paragraph, inaccuracy, the relationship between memory and words is important to discover, language is very inexact already, and memory when released and delivered in words will never be “the truth” about “the past”…
basically, we are still too early in knowing what is time and space to explain memory…
here is something from http://www.boston.com today about the body’s role in mind functioning, loosely summed… “The greatest impact, however, has been in the field of neuroscience itself, where embodied cognition threatens age-old distinctions – not only between brain and body, but between perceiving and thinking, thinking and acting, even between reason and instinct – on which the traditional idea of the mind has been built.”
discovery only happens when we allow “not knowing” to exist
Maybe I am missing the difference. I have no doubt certain people with a great memory have their brains wired differently. but people like Harry Lorraine, even Banachek is it? one of Randi’s students can do great memory feats by effective use of association. I’ve seen many apparently normal people demonstrate very effective memories, from a radio DJ who can name the pubs associated with every football ground in Britain etc, TV shows are full of them. I would be surprised if their brains were different, after all I memorised the log tables after reading a book about memory techniques as a child, I imagine I’d have got quite proficient if I’d practiced regularly. Largely a pen and pencil and later computers were more effective though.
Have their been any studies done to compare and contrast inherently good memories with “learnt” memories ?
Ah! I’ve thought about this a bit more. I wonder if you asked person A to memorise a seres of numbers and then person B memorised the numbers with a visualisation technique if that would make a difference to the brain activity seen? hmm, must read more.
Thanks for a thought provoking post and responses.
here is an old, but true, story from my lab.
i used to keep a file of reprints, which were numbered sequentially and placed them in the cabinet. students would get a kick out of asking me where the articles by ‘clayton’ (or, whoever)… and i would routinely remember the filing #.
this went on for several years, until sometime in 1992 we hit 2431 references… after that i was unable to remember ANY of the numbers.
after that, i had to reorganize the reprints into topical folders…
several years after telling this story, a student came up with an old psychological study, that suggested that upon learning increasing lengths of numerical sequences, it was not uncommon, upon getting to a certain point, to completely forget the previous sequences.
i would have to rummage around to find the original reference… but, the moral to the story is that i suspect that memory is much more complex than simply remembering details… there is probably some dimensional structure to memory as well.
Comment on this blog entry from my 36 year-old son with “severe” autism:
“Any human brain is incapable of causing the capabilities of the human mind.”
In addition to our evolved ability to decide what we need to remember is an ability to unremember what is beneficial to forget.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/health/psychology/05forg.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1204045205-i5Qngsv09wIeSWEo6ZoNHQ&pagewanted=print
arthurgolden: Was that a reflection of the dualist point of view now prevalent in Jerusalem? What’s the take there now on evolution?
To add a bit to some comments I made earlier, and at the risk of again stating the obvious, it seems important to note that the brain normally remembers things it DIDN’T expect to see more than what it DID expect to see. It remembers potential (and plausible) new additions to a previously recognizable pattern, for example. (I have my own theory as to why, but I’m not yet confident that it’s viable.)
So what if this system were instead to treat all input as equal? It might more likely retain as many of those things as space allows (some say it does this anyway). What’s more, it then might file everything away in the same folder, so to speak.
A weakness or flaw might then be a relative inability to “judge” the potential value of each observation, as well as each bit that was retained – at least to the extent that such value was either significantly more or significantly less than that of all others. Making it equally difficult to determine either what’s best to remember or what would be best to forget.
And the flaw might lie as much with our calculating apparatus as with the memory systems themselves. So whatever part of the mechanism was meant to assign value to the input from our senses, it would not be functioning correctly – but not necessarily for the same reasons in every case.
For example some people with this “problem” seem to have otherwise retained the ability to make normal decisions and judgments. Others, like the “Rain Man” remember tremendous amounts of data but have great difficulty sorting that data into logical patterns of thought.
Check out this site, for example, that has more to say about the person the movie “rain man” could have been patterned after, and about some evidence of congenital brain abnormalities. The areas damaged in this man’s brain may also relate to areas in others that, while not perceptibly damaged, may yet be where some necessary calculating apparatus is impaired.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek
Dr Novella commented that “- the evidence supports the conclusion that there are deficits with perception, storage, persistence, and retrieval.”
But with regard to perception in particular, what appears to be a deficit when memories are compared to historical records, is often due not to perception but the judgement at the time that the perceptions were not significant.
Granted that judgement is a part of perception and if wrong, then perception is similarly wrong.
But in a way these judgments are based on their foreseeable use in dealing with future events, and it’s not a flaw to fail to predict that which is the least predictable.
Plus these perceptions need to be accurate for the short term or the organism doesn’t live to see the long term event that decries the alleged deficit.
This was not a criticism, just an additional note about perceptions.
I have of course neglected to address the subjective memory experience with any degree of subtlety. And I have failed to even allude to an explanatory framework that allows for any insight into the phenomenological and interpersonal diversity of memory, without which any discussion of saints or savants would be eminently forgettable.
Posted by “anonymous” in an obscure forum found deep in the web, where the curse of memory has gone with intent to stay:
“There are ordinary phenomena all around that would astound us if we could look past the mundanity of the present to the latent astonishment seen only by a futuristic eye – imparting to them a seriousness they simply cannot receive while in our immediate presence.” Lest we forget.
This thread clearly belongs in the category of the potentially un-rememberable. There is not the slightest possibility of astonishment in its future.