9 Brain Disorders That Completely Warp Your Reality

5. Hyperthymesia: I Can’t Ever Forget

For those of us with useless memories, the ability to recall everything that has ever happened to us in exquisite detail would probably come in handy.

Hyperthymestics can recall every day of their lives perfectly and automatically. They are different from other kinds of exceptional memorisers, in that they would not be able to memorise a page of text or a table of numbers, like a savant might, using revision strategies and mnemonics.

Rather the memories are mostly autobiographical and will occur to them automatically and unbidden when shown a date or other stimulus and it is often the case that they will have a poorer-than average memory for arbitrary information.

One famous exception to this was a man named Solomon Shereshevsky, who was able to perfectly memories vast amounts of information, due to his profound synaesthesia - a condition which causes a person's senses to become mixed up. He once described an ice cream vendor's voice as "in such a tone that a whole pile of coals, of black cinders, came bursting out of her mouth" and a psychologist's as "crumbly and yellow". It is thought that this cross association created automatic mnemonics that endowed him with an impossibly powerful memory.

Solomon's memory drove his so mad that he even resorted to writing things down on paper and burning it, so that he could see the words in cinders, in an attempt to forget them. It seems that, for those who can't do it, forgetting is a luxury.