Psychology

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nonfatmatt

Meet the woman who cannot forget (www.rnz.co.nz)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/psychology

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Imagine being able to remember every single day of your life, all the way back to when you were a newborn.

Australian woman Rebecca Sharrock is one of only 60 people in the world with a highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), also known as hyperthymesia.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Does the brain even have the capacity to remember everything since your birth? I expected forgetting to be a space saving mechanism

[–] Speculater 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think it's more about preserving sanity and keeping survival resources available. You don't think about last year's fight with your neighbor so you can focus on potential dangers in the moment. I believe the storage capacity of the human brain is theoretically unlimited in the timespan of a human life.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Interesting. But still, memories from your whole life would probably take up 100x-1000x what you currently remember, does your brain really have that much free capacity? Although I imagine the mechanism of only paying attention to the memories that are relevant could work even then

[–] athairmor 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Your brain seems to actively forget almost everything before age ~4 and most things before age ~7. The phenomenon is known as childhood or infantile amnesia. It’s possible to retain memories from those ages just very unlikely. I think trauma and strong emotions make them more likely to be retained.

There are several theories why but we don’t really know. It’s possible these people have that shut off.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Honestly I wonder how many GB (or whatever the equivalent is for neural networks) the average person's long term memories take up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Yeah almost certainly. Forgetting is an adaptive mechanism, probably not concerned with space. The brain is finite of course, but I imagine other parts of your consciousness would fail before you ran out of “space”