Do you ever met with a person who got insanely powerful memory? Well, I guess the answer would be no. Here we are going to introduce Markie Pasternak who got amazing memory and remembers everything exactly when she realized her brain was different.
When she was sitting in a class called Learning and Memory, a psychology course that explained how people learn the different types of memory. It was Tuesday, August 26, 2014, the start of her junior year at Marquette University.
Dr. Kristy Nielson who was the professor of the class, stood at the front of the classroom, going over the syllabus for the semester. She gave challenge to class that if the class finished the required material then they would get into ‘the fun stuff.’ They will discuss the cases of people with unusually impressive memories, who can play music totally by memory or map out a whole city after only seeing it once.
That was the moment when Pasternak thought, that’s me, I can do that.
Pasternak is currently the youngest person at age of 23, with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), a exceptional condition that only around 60 people in the world are known to have. Yes only 60 people in the world and Pasternak is one of them.
If you want to take test of her astounding memory and will give her any date between 2005 and present day then she will tell you everything she did that day in incredible and surprising detail and she will also tell what day of the week it was.
On December 11, 2006, her dad was watching the Chicago Bears play Monday Night Football and suddenly he got unfocused and by mistake cut off the top of their Christmas tree instead of the base.
‘I asked my high school psychology teacher (if she knew anything about my memory) … and she didn’t know,’ Pasternak says.
‘She just thought it’d be cool if I went on David Letterman.’ He added.
According to researchers at the University of California-Irvine, the first known case of HSAM was in 2006 and they have been further studying it ever since.
Researchers conduct a procedure which is a test contains two-part to confirm the diagnosis to qualify a potential HSAMer once it is identified.
In first step, they give several dates (say, November30, 2013) and participants must evoke what major existing event took place each day (that was a Saturday, and that’s when Paul walker died).
Once they qualify the first step of test then they move onto the second. A producer spits out 10 random dates, and participants must name the day of the week, confirmable events that took place that day and other descriptions like what the weather conditions was like.
Pasternak also went through this test and passed it with 9 out of 10, the average score for people with HSAM. The usual score for those with no HSAM is 2 out of 10.
People who have HSAM have different ways of remembering dates.
Pasternak has its own as to find out the right year, month then day she got a method as she has a memory like a Candy Land board. In her mind, she perceives each month as a special colored square; May is green, June is golden yellow, December is dark red ‘zooms into’ the square and visualizes each week as a 7-piece pie chart.
‘I know that one because of Valentine’s Day,’ she explains. ‘I know who I was with on that Valentine’s Day and what happened, and then I can kind of piece it together. Now I remember what happened on that Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday.’
Although it takes time to recall those memories, but ultimately, she can memorize events down to the hour. ‘I can’t just memorize things,’ she says. ‘That’s not how it works. I have to see it. I have to be there. I have to live it, or it doesn’t affect me.’
According to Researchers, people with HSAM have the intense opposite of Alzheimer’s, and detection what is biologically different about HSAM brains could help out treat Alzheimer’s, misery, and other mental health issues.
“It makes me so glad that I figured out I have [HSAM],” she says, “so I can help contribute to this growing body of research that has the potential to change lives.”
