What If You Never Forgot Anything?

What if, from this morning, you never forgot anything again? Every word, every face, every password, every embarrassing thing you ever said: on file, forever. The Ministry of If walks you through it, from Hour 1 to Age 80. Real science inside: only about 100 people have ever been found with a memory like this, your brain forgets on purpose, and even perfect memories make things up. Please read the fine print. Chapters 0:00 Congratulations, citizen 0:50 Step 1: Hour one. Find everything 1:20 Step 2: Day one. Count your words 2:11 Step 3: Night one. Expect visitors 2:47 Step 4: Week one. Mind the music 3:23 Step 5: Month one. Go to a party 4:03 Step 6: Year one. Mind the exams 4:36 Step 7: Year ten. Keep every Tuesday 5:29 Step 8: Do not miss forgetting 6:27 Step 9: Age eighty 6:48 Section 9: The fine print 7:42 Which memory would you delete? If you could delete one memory, which would it be? Write it below. The Ministry will remember it for you. Sources People with near-perfect autobiographical memory (HSAM): Parker, Cahill and McGaugh, Neurocase (2006), the first case; LePort et al., Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (2012); LePort et al., Frontiers in Psychology (2015) (equal at one week, far apart at one and ten years); Talbot et al., Neuropsychology Review (2025) (about 100 identified since the first case; 1 in about 80 million is our maths). False memories: Patihis et al., PNAS (2013) (trap words 70.3% vs 70.8%); Loftus and Palmer, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior (1974) ("smashed" and the broken glass). Solomon Shereshevsky: A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968). The forgetting curve: Ebbinghaus (1885), savings on nonsense syllables; Murre and Dros, PLOS ONE (2015), the replication. Forgetting on purpose: Davis and Zhong, Neuron (2017); Shuai et al., Cell (2010) (fruit flies, Rac); de Vivo et al., Science (2017) (mice, connections about 18% smaller after sleep); Richards and Frankland, Neuron (2017). Brain storage: Bartol et al., eLife (2015) and the Salk Institute (a petabyte, an estimate); Landauer, Cognitive Science (1986) (about a billion bits, one classic estimate). Everyday numbers: Mehl et al., Science (2007) (about 16,000 words spoken a day); Bohn and Short, UC San Diego (2009) (about 100,000 words taken in a day, US, outside work); Tseng and Poppenk, Nature Communications (2020) (over 6,000 thoughts a day, an estimate); Jenkins, Dowsett and Burton, Proc R Soc B (2018) (about 5,000 faces); NordPass survey of its users (2026) (about 120 personal passwords); IFPI Engaging with Music (2023) (about 20 hours of music a week); Bentivoglio et al. (1997) (blinks); Radvansky, Krawietz and Tamplin, QJEP (2011) (doorways); Rasmussen and Berntsen (2011) and Berntsen (2021) (memories that turn up on their own); Liikkanen (2012) and Williamson et al., PLOS ONE (2014) (earworms). Lifetime totals assume 80 years and 16 waking hours a day (our maths). Animated entirely in code. Voices: ElevenLabs. Music: ElevenLabs. This has been a Ministry of If orientation. Please remain calm. #WhatIf #Animation #MinistryOfIf