What If You Never Forgot Anything?

You can remember every word, every face and every embarrassing mistake. So why does the most important moment still almost slip past you? What if you had a perfect memory? Step into Max's life after everything he notices starts staying with him. Lost keys become easy. A piano lesson stays in his head after one viewing. Soon, a 10,000-digit challenge could change his family's life. But remembering instructions doesn't teach his fingers to play, and perfect recall can't recover something he never noticed. As old arguments and mistakes become impossible to forget, his sister Mia tries to bring him back to the moment he's living. An original fictional What If story, informed by research on attention, working memory and exceptional autobiographical memory. Max's flawless memory and the competition are imagined; real exceptional memory is not a perfect recording. Chapters 00:00 The keys in the cereal box 00:30 A perfect memory, with one catch 01:19 Knowing isn't doing 02:23 The gorilla you didn't notice 02:56 Going viral and a life-changing prize 03:32 When remembering becomes a trap 04:16 Mia's three taps 04:50 Ten thousand digits 05:33 The choice you can't replay 07:21 The real science behind the story Sources and further reading Working-memory capacity: Nelson Cowan, The magical number 4 in short-term memory: https://static.cambridge.org/content/... Attention and the gorilla experiment: Daniel Simons, Monkeying around with the Gorillas in Our Midst: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1... False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory: Patihis et al.: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24248... Sleep, focus and everyday performance: NHLBI: https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/slee... Which ordinary moment would you keep forever? Tell us in the comments, and subscribe for more What If stories. #WhatIf #PerfectMemory #Memory