What If You Could Never Forget Anything?

You can't remember what you had for lunch three weeks ago. Now imagine you could: every day, every conversation, every embarrassing moment, in full color, forever. Real people live like this. A woman who emailed a neuroscientist in 2000, and a Moscow reporter studied for thirty years. Here's what a memory that never forgets actually feels like, why even a perfect memory gets things wrong, and why your brain forgets on purpose. Sources: Parker, Cahill & McGaugh, "A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering", Neurocase, 2006 McGaugh et al., "The Discovery of Super Memories", Scientific American; UC Irvine news releases (2010, 2012) Jill Price with Bart Davis, The Woman Who Can't Forget (2008) Walker, Skowronski & Thompson, "Life is pleasant, and memory helps to keep it that way!", Review of General Psychology, 2003 (fading affect bias) A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968); Solomon Shereshevsky Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes the Memorious" (1942) Patihis et al., "False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals", PNAS, 2013 Hermann Ebbinghaus, Uber das Gedachtnis (1885) Richards & Frankland, "The Persistence and Transience of Memory", Neuron, 2017 S.'s late-life ability to forget is reported in accounts of Luria's work and was not tested directly. The people in this video are drawn as simple stickmen; it is an animated explainer, not a medical source. If painful memories are weighing on you, a doctor or therapist can help.