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Seiiti Arata.
Imagine what your life would be like if you had a perfect memory, unable to forget anything.
In exams, you would remember all the answers.
At work, you would remember all the information you need.
In life, you would remember everyone's names, birthdays and even their personal preferences.
Seems amazing, right?
And that perfect memory really exists.
It's called hyperthymesia.
But contrary to what it may seem, being unable to forget things is not an advantage.
Hyperthymesia is a big problem.
Hyperthymesia is not the same as photographic memory, which would be the ability to remember
everything a person sees.
This photographic memory often appears in some movies or books, but has never been proven
by science.
Hyperthymesia is a mental condition that exists and has been proven for several years.
It's very rare and makes people remember basically everything they've done every day since they
were about ten years old.
So if you're over ten and you don't remember every single thing, you don't have that perfect
memory.
And that's actually good news for you.
The inability to forget things is a burden you don't want to carry.
Perfect memories are interesting for a work of fiction or for memory competitions.
But in real life there's not much point in remembering the color of the shirt you were
wearing more than twenty years ago, or in memorizing a string of three hundred numbers.
Of course, the few people who have hyperthymesia end up taking advantage of this rare condition.
A famous case is that of Brad Williams, who used his perfect memory to win awards on television
quiz shows.
His story even became a documentary and attracted a lot of attention.
Leaving some exceptions aside, the truth is that remembering everything that happened
can end up becoming a burden.
Imagine yourself remembering every shame you went through, every mistake you made, every
sad situation you had to face.
It is as if the past is always present.
Studies in people with hyperthymesia have shown that perfect memory brings negative
consequences such as compulsive behaviors, germophobia, extreme need for organization
and other problems.
None of these people have been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but studies
suggest that the two conditions have common mechanisms in the same parts of the brain.
These same studies have also shown that, for some things, the memory of people with hyperthymesia
fails just like the memory of ordinary people like you and me.
They can remember dates, names, and long-term data, but they also forget what they had for
dinner yesterday or something they saw in the newspaper last week.
In addition, they also have false memories when they need to reconstruct scenes from
the past.
This proves that those perfect memories of the movie's super detective only exist in
fiction.
You don't want to remember everything.
You just want to retrieve the right information at the right time.
Having a memory that is unable to forget things can be very bad.
But having a good memory, being able to remember the right things at the right time, can make
a big difference in your life.
If you're a student, having a good memory helps you learn subjects, pass exams, get
good grades.
If you're looking for work, having a good memory helps you do good job interviews and
excel in exams to qualify for certain types of technical work.
If you are already in the job market, having a good memory helps in the technical part,
because you remember the guidelines and information of work, and also in the social part, since
you remember people's names, birthdays, even of everyone's preferences.
If you weren't born with hyperthymesia or any other natural memory condition, can you
improve your memory skills?
Can someone born with a bad memory increase their ability to remember things?
Science has already shown that remembering things is a skill.
And like any skill, memory can be trained, your intelligence can be trained.
The more you train yourself to remember things, the stronger your memory becomes.
The thing is, you can't train doing random things without a good plan.
There are many memorization techniques you can practice to get your brain used to retrieving
the right information at the right time.
Spaced repetition, Loci Method, mnemonics… the techniques are many and you can choose
the one that best adapts to any situation.
But behind all these techniques is a fundamental concept that you need to grasp if you really
want to improve your memory: the concept of the forgetting curve.
Our brain was made to forget.
If you want to remember, you have to go against the natural tendency of the mind.
We like to think of the brain as a memory machine, as a place where our memories are
stored.
But the reality is that the brain is more of a forgetting machine than a remembering
machine.
As studies of people with hyperthymesia show, remembering absolutely unimportant details
is useless and tiresome.
In normal people, the brain purposely forgets old and unimportant information to stay healthy,
storing only recent and important information in the memory.
Hermann Ebbinghaus called this concept the forgetting curve, which shows the decline
of memory over time for low-impact information.
For example, you may remember the clothes you wore yesterday.
Even if this information is not very relevant, it is still very recent, so you can remember.
But it's highly unlikely that you'll remember the outfit you wore on any given day last
year.
As it was irrelevant information, your brain forgot it over time.
Now, if you've had a very impactful day, like the day you got married, or the day your child
was born, or the day you got a job you really wanted, maybe you remember the clothes you
were wearing.
Even though these events happened many years ago.
This is because as the information was relevant, the brain did not forget it even over time.
When you assimilate the concept of the forgetting curve, you can see what lies behind the most
famous and efficient memorization techniques.
All of them will mess with these two variables: time and relevance.
In spaced repetition, for example, the idea is that you do periodic reviews so that your
memory is refreshed whenever your brain is starting to forget.
It basically messes with the time variable.
In the Method of Loci, you associate memories with places that have some relevance in your
mind, a place you know well.
It basically deals with the relevance variable.
So you don't have to be born with a perfect memory to be able to remember the important
things.
You just need to train with technique and good guidance to know how to manipulate time
and relevance variables and thus be able to retrieve any information exactly when you
need it.
Having a perfect memory may seem like an advantage, but people with hyperthymesia in real life
prove that remembering everything is more of a burden.
You don't want to remember everything, you just want to retrieve the right information
at the right time.
To do this, you don't have to be born with a perfect memory.
You just need to train your memory the same way you train any other skill you want to
improve.
In the Arata Academy Intelligence course, we will learn together the techniques you
can use to train your memory to remember any information you want to retrieve.
You can attend a special training class right now, just access https://arata.se/intelligence