Some of us are tortured by our memory, others imagine things that never happened or can barely remember anything. When Rebecca Sharrock was 13 years old, she pulverised her two front teeth. She had been riding on a scooter from her friend’s house when the little rubber wheel hit a pebble, throwing her off.
“I felt my two front teeth shatter and my lip split,” the writer tells The Weekly, shuddering. “When I came home, I looked in the mirror and saw that my teeth were like jagged rocks. I screamed, and not just from the pain, but from thinking what I would look like from now on.”
Most of us would probably remember, in more detail than usual, a traumatic event such as this. What we would not recall is every second of that day – and many before, and thereafter – from the way the sun was shining brightly, to the TV show we were watching, to what we had for breakfast. It’s unlikely we’d remember the exact details of the conversation we had with our friend before going home, and what we talked to our parents about later.
Rebecca does. What’s more, every time she remembers, she actively relives it.
“The tooth pain is coming back,” she tells me, her palm cradling her mouth. I stop asking her about it – I can see she is a little agitated.
Living with highly superior memory
Rebecca is one of only 60 people in the world with a highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), also known as hyperthymesia. She has the extraordinary ability to recall personal events and experiences over a lifetime, from every school lesson to dinner she’s ever had, and the time she had it. Rebecca has also memorised every single word of all seven Harry Potter books, and has taught herself to read and speak in near-fluent French, Spanish and Italian. She is now knee-deep in learning Chinese.
“We actually looked at this experimentally and tested her,” says memory researcher and one of Rebecca’s doctors, Professor Gail Robinson from the Queensland Brain Institute. “We asked her for, or gave her, examples from Harry Potter books, looked at her reaction times and accuracy, and compared this to 10 other self-confessed Harry Potter fans.”
Rebecca blew everyone out of the water. Yet, while Rebecca’s autobiographical memory is incredible, Professor Robinson stresses that when tested on other types of memory, such as semantic memory (which involves the capacity to recall words, concepts or numbers and which is essential for the use and understanding of language) Rebecca is not unique.
“When we conducted a neuro-psychological assessment of Rebecca’s cognitive skills, which looks at memory as well as … language, general intelligence, attention, visual perception and executive function, she was in the average range,” she says.
Rebecca’s brain, and the parts involved in memory-making and learning, such as the hippocampus and amygdala, are no different to those with regular memory.
“We’ve analysed the volume of tissue in her hippocampus and amygdala, and there was nothing different about them,” Professor Robinson says. “We suspect she may have stronger connectivity between different parts of her brain, but that’s much trickier to measure.”
So what exactly is going on in Rebecca’s brain? And what can we learn from this extraordinary example about memory – and what it means for the rest of us?
Our memories can lie
Memory is a tricky beast to pin down. There are so many ways to understand it and the function it plays in our lives that even experts find it hard to explain.
In its simplest form, memory is the continued process of information retention over time. It allows us to recall and make use of past events to frame our understanding of the present, and to anticipate the future. Memory is what teaches us, and what allows us to make progress.
“Memory is a rather enigmatic process of the brain, but can broadly be grouped as short-term or long-term memory,” says Dr Steve Kassem, a researcher at Neuroscience Research Australia.
“Long-term memory is more permanent and vague: Like the memory you have to ride a bike, the memory of how public transport works, or even certain smells you unwittingly associate with certain feelings or modes of life.”
Short-term memory, on the other hand, is more relevant to the now, he explains. “What task did I just do? How is that needed for the next task? It’s remembering people’s names at a party. Short-term memory is also more resource-intensive on the brain than long-term memory, which is sort of a ‘lazy’ one which does not need to actively remember too much.”
While we like to think of memories as a detailed recording of past events, our memory is more like a highlight reel – a blend of emotions and sensory information rather than exact replicas. By the time we recall an event, much of what we observed has already been filtered out – and filtered in.
Why your memory isn’t always accurate
“I remember being baffled by this idea that what we remember about our pasts is likely to be a mix of things that happened, but also things that we’ve heard, information we’ve seen on the news, and even activities we knew of but had not participated in ourselves,” says Eryn Newman, Associate Professor in Psychology at the Australian National University (ANU).
This realisation that memory doesn’t always serve an accuracy function, as we tend to think of it in the Western world, but is porous and influenced by the world around us, led Professor Newman to study false memories.
“Why would you have a memory system that can change? Why would we want one that is flexible?” she muses. Broadly speaking, false memories range from remembering an event quite accurately, but with some error inserted into the detailed narrative, to dramatic shifts from reality, where people remember entire events which didn’t occur.
False memories are fascinating. And they often carry negative connotations of lying and deliberate manipulation. Some famous examples of false memory include former US President George W. Bush claiming he saw the first plane hit the World Trade Center on TV before entering a classroom (there was no live broadcast of the first crash); and Harvey Weinstein using “false memories” as a defence against the women who accused him of sexual assault, arguing the assaults simply did not happen.
Professor Newman says that, in the criminal justice system:
“We may treat [memory] much like forensic evidence, expecting it meets certain standards – that it is accurate and reliable. Yet when you look at the science of human memory, it’s not a recording – some scientists suggest it’s more like a Wikipedia page that you can edit, as can I.”
Memory also helps us to tell stories. Consciously or not, people often tune a story to fit their audience, adding or taking away details that will help in its retelling, she adds.
“My younger sister still shares her own memories of feeding Lucy the lamb, a family pet,” Professor Newman laughs. “And every time, my parents tell her she didn’t have the capacity to feed the lamb because she was only six months old. Yet, she tells it with such richness and detail, it’s like she really did it!”
Museums of memory
Memory researcher and author Lynne Kelly, who studies Indigenous, mostly oral cultures and the way they remember information, says the spread of literacy in the last few hundred years has messed up humanity’s biologically encoded ways to memorise information.
“Indigenous Australians, for example, associate information with physical locations of the landscape – each location will have a story and also a song attached to it,” she says. “They use art, stories, music and physical places to remember the most extraordinary amount of information about animals, plants and country, which remains accurate thousands of years later.”
In her new book, The Knowledge Gene, Lynne explores a version of the NF1 gene, which shows that humans are biologically encoded to use music, art, story and their connection to place to store vast amounts of information. She also looks at the strength of mnemonic devices (a learning technique that uses a pattern of letters, ideas, or associations to assist memory recall).
“Literacy has sidelined music, art and performance to hobbies or to entertainment – yet they are at the heart of learning for Indigenous cultures. Given that humans have lived in oral cultures for the vast majority of their evolutionary existence, our brains have evolved to efficiently store knowledge without using writing.”
For Fiona Denmark, 47, acquiring knowledge through reading is impossible. Born legally blind in Broken Hill, an outback town in far west New South Wales, she did not have access to specialist care on a regular basis and had to find her own ways to cope.
“I had to learn to be resourceful pretty quickly,” she explains. While Fiona was not taught Braille, she did learn how to touch type, which helped her find work with the Victorian Government, as well as become a keynote speaker and disability advocate.
“If someone asks me how I know which keys to type, I have to think about what I press, because it has become muscle memory,” she says. “I type my speeches, and a program reads it back to me – I then have to memorise it,” Fiona says.
“Being blind means you don’t have that reference of power points, can’t look back at the notes you’ve written, so stuff just sticks in my head.”
Can we train our memories?
Anastasia Woolmer was the first woman to become Australian Memory Champion and has now held the title twice. Her memory skills have broken records, and she now works as a memory coach, but Anastasia didn’t always have dynamite recall skills.
When the former ballerina turned finance professional found herself between jobs after having kids, she came across the book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, which chronicles the efforts of author Joshua Foer to improve his memory under the tutelage of top “mental athletes”.
“After I read it, I researched these athletes and started to do the training myself,” Anastasia recalls. She plotted her results in an Excel spreadsheet, comparing her scores against other Australians. Within a few months, she realised she was up there with the best.
“The competitive beast in me came out, and I worked daily to see if I could get my scores to a winning level,” Anastasia laughs. “And in 2016, I won the Australian Memory Championships.”
Like Lynne, she discovered that associations with pictures, music and stories were key to remembering everything.
“Our memories for visual information are really good. If someone described a story that was interesting, you’d remember it far more easily than if you’d read it.”
One popular memory training technique is a “memory palace”, an imaginary location where you can store mnemonic images. The most common type of memory palace involves making a journey through a place you know well, like your house or town.
During our chat, Anastasia put me through this exercise, asking me to imagine my apartment and associate a grocery item with each room. I imagined squishing a cucumber onto the front door, seeing the juices flow down, then throwing two oranges at a favourite painting hanging in the hallway. On we went until I easily remembered 10 items, which I could even recite backwards 20 minutes after the conversation.
Memory is who we are
So what does all this mean? In a world where literacy dominates the arts, and digital technology is slowly replacing the human beings who once served as our common memory, we might have to start rethinking the role of memory in our lives – and whether it is worth preserving.
Studies show the internet messes with our ability to store facts; people who have access to search engines remember fewer facts and less information because they know they can rely on Google to fill in the gaps.
Memory, as we have seen, is like a muscle that can be trained. Memory enables us to learn, to preserve culture and to communicate. It helps us take care of ourselves and others, and to prepare for the future.
“Memory is who we are. Without it, we don’t have a link to our concept of self,” says ANU memory researcher Dr Paul Marshall. “By externalising our memories to technology, we also lose part of who we are as a society, as a people.”
Of course, there is a fine line. For people like Rebecca, who remember everything, no matter how trivial, memory is as often a burden as it is a gift.
“I wish I could let go of the negative memories because I don’t just remember them, I relive them over and over again,” she says. She goes to sleep with classical music to drown out the never-ending film that is her life; she meditates to try to stay in the now.
Yet, Rebecca stresses that while she relives painful events, she equally relives the good ones. Her sense of smell is so advanced she can mix oils to make her favourite scents, such as gingerbread and Turkish delight, and when eating something she doesn’t like the taste of, her brain can easily conjure a delicious meal to override it.
So would she change any of it? “No,” Rebecca laughs. “It’s who I am.”
You can learn more about Rebecca’s life in her book, My Life is a Puzzle.
Australian Memory Champion Anastasia Woolmer’s top tips to keep memory strong
First steps to strengthen memory
- Exercise regularly
- Sleep well
- Eat a healthy, balanced diet
- Take care of your mental health
Then try to learn something new every week
- Take a different path on your regular commute or walk.
- Visit a different shopping centre.
- Brush your teeth with the other hand.
- Challenge yourself to learn a new word in a different language every day.
- Learn a new game (it could be a card game or a board game or outdoor play), then teach it to someone else.
- Use the memory palace technique to remember all kinds of complicated facts, names and places.
This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue.
