Hyper electronic ‘mnemonic’* for hypermnesia**
This morning I used the power of an Internet search engine, a Russian one, to recall the name of a condition where the sufferer is able to bring back to their mind everything that happened in their life.
The article I retrieved, entitled ‘Rebecca Sharrock has an extremely rare condition called Superior Autobiographical Memory. It means she can recall her entire life in extraordinary detail.’, provided some very interesting information about this condition, also known as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM).
For instance, that the sufferer did not do especially well at school and that the condition causes her suffering because she can relive pain as a result of her ability to recall vivid memories: ‘When she remembers childhood injuries, she physically feels the pain all over again.’
This article is a must read, which is why I have archived it at Archive.is: http://archive.is/nF4Le and I have checked its availability on the Internet Archive's Way back machine.
A further search on Yandex with the key word ‘hypermnesia’ yielded an interesting ‘snippet’ from the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Hypermnesia: Enhancement of memory
function (hypermnesia) under hypnosis and in some pathological states
was frequently described by 19th-century medical writers; for example,
cases were recorded of delirious people who would speak
fluently in a language they had not had occasion to use for up to…"
[my emphasis]
https://www.britannica.com/science/hypermnesia
This is because I had been looking up information about a similar condition, known as the acquired savant syndrome, exactly a week ago – more on this in a future entry or weblog post.
Although search engines are said to be having a deleterious effect on the short-term memory abilities of humans (because people no longer make the effort to remember the type of information they can easily retrieve from the Internet), I do really relish the ability at our disposal (with only a few keystrokes) to retrieve from cyber space information which my brain cannot remember, as I tend to subsequently file the information I have retrieved, which in turn helps me to memorise it. ;-)
* From the Medieval Latin word mnemonicus, itself from the Greek word mnēmonikos from mnēmōn, mnēmon- mindful, from mna- base of mnasthai remember; it means ‘easy to remember’.
** Hypermnesia, from the Greek word mnēsis (which means memory), is the unusual power of memory
