I just want to remember where i left my car keys

[Ron Caliburn]

By Dinesh Ramde, The Associated Press


LA CROSSE, Wis. - For as long as he can remember, Brad Williams has been able to recall the most trifling dates and details about his life.


For example, he can tell you it was Aug. 18, 1965, when his family stopped at Red Barn Hamburger during a road trip through Michigan. He was eight years old at the time and he had a burger, of course.


"It was a Wednesday," recalled Williams, now 51. "We stayed at a motel that night in Clare, Michigan. It seemed more like a cabin."


To Williams and his family, his ability to recall events - and especially dates - is a regular source of amusement.


But, according to one expert, Williams' skill might rank his memory among the best in the world. Doctors are now studying him, and a woman with similar talents, hoping to achieve a deeper understanding of memory.


Williams, a radio anchor in La Crosse, seems to enjoy having his memory tested. Name a date from the last 40 years and, after a few moments, he can typically tell you what he did that day and what was in the news.


How about Nov. 7, 1991?


"Let's see," he mused, gazing into the distance for about five seconds. "That would be around when Magic Johnson announced he had HIV. Yes, a Thursday. There was a big snowstorm here the week before."


He went on to identify correctly some 20 other events including the birth of the first test-tube baby in 1978, the toxic-gas leak in Bhopal, India, in 1984, and Billie Jean King's victory over Bobby Riggs in tennis' "Battle of the Sexes" in 1973.


"I've always been this way," Williams said. "Growing up, I never really had reason to think I wasn't like everyone else."


So how does he do it?


"You want the Nobel Prize right now? Tell me that answer and I'll publish it," said Dr. James McGaugh, who has studied Williams since last summer. "We don't know.


"We do know that he carries this information with him, that it's detailed, that it's just there. That's what we want to know - why is it there?"


Williams' brother first contacted McGaugh, a research professor at the University of California, Irvine, after the neurobiologist published a case study of a similar person in the journal Neurocase in 2006.


That woman is in her mid-40s and was identified only by the initials A.J.


She told McGaugh whenever she hears a date, memories from that date in previous years flood her mind like a running movie. The phenomenon, she laments, is "nonstop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting."


"Most have called it a gift, but I call it a burden," she wrote. "I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!"

McGaugh and his colleagues subjected A.J. to a battery of psychological tests. Given a date at random, she was nearly flawless in recalling the day of the week and what she did that day.

The details she provided invariably matched what she had written in diaries decades earlier.

Scientific literature documents people who could memorize a series of 50 to 100 random letters or digits. Another person read a 330-word story twice, then reproduced it nearly verbatim a year later.

But those research subjects remembered meaningless information.

What distinguishes Williams and A.J. is their "superior autobiographical memory" - an above-average ability to remember dates and details from their distant past, McGaugh said.

"In subjects we regard as having this ability, they do better than 90 per cent on the tests we provide," McGaugh said.

The tests typically involve reproducing personal information that can be corroborated with old scrapbooks, yearbooks and diaries, sources that McGaugh often tries to obtain from family members without the subjects' knowledge.

Other tests involve naming a notable public event and asking for its date, or vice versa.

Williams and A.J. both performed better on topics that interested them.

Williams excels at pop-culture trivia such as Academy Award winners, but he stumbles on sports.

A lifelong bachelor and self-described Scrabble addict, he finished second when he appeared on "Jeopardy!" in 1990. He says he went 5-for-5 on "1984 movies" but tripped up on categories including "snakes" and "words that begin with 'kh'."

Because a person's interest in the information is a key factor in recall ability, some researchers doubt that Williams and A.J. are unique.

"If it's a truly amazing memory that just sucks things up, it shouldn't be based on how interesting something was to you," said Stephen Christman, a neuropsychologist at the University of Toledo in Ohio.

Christman, who wasn't involved in the research, pointed to baseball fanatics who remember obscure statistics because of their passion for the game.

Perhaps, he speculated, A.J. obsesses so much over past events and relives them so frequently in her mind that it's now effortless for her to recall countless dates and events.

[Kolya]

I am the exact opposite.

I remember all the details except when.

I seem to go through periods of severe memory decay.

Weird.

[Ethan Skinner]

Do these guys have latent psychic abilities, or what?

[Ron Caliburn]

Something going on anyway.

[KonThaak]

That guy there at the end says that memory shouldn't be affected by how interesting it is to you, but the truth of the matter is, if it isn't interesting to you, you don't pay attention to it. If you don't pay attention to it, it's a teency bit hard to remember it, I would think. I mean, when I don't pay attention to stuff, I don't even tend to notice it's there, let alone remember it later.

Like when Lex put a different wig on one of her dolls... I don't normally look at the dolls, 'cuz they're not usually in my line of sight when I walk into the bedroom, and since she's pregnant, she doesn't change them around that often. It would therefore be very difficult for me to "remember" that one of her dolls changed hair colors, when I wasn't interested enough to look at them in the first place.

Might as well ask these two to remember events on dates that pre-date their own birth!

[Ethan Skinner]

That guy there at the end says that memory shouldn't be affected by how interesting it is to you, but the truth of the matter is, if it isn't interesting to you, you don't pay attention to it.

(SNIP)

Might as well ask these two to remember events on dates that pre-date their own birth!

I read somewhere that the mind is a phenominal computer that puts anything we have, anything the government has, and anything the aliens have, to shame. I also remember reading somewhere that the mind can recall everything it comes across, if stimulated properly, no matter how breif that occurrence was.

Stimulated my psychic energy, perhaps.

But KonThaak... that last sentence of yours gets me thinking...