While the average person can list no more than ten events for any given year of life, people living with H.S.A.M. The sixty or so members of our species whose brains are not sieves have their own diagnosis: highly superior autobiographical memory, or hyperthymesia. “You can be 100 percent confident in your vivid memory,” Genova writes, “and still be 100 percent wrong.”įorgetfulness is our “default setting,” and that’s a good thing. It is sobering to realize that three out of four prisoners who are later exonerated through DNA evidence were initially convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony.

A dream, a suggestion, and even the mere passage of time can warp a memory. The fragments of experience that do get encoded into long-term memory are then subject to “creative editing.” To remember an event is to reimagine it in the reimagining, we inadvertently introduce new information, often colored by our current emotional state. In “ Remember,” an engrossing survey of the latest research, Lisa Genova explains that a healthy brain quickly forgets most of what passes into conscious awareness. Any study of memory is, in the main, a study of its frailty.

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