 Thank you all for coming here. I don't know how to give a formal talk of presentation, so I do my best to be formal, but we are very honored to have Dr. MacGuff here. He is, I call him, the father of member consolidation. He did his PhD in psychology for Minouza Berkley, a postdoc with Daniel Bowett in Nobel Laureate from Rome, and then later on he moved to University of California, Irvine to fund a Center for Memory and Neurobiology when he was 32 years old. That was the first Center on its own in the world actually, and after that from 1982 for 22 years he founded the Center for Learning and Memory in New York, California, Irvine. Dr. MacGuff is a member of National Academy of Art and Science in the US and also a member of National Science in Brazil and Mexico. He has been for 57 years an active scientist. During that time he published 560 papers, so based on calculation he published one paper per month. Again, as I said, he's the father of member consolidation, but also he's the first one who started a very rare almost science fiction people that they have highly superior memory, so we are glad to hear his new research on this subject. Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much. I thank you for coming today and I thank the people who are responsible for bringing me here today and I have an opportunity to tell some of you the story for the first time and some of you you're going to get a bit of a story that you've already heard a couple days ago and I'm not going to apologize because repetition is very good for memory and so if you hear part of the same story twice it's even better and so don't say oh he said that before I know all about it it's just good for you so it's like taking medicine you don't like it makes you healthy and well and that's what I'm trying to do here. So you see the title up there that's what I want to talk about that's not how I got started in life. I got started in life by investigating the neurochemistry of memory and in order to do that I started investigating the influence of drugs on memory, stimulant drugs and that got me into studies of memory and got me into studies of what's going on in the nervous system and as you'll see my story segued from that into more the neurobiology of memory particularly the conditions that create strong memory. So here's a very important question that was proposed by the most famous psychology in our history and that was William James at Harvard University and he said why do we remember so little? That is we have experiences all the time and yet we remember little of all the experiences that we do have why is that? And the other question that he raised is despite the fact that we remember so little why do some of our experiences leave lasting memories? So this was a question that he proposed in 1890 in his very famous book and with my youth and an experience many years ago I decided to tackle these questions. Assuming that I had the honor of pursuing a question was raised by the famous psychologist, philosopher William James. Now the clue to an answer to both of these questions that were raised by William James comes from Francis Bacon in 1620 and I want us to think about it for a second. He said memory is assisted by anything that makes an impression on a powerful passion inspiring fear for example or wonder shame or joy. Now there are two assumptions in here one is that memory is weak to begin with because it says memory is assisted memory can only be assisted if it's not very strong. So it takes care of it responds to an issue that William James raised previously but it suggests that that the passion or will substitute emotional arousal plays some role in providing an opportunity for some memories that would otherwise be weak to become strong. So there are two things in this that speak to the William James concern or questions that he raised. So what does it mean to say that passion powerful passion well I interpret that to mean emotional arousal and the physiological consequences of emotional arousal which leads to activation of the brain and then you follow the pathway down on one side you get release of epinephrine from the adrenal medulla and on the other side you get to release the the synthesis and subsequent release of cortisol from the adrenal cortex and both of these go into the bloodstream and it's something over which you have no control at all. So if you are excited right now if you should get excited about something the adrenaline will increase and you start the synthesis of cortisol a half an hour later both of them will be high and you have no control over that. This is an automatic physiological response to the conditions that you are exposed to in life it just goes on. Now the question is is Bacon right that turning on these physiological responses have something to do with the creation of a strong memory. That was his assertion back in 1620. I've just translated into physiological terms so let's take a look. So to investigate this many years ago I started using this task right now which I call inhibitory avoidance. It's a very simple task. Remember I'm interested in the strong experience strong memories of a unique experience that's what I'm interested in. So in order to do that I have to have a unique experience. So I take a rat that has been living in a cage doing nothing but I suppose using its imagination or whatever for approximately two months I take it out of the cage bring it in here and put it in the white part of the apparatus which I can't see and you can right here. So the rat is just sitting there we open a door a door slides down and the rat can explore and go out into the other part of the apparatus when it meets reach the middle part of the gray region that's a metal metal floor when it reaches there gets a mild electrical shock to its feet. That is it that is the experiment. Walk through get a shock to its feet we take the animal out the next day put the animal back in the white area and simply ask would you like to go back into the other region and we measure the time that the animal spins in the starting chamber before it goes back in and we determined that if an animal has no memory the animal will walk right through if the animal has good memory the animal will stay out for a minute or two minutes or even ten minutes depending upon the condition and demonstrate that it remembers what happened the previous day. So here's an experiment to investigate the influence of a hormone that we released to ourselves when we got excited and in this case we gave it to the rat and an amount which would be equivalent to that that is produced by a very high foot shock but the animal gets a low foot shock we just give it a big dose of adrenaline or epinephrine. So their controls are shown on the left in the white and these controls stayed out when put back in for about a minute first day they walked through in about five or ten seconds the next day they say out for a minute and we infer that they stay out because they remember having been in and receive the shock we have controls we use to make sure that is the case. Now the question is what happens if we give immediately after the training trial at a time that the animal would release epinephrine to itself if it were a high foot shock but if we supply the epinephrine will the animal remember better. Think about yourself if I were to give you if I were to say something very exciting to you right now frightening for example would you remember what happened more than if I didn't do that well this is like the rat except we supply the excitement directly with the needle and we give a lot of epinephrine we see what happens well what happens is those animals don't go back in for four minutes got the same training the only thing only difference was that immediately after training they got a dose of epinephrine that's all that happened after the training then we can ask well does it have to be immediately after the training well yes for a big effect because if we delayed the injection the longer the delay of the injection after the learning the less the effect so this is a the first ever but also a clear demonstration that epinephrine enhances the memory of an experience that just occurred and of course that's the way it works works in real life you don't really release epinephrine before something exciting happens you release it after it happens and so we modeled that in the experiment give it a mildly exciting experience and then have the animal remember it as a terribly exciting experience just by a little dose of epinephrine. Now we decided to look at the place or places in the brain that might be involved in enabling this influence that we had just observed and we chose to look at the amygdala this is many years ago and we chose to look at the amygdala because in other work we had accidentally found that if we stimulated the amygdala electrically after an animal learned something we could enhance memory it was just a pure accidental finding but we said if that's case maybe the amygdala would be a region of the brain which would be important in mediating the influence that we had just seen so we did experiments in which we first implanted animals with a cannula aimed down at the specific region of the amygdala the basolateral region a subdivision of the amygdala and the cannula is sitting there so that when we trained the animal immediately after we trained the animal we could inject the basolateral amygdala with a little bit in this case not of epinephrine but norepinephrine because epinephrine doesn't pass the blood-brain barrier but we knew that epinephrine turns on the release of norepinephrine so we said the candidate here might be norepinephrine in the amygdala so we did that experiment and here is the result first we replicated the earlier experiment these are animals that stayed out for almost two minutes that's the white bar there in their memory and now we see what happens once again with epinephrine huge enhancement of memory given by a post-training injection of epinephrine now another group was given a very low dose of the beta adrenergic antagonist that is a blocker of epinephrine and norepinephrine a very low dose and that didn't do anything this injection is into the amygdala into the amygdala but what happens with that dose injected into the amygdala when we gave epinephrine in the periphery the effect was blocked so this gave us our first clue that the the action of peripheral epinephrine in influencing the storage of memory involved in some way this region of the brain the amygdala and so we pursued that in a really a great many experiments so I'm going to show you just to show you the limits of this I'll show you one task which I rather like because it doesn't involve any shock it's much more like our personal experiences of just going through daily life so here is a rat going through daily life goes in a box and there are two objects that look just alike and we study what the animal does in there and it turns out the animals explore the objects but they spend equal amounts of time on the two object boring I mean what could be less exciting than to be locked into a box with two light bulbs right so on the next day we put them in the box and it has one of the same kind of objects and another object is different and we ask where does the animal spend its time the animal spends its time on the object it is not seen before so it's a very nice test of memory that's built on the rat's curiosity that's clearly it's a memory test of what other interpretation there could there be that the animal selects the object it hasn't seen there's no shock in here at all now we ask the question can we make a strong memory of this event where there is very little emotional arousal involved can we turn it on so we gave a training with very minimal experience in the box on the first day and you can see that over here it was so little that there isn't any significant evidence of memory however if we followed that exposure with the dose of norepinephrine in the amygdala then we had huge enhancement of memory that was dose dependent enhanced memory of something as boring as looking at objects so we could make a strong memory of something which by itself did not elicit strong emotion simply by this kind of injection procedure and on the other side you see that we can block the memory over here by injections of perpranolol so here's good memory and poor retention if we put into the basal lateral amygdala we'll put some perpranolol so the the learning itself does not have to be exciting the learning can be pretty boring and we can turn a memory of a boring experience into a very strong memory by manipulating the system which ordinarily regulates the strength of memory for exciting experiences we can gain experimental control over that and that gives us an increased evidence that this region of the brain is in control of regulating how strong our memories will be of various experiences that we have now all of this presumes that norepinephrine is in fact released in the amygdala I mean up until now what I've shown you is that we can we can influence by injecting it but what about the normal release well let's take a look at this this is the the release norepinephrine release in this region of the brain that we measure using high-performance liquid chromatography what we do is we put a probe down in there and that probe samples the solution which is being released within this region of the brain we analyze that for norepinephrine so if you look at the look at what's going on here these are resting conditions these are individual animals that are just resting and you can see this is the base level here and at this point they get trained in the inhibitory avoidance task they're put in and they get a shock and then what you see is the increase in the release of norepinephrine induced by that at various times afterwards and these are all individual animals so here's an animal with a huge increase in norepinephrine in the amygdala and here in between in between and here's an animal that should know hardly any increase at all so there's wide variability and now we can ask the question does what does that have to do with memory and to answer that what you do is to look at the numbers up there the numbers are the latency to re-enter the place in the box where they had received the shock so the animal that has the highest release of norepinephrine never went back to the place where it received the shock never was set out for 10 minutes and that's when we stop measuring that's not when I stop measuring that's when the graduate students in postdoc stop measuring because they're bored watching animals do nothing if you look at the lowest here this animal walk through in 10 seconds and what you see then is a relationship between the amount of norepinephrine released and the retention for performance tested the next day the more norepinephrine is released the less likely are they are to go back where they got the shock so yes norepinephrine is released under emotionally exciting experiences number one and two it predicts retention behavior does both of those things now we we think as I have been implying all along with the examples I've given you we think that this applies to humans as well this is not just rat work but it's using rat work to get some principles which we think will apply to us as well so we've tried to figure out some experiments that we could do which would relate to this issue or maybe even support the conclusions that where I'm trying to explain to you and so I'll show you just a couple of these to illustrate the principle here's one experiment so we we told human subjects a story and I'm showing you right here the memory for different phases of the story here's the story it goes like this and for everything I say there is a picture that illustrates it so in a boy and a mother leave their house there's a picture they cross the street picture they see a car that has damage picture so on they go to the hospital and they see it's a disaster prepared in a stay and so they see people wrapped up as though they've had injuries and then the mother makes a telephone call and goes home picture picture picture and we test them then two weeks later for their memory of these pictures and what you see is there are three phases of the story the beginning the middle and the end and they remember all of it equally well another group saw the same pictures but with a different story boy and a mother leave home they cross the street the boy is hit by a car rushed to the hospital surgeons work frantically to save his life a distraught mother makes a telephone call and goes home same pictures and then two weeks later they are tested for memory of the picture and that's what their memory is in red up there and the middle of part of the story is the emotional part of the story and that's what they remember so emotional arousal increases the memory in the human subjects for this period so then we did the same thing and we said what if we give propranolol that is a beta adrenergic blocking agent to the human subjects who are in this experiment so here is the percent correct on the left for the neutral story in subjects and on the right is the percent correct for the arousal story this is a replication of our earlier finding if they got the arousal story they remember better what happens if they're given propranolol it does nothing to the neutral story but it blocks the enhancement that is induced by the exciting story so we can turn a memory of an exciting event into an average memory rather than a strong memory simply by giving propranolol which blocks beta adrenergic activation so the data although there are different kinds of experiments the results are the same we also did experiments in which we trained human subjects and injected them with epinephrine and we got facilitation as we did with the rats we had to stop those experiments because the human subjects committee required that we tell our potential subjects you must understand that there is a very slight possibility that this injection may kill you and so we had to stop those it's not going to kill them but that's what they said we had to do so we quit those experiments and we learned from pharmacologists from the cardiologists we learned that you can also increase epinephrine release by putting your hand in a bucket of ice water they do that routinely to check cardiovascular conditions so some of our experiments involved training human subjects on material to be learned and then having them immerse their hand in a bucket of ice water afterwards and believe it or not that enhanced memory so there was a rumor on the Irvine campus that undergraduate students were going to buy buckets of ice to take to class this is another study done by Larry Cahill my former student in which they simply showed emotional pictures to human subjects that's all they did they looked at emotionally arousing pictures and then afterwards they got samples of saliva so that they could measure alpha amylase which is an indirect measure of norepinephrine release and what you're looking at is the correlation between a cell salivary alpha amylase that's measured immediately after learning and retention as that was assessed one week later and as you can see there's a pretty good relationship it's not perfect but the correlation is plus seven two which is not bad it says that the alpha amylase measure is a predictor of retention of memory assessed one week later and of course the findings are consistent with the animal research even though there are different kinds of experiments and then finally on this series we also did pet imaging to assess the effect of emotional arousal and in this condition we injected subjects with a radiolabel glucose and then we put them in a room and had them watch some emotionally arousing film clips and then we put them in a scanner and a pet scanner and measured the activation of the vengdala and and oops I don't show that the vengdala gets activated when that's done and they got a surprise memory test three weeks later and you're looking at the relationship between the pet score which is at the bottom and the number of films recalled which is going up the side there and the correlation is plus point nine three it says we can predict performance on the memory test several weeks after subjects are exposed to these movies simply by looking at the pet image scores very very strong predictor extremely strong predictor so here's a cartoon which summarizes this part of the talk of what we think we have found you have a learning experience and this learning experience is going to activate the storage processes going on and a lot of different brain regions that stores that underlies the representation of the memories that are initiated by the learning experience at the same time it's going to initiate contact with all of those regions the brain is going to turn on the basolateral amygdala and it's going to turn off the adrenal glands for both cortisol and for from epinephrine if those are turned on those are modulatory influences coming from the basolateral middle amygdala and the adrenal gland and those modulatory influence will come up and influence the storage that's taking place in other regions of the brain where the memory is being processed so that's our interpretation of the influence of epinephrine cortisol and the involvement of the basolateral amygdala because they work through that and that's the way we look at it now back to earlier thinking I showed you what Bacon had to say about this thirty years later Descartes said the usefulness of all of the passion consistencies in their strengthening and prolonging in the soul thoughts which are good for it to conserve so the importance of emotional excitement consists in its strengthening memories which are good to conserve and he knew that in 1650 and I did not know that when we started this research and matter of fact I'm embarrassed about it because I should have known what philosophers thought about this and what I did was simply work on a problem that they drawn a conclusion to a long time ago they said memories are good for you make strong memories if you may have an emotional excitement that's what both of them said and all I did was to get some data which support that in the rat and the human and provides them additional information about what it means to get excited it's emotional arousal and to release of cortisol and epinephrine and it influences a particular region of the brain which is the basolateral amygdala which is in communication with all of the rest of the brain so I think we provided a little bit of information that was not available to Bacon and Descartes now I'm going to turn to the second part of this talk and I would like to say that it fits beautifully with everything that I've already said I can't say that because I don't know whether it does or not but I'm going to tell you about it anyway it's happened this way 16 years ago a woman sent me an email and she said I have a memory problem and I want to see you now what would you think if somebody told you they had a memory problem and say well they're not doing so well well I said this is not a memory clinic I'll direct you to one and she said oh no no it's not that kind of thing she said I don't forget and it was a problem to her because she can remember every bad thing that has ever happened to her in life and it was driving her nuts and she wanted to learn about it I think she wanted me to help her in some way assuming that I was a clinician which I am not so at any rate I agreed to see her and she came and I'm going to tell you about her and as we were investigating her I was claiming this was the first individual in history ever identified to have this ability and I learned that I was wrong because there was a man who was identified in 1870 who claimed to have ability of being able not to forget and he was tested and the results were published in a very obscure journal in 18 a philosophical journal in 1870 I had never even heard of the journal but somebody was kind enough actually not kind enough they sent it to me with a bit of nastiness saying you know you were not the first after all look at this study I found in the literature well I was not offended I thought it was wonderful to have something to refer to so here is Daniel McCartney age 54 tested in June of 1870 this person found the individual and decided to test him now he was tested many many many questions many questions and I've just selected a few here just to illustrate the point and I want to draw your attention to two things one is when asked a question is gave you details about what happened on a particular day and he responded very quickly two second latency between the question the response so he was asked he was asked October 8th 1828 and in two seconds he said it was Wednesday it was cloudy and drizzled rain I cared dinner to my father where he was getting out cold two seconds all right he claims that he remembered that here's another one February 22nd 1829 the next year to answer in two seconds Saturday was cloudy in the morning and clear in the afternoon there was a little snow on the ground an uncle who lived near us sold a horse beast that day for $35 so that was 41 years earlier remembers the day and he remembers something to happen on that day April 4th now this is now a shorter time April 4th 1841 three seconds a long delay three seconds Sunday it was rainy and muddy General Harrison died that day then the next one February February 2nd 1856 it was most awful cold it was the coldest day I ever see in my life he said now I checked the records for Iowa myself I went into the records to see what it was and the temperature records for Iowa indicate that February 4th was the coldest day in 1856 and that's two days away from the day in which he said it was the coldest day and so on now here's what the issue is he responds very quickly and so we assume that he has very good retrieval processes we might assume that he has very good memory but we have no way of validating most of the claims here they sound perfectly reasonable but we need validation if he says that it was cloudy and drizzled rain on October 28th 1828 we can look to see if it rained but we don't know whether his father took something to his father who was digging coal we don't know that so a validation problem we have to take it pretty much at face value but I have to say that I checked several of these things and several of them checked out that is there was another one in which he said it just rained terribly so I checked the rain records for Iowa for that day and I found that that was a rainiest season in a long time in in Iowa so the little checking I did do tended to validate what he said but that is a problem for understanding autobiographical memory you need to be able to validate it in some way if you really think it is really remembering what actually happened and that's the sense in which I'm interested in it all right I didn't know this when this young woman came to see me I didn't know anything about it so I just improvised my own method of examining her I had gotten for Christmas remember this is 2000 the turn of the millennium so I'd gotten a big book that had a day-by-day newspaper clipping clippings of articles of each day of the preceding century so I was able to look at events that occurred in the 1970s 80s and 90s this one was 34 years old so I could go back some years to do some testing and I would just open the book and find something on the book that would have been on CNN or front page newspaper magazine some everybody would know about it everybody would have been exposed to it and I would ask her about it I'll show you a couple of examples here so I asked her name it was Jill Price I asked her there was a plane crash in San Diego tell us about it and her response was well September 25th 1978 and that is of course accurate one of the Gulf War start and she says correctly oops Wednesday January 16th 1901 how many of you heard about the OJ Simpson trial any of you old enough to remember that when the one was the verdict rendered and she said immediately October 3rd 1995 and then so on so I had a large number I'm just giving you some examples so she could tell me the day and the date and she told me very quickly and it was more than that because for every one of these there was a narrative it wasn't a factoid she say oh yeah that Simpson verdict that was terrible because I was sitting with my family and we were so upset about it and it's a story about so she's not she hasn't just remembered that it was October 3rd 1995 she's telling me that she remembered where she was and what was going on the matter of fact she's very loquacious so I had to turn her off while I was testing because she wanted to tell me too much so that's asking for an event and her her response was indicated on the right now we turned around the other way and I gave dates so what happened on August 16th 1977 and she said Elvis Presley died right just like that and her latency is about two seconds the very very similar and so on you can see some of the these things here I tried to pick as you will see events that at least in California West Coast United States everybody would know about now my favorite here is the third one down I asked her what happened actually I asked her what happened on November 7th 1979 because I was looking at a newspaper article and I said November 7th 1979 and I asked her what happened and she said nothing and so I gave her a clue I said international that was the kind of clue I would give and she said well I can't think of anything but she said our our the Iranians took over the US Embassy on November November 4th 1979 I said well you got the right thing but you're off by three days and she said no the book is wrong and then I checked and I found that I was looking at the date that the article was written and down in in the article it gave the true date and she gave me the date on which the Iranians took over our embassy well I got my attention because she could do that so to stretch it a little bit I asked her to give me the dates of the last 22 Easters how many of you can remember the date of the last Easter and the way the year before raise your hand if you remember well she gave me correctly all but one all but one of the dates of the of the last 22 Easters and then she corrected it she made a mistake on one and she corrected it and she also without asking wrote down because I asked her to write it down she wrote down what she was doing on that day not only did she remember and she Jewish so why would she care about Easter anyway interesting so raises a lot of questions we had to ask if the for the for the public events it's very clear she's right or wrong and she was right generally when she wrote down her private events there's no way of knowing whether she was right or wrong so far as autobiographical memory for the most part we have to take her word for it however she kept the diary and so we were able to spot check the diary for a number of her claims and look at it to see if they were correct now what's interesting about that as she had kept diaries and she tied every one of them up to every of the diaries that the diaries each one of them was about that thick and then she was finished with it she would tie it up with a little pink ribbon right and she had a stack of these diaries each one tied with a pink ribbon so we had to dust them off like that to get the dust off the diaries open them up and she claimed that she did something on a particular day we would find a day and check it out and in every case it turned out that we were able to validate her claims of things that had happened to her now she we treated her as AJ because she didn't want to go public and then later on she decided to so we appeared on a radio station public radio and then she appeared on briefly on a couple of television stations and little by little we began to accumulate subjects and by 2010 we had accumulated five very very good subjects and we appeared how many of you have heard of the the US television program 60 minutes have you heard about well on the night that we appeared on that 18 million people watched that program and of those 18 million 600 of them and more sent me an email within 10 minutes after that program claiming that they had the same ability so then we had a potential pool of people but I'm going to tell you about one of the people who was on that television program her name is Louise Owen she is a professional violinist in New York she's a very good violinist but I don't think it's because she has good memory it's because she started playing the violin when she was three years old and her parents are both professional musicians so I think she grew up in a musical environment and the talent as well so here's Louise Owen and I want you to notice the speed of response and and the accuracy of the response I hope you can hear this McGaw says this type of memory is completely new to science so he and his colleagues have had to devise their own tests like this one on public events October 19th 1987 it's a Monday that was the day the big stock market crash and the cellist Jacqueline Dupre died that day the Berlin Wall falls on what day November 9th 1989 which was a Thursday Christopher Reeves accident occurred on what day it was Saturday May 27th 1995 and when were the Oscars held in 1999 1999 Sunday March 21st yes perfect what do you think we deliberately ask about a lot of topics Christopher Reeves we ask about the Berlin Wall we ask about the Oscars we try to cover a range of topics so that we can find out if they really knew what happened and and she knew she knew the other thing is you see how quickly she responded now if if somebody asked me questions like that if I even thought I might know I would look at the ceiling let me see I'll think about that don't you do that somebody asked you a difficult question that I don't know what the ceiling is such a choice but it is well the answer is up there I see it it's on the ceiling shouldn't do that just just very politely and friendly she just gives the answer like that now these are all factoids these are all things that happen that I have a particular date she was interested when the cellist died she knew that she's a musician but she also knew about Christopher Reeves and she knew about everything that we asked there now I think it's on the next one I'll check a second here yeah on on on this one I ask her something which would not be a factoid I ask her about a weather question let's move back in time now to 1990 it rained on several days in January and February can you name the dates on which it rained believe it or not she could let's see it was slightly rainy and cloudy on January 14th 15th it was very hot the weekend of the 27th 28th no rain we check the official weather records it rained very hard on Sunday February 4th and she was right there was 20 years earlier and she could tell me the days on which it rained in New York where she lives 20 years ago and she was absolutely correct on that so it's not just a factoid it's not something which is a a deep interest of hers it just she remembers that and we could validate it so here is a an autobiographical memory the only fault there is that she did she did close her eyes when she was looking it up and I we gave her we took off points for that because we also by luck have discovered some children who have this ability and why is that important it's important because some people may think that they have this ability just because they've acquired the ability as they have aged they've learned more and more about how what to do in order to retain memories they develop some skill learn the skill so we started looking at children because they would not have had either the time or inclination to develop this they're busy growing up so I'll show you some children whose parents claim that they have had this ability ever since they were young children unfortunately we didn't get them until they were about eight years old so they are elderly children for our interests and I'll just let them speak for themselves Osler age 10 what day of the week was Halloween 2011 Monday that one I didn't even have to think about New Year's Day 2010 Friday I remember that because I was up all night at the blues game that's when Jake was six he lives in St. Louis loves sports and he is in most respects a typical ten-year-old what happened related to school on January 30th 2013 that day I'm pretty sure oh wait that's a true question yeah there's a huge lightning storm that last night we didn't have school that day that was a trick question we didn't have school that day and the results are with a lightning storm all night so it's not a factoid talking about his life I went to a blues game and all of that and that's just oh the weather is like that and that you know it's just you ask him a question it's not like somebody memorized it it's apparently is recalling that day and then saying what has happened and he was six years old when that was first observed now in addition we've discovered a set of twins so I'm gonna show them to you and I'll let you decide what you think seventh 2012 do you know what day of the week that was that was a Sunday you're right there is exactly one child in the world other than Jake who's been identified so far with this ability 11 year-old Tyler Hickenbottom and in a fortuitous coincidence Tyler happens to be an identical twin he and his brother Chad share the same jeans I think I might have worn an orange shirt but surprisingly not the same memory how would you like to be his brother that was 2010 I tested them again just this summer and they're just like that they're really good kids they're just normal kids and just talking with them there's no difference between the two they're just identical twins and they're a lot of fun I test them individually and the one just answered correctly on every question and the other one is I don't even know what you're talking about and I he's clueless absolutely clueless so it raises a question they're identical twins one of them has the ability one of them does not what does that mean now in the course of this I told you we we were on this TV program on December 19 2010 and it was a Sunday it happens this program is always on a Sunday so it's helpful that's helpful so it's on it's on a Sunday I didn't see the I didn't see the program because I was at a concert but I recorded it and I got back about three hours after the program had aired and by the time I got back I had over 600 emails from people who claimed that they had the same ability we tested them all either by Skype or just on the telephone and we identified people who responded well and we gave them a lot of tests I'm going to show you something about the characteristics of these other people all right this is I think very interesting at least it is to me if you look at what colors are going to be there yellow orange yellow orange are controls and that is their performance on a 30 question quiz and it shows the percent correct and the number of people who get that percent so you can see nobody gets over 35 percent correct in the orange and the the modal point is 15 that's controls these are people who do not claim to have the ability if you look over to the right then you see that there are people who score 50 percent correct all the way up to 75 percent correct now the blue are people who are really very good but if you follow that distribution you see that as it goes left all of a sudden the people who claim to have the ability look just like controls so those are people who claim to have the ability but in fact do not that's these white men's here matter of fact there's some people who claim to have the ability who are worse than controls over here right so we have two distributions and the point I want to make here is that these people are not at the tail end of a normal distribution they are a different distribution they're a different distribution they're different people they're way different on the scale and we have worked primarily with the people who are marked in blue and we brought them to the laboratory and they got better than 55 percent correct on the questions that that we asked and I'll tell you a little bit about them so first we gave them a 10 dates quiz and they are asked to provide for each of 10 dates the day of the week a verifiable event something that happened around that period of time and an autobiographical event now the verifiable event means that we could check it to see if it really happened in the world but we couldn't check the autobiographical we had to take their word for it and here are the results in blue we have the what we call the potential and HSAM is highly superior autobiographical memory we call them the H. Sam's look on the left the day of the week the H. Sam's were almost at 100 percent and the controls are down about 15 percent which is you know what is one seventh they're probably less than they probably gets wrong more often than than than chance for the verifiable event that occurred that the our controls are at zero and the potential H. Sam's subjects are at about 80 percent when they're asked for an autobiographical event which we could not check at that time there the the H. Sam's are at about 75 percent and the controls way down and if you look at the total average across there it's about 75 80 percent versus 10 percent this is a huge differences these are not slight differences it's almost either have the ability or you don't it's it's that different when you're working with the extremes now then we pursued the autobiographical memory a little bit differently we asked them to tell us things that we could verify the first day at the university first day of elementary school their 18th birthday celebration the address of the first place they lived after leaving their parents the last final exam in college and we had to get verification for the H. Sam subjects now we're asking you something which we can verify by looking at records the H. Sam subjects gave 145 details which were verified the controls gave only 24 details which we could not verify so that's the clear difference between them so here's some here's some characteristics that I put up here for you they are highly accurate and autobiographical remembering not perfect not perfect but they're highly accurate they're slower to forget we did another experiment in which we gave them some experiences and then we measured their retention their memory of the experiences that we gave them now the controls are just like these people for 24 hours or put it another way 24 hours after an experience our memory is as good as theirs so that's at their very best they're like us for 24 hours then sadly we begin to forget and they don't so the way I like to put it is they are they are not good learners they are bad forgetters they simply forget slowly and we forget rapidly and that's the basis of the difference so they're not magical learners of anything they're they're not super learners as a matter of fact in laboratory experiments they are generally no better than controls in learning laboratory material but in the real-life situations they remember well for 24 hours as we do and then we gradually forget and they forget if at all very slowly that's a basic thing the one feature that they all appear to have in common is compulsiveness obsessive compulsiveness both by them telling us what they do and I'll give you a couple of examples but also on tests that we give them there are tests that measure obsessive compulsiveness and they're significantly higher on that scale and comparison with our controls and we think that that may ultimately turn out to provide a clue we don't know what that clue is yet but we do know that they are different what are the signs of compulsiveness well some of them report and we saw it happen that if they draw something drop something on the floor it has to be washed before they touch it one of the reports he's very careful not to drop his keys getting into in his apartment because if he drops the keys they have to be washed before he can use them again he doesn't wear shoe laces because shoelaces touch the ground and the ground has germs on it so he's very careful so germ avoidance is one of them and it takes different forms another one when I was interviewing him I looked over and and I asked him to tell me something about him and he said well I do have this and he reached over and he grabbed a napkin he says I carry this with me because you can never tell who's touched the object before you and so when he goes to a restaurant he takes his own napkin so he can handle the salt shaker and the pepper shaker and all of that because you can't be too careful and so he's germ avoidance one of our subjects who is a Hollywood actress Mary loose Hinner is a an organizational person the first time I met her she came into my office stood in the doorway now if you saw my well you saw my office because the twins were being interviewed in my office it's relatively neat you know there's nothing terribly messy but she stood in the doorway like this and she said well I could organize your office in 15 minutes and I wanted to say hello could we be introduced you know those were her first words to me she wants to organize and I found out later that she has as a hobby organizing the the closets of her friends so and her own her own closet is organized in terms of last worn date of purchase and she does that for all of her dresses and for all of her shoes everything has to be in a tidy thing now she's a wonderful person she's very sweet and jovy and all the rest but she does have this organizational thing all of our subjects have something like that and there's got to be a link somehow and we haven't figured out exactly what that is and finally there are some differences in brain regions we have done structural imaging of all of our subjects and we found a number of brain regions which differ in comparison with age and set sex match controls we our most interesting one is the insinid fasciculus which is a pathway that connects the back part of the brain with the front part of the brain and it is more active in our subjects as DTI assessment and structural imaging and so that's of interest and possibly a clue the hippocampal per hippocampal gyrus a region of the brain which is involved in memory is different in our subjects and a region of the stratum is also different and we're interested in this because that's also a region that has been implicated in obsessive compulsiveness so maybe there is a link there that we can follow up we have not done any any structural imaging I'm sorry in any functional imaging as yet but we intend to do that to see what happens when they are asked to remember things but it's a delicate problem because it may be that what happens when they try to remember something is what we all go through when we try to remember and that may not be no different in them as in comparison with us but we need to find that out so here's some questions that faces memory is is essential for our survival we are our memories that's we are our memories and where they're not only our past but they're our future we need them in order to get along in life so why is the ability to have strong memory so rare why don't we all have memories like that I mean that's serious question evolution made a serious mistake they left us with miserable memories and they gave a few people who don't need them very strong memories so that's a very serious question is there a genetic basis of this well we have identical twins one of whom has the ability and the other one does not we are rechecking by the way to make sure that they are identical twins we're doing a double check on that and we're also doing genetic studies larger studies what can we learn about memory from this in one question we wonder do they have this ability because they have stronger processes involved and storing and preserving memories or do they have mechanisms for retrieving memories which are better I mean we all have memories that we can't think of right now and later on the answer will pop in you've all had the tip of the tongue memory problem just cannot think of it and you try very hard and then 20 minutes later it pops into your head that says the retrieval processes that you said in motion are still working even though you you're not doing it yourself the brain is doing it by itself do they have better mechanisms in their brains to pull out the information notice that they're responding with Louise Owen immediately after the question just like that so that she have retrieval mechanisms I mean even with something that you and I know very well we probably would take more than two seconds and yet she reaches in and grabs it out and then finally what are the neurobiological implications what would it is suppose we understand a lot of the above what does it mean for understanding the brain and is it just understanding their brain or is an understanding our brain as well let me take it to the extreme you probably all know that some autistic savants have extraordinary memory there's this young man in the UK who has flown over London Rome and Tokyo and in each case after he was flown over by helicopter came back and drew the rooftops of the city in remarkably accurate detail just with one and he's autistic one flower something's going on the brain of that individual which is remarkable and wouldn't it be interesting to understand the memory processes that enable that kind of memory be just truly remarkable to understand that maybe if we could understand the brains of these people we would get a remarkable understanding of what our brains can do and what can't and what the mechanism of underlying it so it's worthwhile thinking deeply about the implications but there's obviously a lot of work to be done and with that thank you