1.19. Total Recall

Posted on 6 November 2019

Everything so far has focused on memory and identity loss, but if you had a perfect memory what would happen?

Imagine everything you experience is immediately impressed on your Long Term Memory.

Every detail, every sound, every image, every touch and every connection can be recalled.

People who have such total recall over their experiences are rare but do exist and have been observed by science.

The overwhelming link between them is that they feel swamped by too much experience and find it difficult to interpret any meaning for it.

For example, such a person could remember all the lines of a play in minutes but ask them to describe what they think about the quality of the play and their faces become blank.

How trapped are these people compared to their polar opposite Henry Molaison?

You have evolved to forget for a reason.

More than ever in the 21st century you are bombarded with information.

Too much information, most of which is unnecessary and completely useless to your daily life.

It is the sifting and separating of this information that allows us to create the meaning from our experiences.

In all of our lives, we all have experiences that we simply want to forget.

^{Image from www.uni-bamberg.de}