Wedding and birthdays aside, chances are you would not be able to recall exactly what you were doing on any given date in 2006. But Aurelien Hayman is different. Not only can he remember what he did, he can tell you what he was wearing, what he ate, what was in the news and even what the weather was like. The 20-year-old is one of only a handful of people in the world with hyperthymesia, or highly superior autobiographical memory. Pick any day from his teenage years and he can recall every detail of it – while most of us will remember no more than 11 events from each year of our life. Information about conversations he had, programmes he watched and even songs he heard are all part of Aurelien’s astonishing recall. While Aurelien describes his early childhood memories as ‘vague recollections’ like everyone else’s, things changed around the age of 11. He said: ‘It’s not something that I realised overnight, but when I was 14 I discovered that I was quite good at remembering some things that had happened years before.’ Now, when asked about the random date of October 1, 2006, for example, Aurelien remembers it was a cloudy Sunday, he listened to the song When You Were Young by The Killers, and he had asked out a girl but been turned down. Not only that, but he recalls that on the Saturday he was wearing a blue t-shirt and saw the girl who would later rebuff him in the city centre of his native Cardiff, and that on the Thursday there was a power cut at his home. Only 20 people in the world have been diagnosed with hyperthymesia, and it is believed Aurelien is the only Briton. His skill is not shared by his father Martyn, an architect, his French mother Dany, or his sister. The average person retrieves information such as dates from their long-term memory in the right frontal lobe of the brain. Aurelien does the same, but his long-term memory capacity is increased because he also uses the left frontal lobe, which normally deals with language, and occipital areas at the back of the brain, normally used for storing pictures. And all of this seems to happen subconsciously. He said: ‘There’s no method or technique to it. I’m not aware that my memories are being coded. ‘It’s like being able to access something in a filing cabinet very quickly. It’s like the dates have pictures. It’s a very visual process – there’s a sequence of images.’ However, the English literature student at Durham University insists his remarkable memory does not give him an advantage when it comes to exams or essays. He said: ‘I have quite a good memory generally but, because what I have is a good autobiographical memory, I don’t think it can really help with an academic piece of work at university.’ Hull University’s head of psychology Professor Giuliana Mazzoni, who put Aurelien through a series of tests, said: ‘We were pleasantly surprised to see that he could remember so much information about his life, with little objective details everywhere. ‘When we checked the factual information relating to the day of the week, the weather or a television series he said he’d watched, the information was accurate.’ Source
