Imagine being able to remember every minute detail of your life. You can recall what the weather was like, what you were reading, or what you wore to the shops at any minute, any hour, or any day stretching back decades. It sounds like some kind of parlour trick, but it's actually a real and very rare medical phenomenon. So far, scientists have identified 10 cases worldwide.
And believe me, what... What these people can do will quite simply make your head spin. July 22nd of 1978, here we go again! My first apartment that I moved into was 100 South Donany, right down this street. So driving along, all these different things, just different little things.
Yeah, for sure. Mary Lou is no stranger to the limelight. In the 1970s, she starred in the sitcom Taxi. See, I'd really like to have one person there that I don't care about impressing. But among her family and friends...
Mary Lou Hanna has always been famous for remembering everything. Hey mom, what day was Valentine's Day in 79? It was a Wednesday.
And you're right. I've never explained how you do that. I don't do it, I just see it.
And you can remember your whole life? Yes, I can remember my whole life. And some things come up like right away. And then some other things kind of come up a little more slowly. But...
Eventually, everything comes up. I thought I'd see just how far back Mary Lou's memory goes. Well, then by all means, just come to my party. Picking at random an episode of Taxi filmed more than 30 years ago.
Thank you very much. I had a look at the Taxi episode from 1978, Come As You Aren't. Do you remember it? Oh, that was the fourth episode that we shot. And I had the blue dress on.
Alan? See that was going to be my first question to you. Oh, what do you remember?
What color dress you wore to the party? Yes, yes, yes. And I remember Tony's line, how come we can't go to the party too? How come we can't go to the party too? You know, it's like things come back, a line to Alex, you're maybe my best friend.
You're maybe my best friend. And he turns around, and you know, it's like the episode will come back to me. Mary Lou is one of just 10 people in the world who've been tested and proved To have superior autobiographical memory.
October 1st, 8th... Total recall of every day of their lives. Extremely impressive. Delta Airline Flight 191 crashes near Dallas, Texas.
Oh, I know exactly when that happened, because it was August 2nd of 1985. It was a Friday. Such a gift has never been documented before, and scientists like Professor James McGaugh are excited about... where it may lead.
One of them said it's like a Google search, that you put it in and it just sort of and there it is. And it's the year and it's the month and it's the day and it sort of narrows in and it goes bang and they've got it. And this all happens very quickly. It just, there you have it. That's how they explain to you how they do it.
Yeah, it's not a scientific explanation. I understood it, though. It really is like selected scenes on a DVD. So how does it work?
If I throw you a random date, say the 8th of September 1985. Okay, so I know 8th of September 1985 was a Sunday. It's like 85 all of a sudden kind of lines itself up and it gets completely organized sort of in a timeline way. and I see the whole calendar sort of fall into place.
It's an extraordinary skill, and one that Mary Lou is thrilled to have. For others, though, like Jill Price, who was the first person to be diagnosed with this remarkable condition, it's a burden. Is it driving you crazy on the inside?
Yeah, sometimes it does. Yeah. I mean, I really just want to be screaming at the top of my lungs most of the time, and I can't do that.
So I have to keep everything in check. When did you realize you had this ability? About five weeks after I turned 14, and I don't really know why on this day exactly. February 5th, 1980. But from that day until now, it's every day. And so, you know, you pull a date out, boom, it's like I'm right there.
Every moment of every day? Every day, yeah. Don't believe it?
Well, let's do a test. Challenger, go at throttle up. The Challenger disaster.
Tuesday, January 28th, 1986. And the Super Bowl was the Sunday before. John Lennon's assassination. That was December 8th, 1980. Do you remember what day of the week it was? Monday. I was in 10th grade.
It blows my mind that you can remember that. That crash killed 274 people. The Chicago plane crash. The one in May 25th, 1979. That is the one. Yeah, I was in the 8th grade.
I had just come back that week from having the chicken pox. Remembering historical events is one thing. But this goes a whole lot further. Well, May 8th, my grandmother had...
Imagine having instant recall of what you ate for breakfast exactly 20 years ago today. What if I flip it around? I don't give you an event, but a date. The 28th of February, 97th.
Um, that was a Friday, and I was leaving that day to go up to San Francisco. But we sort of got sidetracked by a bank robbery in North Hollywood. She's right. For an hour, North Hollywood was a war zone.
Starting like on that Friday the 15th, I'd gone to a football game. And so begins an outpouring of memories, plucked from three decades ago as if they were yesterday. We'll be crossing decades and time and... You can always hear the clouds of information surrounding you.
Yeah, that's what's in my head. It's just all this stuff. For years, all this stuff, as Jill calls it, was driving her mad. In desperation, she contacted one of the world's foremost experts on memory, James McGaw.
He thought it was a hoax. So I got out a very large book that was published at the time of the millennium. which has a day-by-day report of what happened in the past century. And I just randomly opened the pages and said, what happened on this day? And I was astounded by it.
because she could just tell me without even taking a deep breath. OK, now we're going to do... By the end of the day, Dr Magor realised he was dealing with something completely unknown to science.
It's extraordinary. It's the ability of an individual to remember in detail what happened to them on any day of their life. After the age roughly of 10 or 12, and also to remember all of the major public events that occurred on any given day.
That description struck a chord with another young woman, who thought it sounded just like her too. I wrote them a letter and I said my name is Louise Owen, I'm a 36 year old violinist living in New York City and I have total recall of every day of my life since 1985. The Berlin Wall falls on what day? November 9th 1989 which was Thursday.
Dr Magor and his colleagues put Louise through hours of exhaustive tests. Let's move back in time now to 1990. It rained on several days in January and February. Can you named the dates on which it rained.
And sure enough she passed with flying colors. It was slightly rainy and cloudy on January 14th, 15th. Their memory is very much like your and my memory of yesterday. So no tricks? There's no tricks and they just say it just happens just like that.
Louise if I throw a year at you say 1991. What happens to your brain? 1991. I immediately am thinking about that was the year that I left LA and I moved to Boston. Do you remember when the Oscars were that year? The Oscars?
I did not watch the Oscars that year. I think it was Monday, March 25th in 1991. That is not bad for someone who didn't even watch. You're just showing off now. It's not even really fair to ask.
Best actor and actress? Kathy Bates won for Misery. Kathy Bates in Misery.
And Jeremy Irons for Reversal of Fortune. Jeremy Irons. I feel like a bit of a freak show is not the right word. Oh, I think freak show is accurate.
Sort of a walking party trick, you know. Louise Owen can't explain her gift, but says her memory is a bit like a muscle she likes to exercise. I think, OK, today is May 27th.
What happened a year ago, two years ago, three years ago? ...years ago on this day and I'll scroll back as far as I can go. So it jumps into your head very quickly.
Can you get rid of it? just as quickly. Sometimes I feel like with all of these dates and all these memories it's almost like I'm in charge of about 9,000 rambunctious little children.
Each one represents a different date, a different memory and they're all vying for my attention all the time. It's like, pick me, pay attention to me, but I have to keep everybody under control here. That sounds exhausting. But it's a lot of fun.
This is where the saliva goes. Dr. McGaw and his colleagues are getting closer to understanding this extraordinary ability. Things are very colour coordinated here. They notice that the ten confirmed cases are all highly organised, some to the point of obsessive compulsive disorder, others like Mary Lou Henna who just have very neat wardrobes. I love organisation.
I like my shoes a certain way, right foot going this way, left foot going that way, so you can always see the toe and the heel on every pair. This is my notebook from senior year in high school. All of the subjects who have this strong autobiographical memory have some tendency to do some things in excess. So you've kept a journal for how long? Since the last week of 1976. It just swirls in my head until it's written down.
Look how tiny your writing is. Can you even read it? Yeah.
You alright there? Yeah. Okay, here we go. Now the scientists are doing MRIs, brain scans, on their volunteer subjects and they've discovered something astonishing.
In each subject, one part of the brain, called the caudate nucleus, is enormous, up to seven times bigger than normal. These people may help unlock some of the mysteries we still don't understand about the human brain. Is this potentially a cure for...
Alzheimer's or dementia. This information that we provide may well turn out to be useful for understanding all kinds of disorders of memory, not just Alzheimer's disease but brain damage from head injury and from encephalitis and all kinds of things. For those who live with it every day, total recall is a mixed blessing.
What about the sad stuff? That's the stuff that has given me Like my emotional nightmare throughout my whole life. I can't just move forward.
And that is detrimental to my daily life because it's hard to move forward. It sounds crippling. It is crippling in a way because I do believe if I were like everyone else, my whole life would have been very different.
Is this a memory you remember? Oh, for sure. For Mary Lou Hannah, it's been a good life, made even better because she can recall every single moment.
I feel so blessed to have it because I feel like... I get to carry all my life lessons with me. What about the bad memories though?
I mean, do you think back to relationship breakdowns and feel that heartbreak again? Every woman asks that question. Every single woman. It's so funny. Women always say, what about that bad breakup?
And men always say, oh my gosh, you must be impossible to be married to. Hello, I'm Liz Hayes. Thanks for watching. To keep up with the latest from 60 Minutes Australia, Make sure you subscribe to our channel.
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