I am one of 100 people in the world with a disease that allows me to remember the day I was born.

Two women have revealed what it’s like to live in incredible conditions that allow them to remember what it was like to be a baby.

Emily Nash, 18, of Ottawa, Canada, is the youngest person known to have a disease that causes her to have an incredible photographic memory.

In her words, her brain is “organized like a calendar,” with the ability to replay, rewind, and fast forward important experiences and events.

She claims she vividly remembers learning to walk and being chased around the house by her parents as well.

Becky Sherlock, 34, Australia’s only known case of HSAM, claims she remembers the day she was born and the “intense curiosity” she felt as a newborn. There is.

Highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) affects only about 100 people worldwide.

This condition was only discovered in 2000 and is still poorly understood.

For most people, the brain only stores 50% of new information within an hour of learning and is constantly emptying storage to make more space for new memories.

One theory is that in patients with HSAM, The brain may not be able to determine and filter out what information is not important. That is, the brain remembers almost everything, whether it is noteworthy or not.

Ms Nash told 60 Minutes Australia: “My brain is organized almost like a calendar. Each date is particularly like a movie, and I can play it, rewind it, and fast forward it. And the deeper I dig into a particular day, the clearer it becomes from that day. You can extract more details.”

“It’s like I’m reliving it and I feel like I was there seconds ago,” she added.

This condition applies not only to experience but also to facts. Nash’s parents, Julie and Jason, nicknamed their daughter Wikipedia because of the vast amount of trivia she remembers.

Her mother said her family had no idea why she remembered things so well and thought she simply had a “good memory.”

Nash’s first memory is of her mother sitting in her high chair and feeding her as a baby. She claims that she remembers how to walk.

“I remember my parents starting chasing me around the house. I was so excited to learn how to walk that it turned into running.”

“I think I learned those two things on the same day,” she recalled.

It wasn’t until she was 17 years old that she was formally tested by psychology professor Dr. Carmen Westerberg. in texas state universitythey understood the full extent of her abilities.

His mother Julie said Nash remembers everything and the family is now focused on creating happy memories.

“From the moment I found out, I had to reorient my parenting from the perspective that this was going to be a lasting memory,” the mother said. “So I sweat a little less over the little things.”

Nash said remembering all the promises she made to her parents and friends can make relationships difficult, but she’s learned to forgive them and tries not to hold grudges.

Nash has volunteered for science, and researchers are studying her brain in hopes of finding treatments for debilitating memory loss conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

They’ll try to understand exactly what’s going on in Nash’s brain and what’s going well, so they may be able to figure out what’s going wrong in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. .

“Knowing that you can help your memory is a very rewarding experience,” Nash said.

Part of her motivation was watching two of her grandparents suffer from dementia.

Later this year, she plans to go to university to study science and memory on her own.

Sleep studies in which she has already participated suggest that Ms. Nash isn’t taking in or learning more information than anyone else, but she just doesn’t forget it. .

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“While she was sleeping, her brain was storing information more efficiently than other people’s,” said Dr. Westerberg, who was involved in the study.

“The reason remains a big mystery,” she added.

Like Nash, Sherlock said he “remembers pretty much every day.”

“I remember at least 95 percent of it.”

In her younger years, she said, “I was a little embarrassingly smart as a kid.”

Sherlock even claims to remember the exact day he was born.

“I remember what I think was when I was born, and I found myself wrapped in a blanket with a tag clipped to my ankle.

“Of course, it’s not 100 percent proof for the skeptics,” she said.

“I was very curious. I didn’t know the word curiosity when I was a baby, but I wanted to know everything about everything. I think I was probably 5,000 percent more curious than I am now. Masu.”

Sherlock also has autism, which makes him easily confused when he remembers everything.

“I often distract myself with random flashbacks that pop into my head, and they come to me unconsciously,” she says.

There are days she wants to forget, she says.

“I have moments of self-pity where I just wonder why I have to have such memory loss, why I can’t forget certain things. It’s a curse.”

Studies have shown that people with the disease have stronger deficits in the hippocampus (a part of the brain that plays a key role in learning and memory) and saliency detection, which determines what information is important, than normal people. It indicates that there is a connectivity failure between multiple networks used. Participants were in a resting state.

This means people with HSAM It may be difficult to determine what information does not need to be stored. That means you remember almost everything.

Some researchers have suggested that HSAM may be a special form of OCD because there are similarities between the brain structures of HSAM and those of OCD patients.

Both have enlarged caudates and are involved in processes such as procedural learning.

There is a link between autobiographical memory and autism because the sensory experiences of some people with autism help cement events deeply into memory.

Some people with autism have photographic or near-photographic memories.