From 3 months old: The 16-year-old who holds the rarest memory in the world

A new study published in the journal Cortex documents a rare case of a 16-year-old boy who can accurately recall events from his early infancy, starting at three months old. The boy was diagnosed with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), a condition held by fewer than a hundred people worldwide. His personal memory performance exceeds 99.9% of the population, but other cognitive measures are normal. Researchers emphasize that this is not a 'super-genius' but a change in how the brain accesses information.

A new neurological study published in the scientific journal Cortex presents a rare case of a 16-year-old boy who possesses the ability to reconstruct entire days of his life with surgical precision—starting from events that occurred when he was just a three-month-old infant. The boy was diagnosed with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), a condition held by fewer than a hundred people worldwide. His memory retrieval performance exceeds 99.9% of the general population. The boy independently contacted cognitive researcher Christian Bjerzikowski, an expert on the phenomenon of autobiographical memories. He described clear memories from April 2009, when he was an infant of about three months old, and from ages two and three. From age three, a continuous memory experience formed. In recent years, he accurately recalls events from about half of the days that have passed, with information spontaneously entering his head in response to stimuli such as smells, song sounds, or a sentence. In a series of controlled tests, all other cognitive measures were found to be completely normal—in tests of number memorization, daily learning, and attention functions, his level was identical to his peers. The researchers emphasized that the subjects are not cognitive 'superheroes,' and the uniqueness lies in the way the brain stores and retrieves personal experiences. In a computerized test, the boy's brain was flooded with memories at a significantly higher frequency than average, while thoughts about the future remained within the normal range. The study sheds light on the question of why most people forget the details of their lives, while for a few, the door to the past remains open.