It's a tantalizing clue, especially when coupled with the MRI findings that a brain area known to be involved in obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, is larger than normal in these folks. He can't wear shoes that have shoestrings, because shoestrings touch the ground,' McGaugh says.īut the obsessive tendencies don't seem to interfere with daily living, McGaugh says. If he drops his keys, he has to wash them. They tend to have some repetitive habits. 'Most, if not all of them, have some obsessive-compulsive tendencies,' says Petrella. Answer: Princess Diana and Prince Charles were married, a Wednesday. Subjects are given either a date and asked to give the event, or an event and asked to give the date. Here are a few questions from the preliminary screening for people with extraordinary memories. The testing has shown that Petrella and the others like him don't use memory tricks. Petrella is one of 11 individuals who have now been extensively studied by memory researcher James McGaugh at the University of California, Irvine. 'And the Steelers, my favorite team, lost to the Raiders that day, 38-10.' 1, 1984?' - which was a Sunday,' Petrella recalls.

'They asked, 'What day of the week was Jan. For example, look at an object in the room you are in now, and then close your eyes and visualize that object. It is a type of sensory memory that lasts just milliseconds before fading. (Most people get 15 percent.) Then he was quizzed about his own life. Iconic memory is the storage for visual memory that allows people to visualize an image after the physical stimulus is no longer present. Petrella scored 55 percent correct on the news events, according to a paper published in July in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. First, there were lots of questions about news events from the past several decades, like the O.J. And now, researchers are trying to understand how their extraordinary memories work.īob Petrella, 62, of Los Angeles had to go through a lot of memory testing to qualify as someone with superior autobiographical memory. But since then, a handful of such individuals have been identified.

At the time, researchers thought she was unique. Six years ago, we told you about a woman, identified as A.J., who could remember the details of nearly every day of her life. Researchers are using MRI scans to learn more about the brains of people with extraordinary memory.

Eidetic memory vs iconic memory