Word got out, the media descended and the lab now receives calls every day from people who say they have the same ability as Price. Of the hundreds of people interviewed, 22 appear to exhibit what the researchers call highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), the detailed recollection of events that occurred in the distant past.
A question that has persisted about this line of research is whether the brains of these people are distinct from the organs of others who can’t remember yesterday’s lunch, let alone trivial events from 20 years back. Preliminary research presented at SFN 2011 by the Irvine investigators suggests that there may be real differences in the brain structures of these people. MRI studies of 11 study participants demonstrate that multiple areas in the temporal and the parietal lobes tied to autobiographical memory are significantly larger than the same regions in a control group. At the same time, another area, the lentiform nucleus, linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder, is also bigger. Some of the study participants, in fact, have a tendency to hoard things or avoid germs, though none have been diagnosed with OCD.
“There seems to be this extreme organizational capacity, kind of like the tricks that mnemonists use,” says Howard Eichenbaum, a Boston University professor who is editor of the journal Hippocampus. “But the brain is doing it subversively under the radar so to speak. This process must interact with the hippocampus, which is taking these autobiographical memories and helping to sort things out the way that mnemonists sort out a long list of words.” http://huff.to/t2tfNg
