People who remember every second of their life | 60 Minutes Australia
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN links it as an example of extraordinary episodic memory in threads on memory and knowledge.
What it is
A 60 Minutes Australia segment on people with highly superior autobiographical memory, who can recall the details of any day of their lives. It presents the rare phenomenon through interviews with people who have it.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2022 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends jzl · 2024-02 · on “Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)”
There are some people, most notably the actress Marilou Henner, who remember and can instantly recall everything they did every day of their life, by date. It’s astounding. More info here: [this video]
Cites rectang · 2022-04 · on “The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages”
> The way Vaughn describes it, any time he reads something in a book, he can remember it almost perfectly. When he returned to school, he had even more to say, and more that he could understand. Giant caudate nucleus at work? [this video]
Cites ckemere · 2025-09 · on “Knowledge and memory”
Addressing the second paragraph here - while conflation and reconsolidation are real phenomena, it's also quite clear that most humans form episodic memories. Some quite clearly have incredible abilities in this regard [2]. A distinction between semantic (facts/concepts) and episodic (specific experiences) declarative memories are fairly well established since at least the 1970s. That the latter is required to construct the former is also long posited, with reasonable evidence [1]. Similarly, there's a slightly more recent distinction between "recollecting" (i.e., similar to the author's "I can remember the event of learning this") and "knowing" (i.e., "I know this but don't remember why"),