I am one of 100 people in the world who can remember the day we were born

Two women have revealed what it’s like to live with an incredible illness that allows them to remember what it was like to be babies.

Emily Nash, 18, from Ottawa, Canada, is the youngest person known to have a condition that gives her an incredible photographic memory.

Her brain is “organized like a calendar,” as she puts it, and she has the ability to replay, rewind, and fast-forward any important experience or event.

She claims to vividly remember learning to walk and being chased around the house by her parents.

Becky Sharrock, 34, Australia’s only known case of HSAM, claims to remember the day she was born and the “intense curiosity” she felt as a newborn.

Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) only affects about 100 people in the world.

The disease was only discovered in 2000 and is still poorly researched.

For most people, the brain only retains 50 percent of new information within an hour of learning and is constantly clearing memory to make more room for new memories.

One theory is that people with HSAM have their The brain may not be able to determine and filter unimportant information, meaning they will remember almost anything, whether it is notable or not.

Ms Nash told 60 Minutes Australia: “My brain is organized almost like a calendar.” Each date is specifically like a movie that I can replay, rewind and fast forward. And the more I dwell on a particular day, the more vividly and the more details I can recall from that day.”

“It’s almost like reliving, like I was just there a few seconds ago,” she added.

The condition refers not only to experiences but also to facts. Ms. Nash’s parents, Julie and Jason, nicknamed their daughter “Wikipedia” because she could remember a lot of interesting facts.

The family had no idea why she remembered things so well and assumed she was simply blessed with an “excellent memory,” her mother said.

Ms. Nash’s first memory is being fed in a high chair by her mother as a baby. She claims she remembers learning to walk.

“I remember my parents started chasing me around the house because I was so excited to learn to walk and it turned into running.”

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

It wasn’t until she was 17 that Dr. Carmen Westerberg, Professor of Psychology, officially tested at Texas State Universitythat they realized the full extent of their abilities.

Her mother Julie said the family was now focused on creating happy memories as Ms Nash would remember everything.

“From the moment I found out, I had to change my upbringing so that this would be a lasting memory,” her mother said. “So we can worry a little less about the little things.”

Ms. Nash said it can be difficult for relationships to remember every promise made by her parents and friends, but she has learned to forgive them and tries not to hold grudges.

Ms. Nash has volunteered her time in science and researchers are studying her brain to hopefully find a cure for debilitating memory disorders such as dementia and Alzheimer’s.

They will try to understand exactly what is happening and going right in Ms. Nash’s brain so that they may be able to figure out what is going wrong in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s.

“Knowing that I can help my memory is a very rewarding experience,” Ms. Nash said.

She is motivated in part by seeing two of her grandparents suffer from dementia.

Later this year she goes to university to study science and memory herself.

Sleep studies she has already taken part in have shown that Ms. Nash doesn’t absorb or learn any more information than anyone else, but she just doesn’t forget it.

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“While she sleeps, her brain stores data more efficiently than other people,” said Dr. Westerberg, who was involved in the studies.

“The why is still a big mystery,” she added.

Like Ms. Nash, Ms. Sharrock said she “pretty much remembers every second of every day.”

“I remember at least about 95 percent of the time.”

When she was younger, she said she was “so smart that it would have embarrassed me a little bit as a kid.”

Ms Sharrock even claims to remember the exact day she was born.

“I have a memory that I believe was my birth.” I found myself wrapped in a blanket and then my ankle was wrapped with a tag.

“Of course, this cannot be proven 100 percent to skeptics,” she said.

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

Ms Sharrock also suffers from autism, which heightens the sense of chaos that comes with the ability to remember anything.

“I often get distracted by random flashbacks that come to mind, they just come involuntarily,” she said.

There are days when she wishes she could forget them, she said.

“I have moments of self-pity where I just think to myself, ‘Why do I have to have this memory disorder, why can’t I just forget certain things?’ It’s a curse to have it.”

Research has shown that, compared to normal people, people with the condition have a disrupted connection between the hippocampus – a part of the brain that plays a key role in learning and memory – and several networks used in expression recognition What information is important – during training The participants were in a resting state.

This refers to people with HSAM may not be able to determine what information doesn’t need to be stored, meaning they remember almost everything.

Some researchers have suggested that HSAM may be a special form of OCD because there are similarities between the structure of their brains and that of OCD sufferers.

Both have an enlarged tail – which is involved in processes such as procedural learning.

There is a connection between autobiographical memory and autism because the sensory experience of some people with autism helps to anchor events deeply in their memory.

Some people with autism also have a photographic or near-photographic memory.