Super Autobiographical Memory

Tuesday night I was watching one of my favorite television shows, Unforgettable. If you haven’t ever watched it, it stars Poppy Montgomery as a NYPD detective who has a condition called super autobiographical memory, the ability to recall every day of her life in perfect detail. She solves crimes by visiting the crime scene and then later revisiting it in her memory to detect fine details. It is a fascinating show.

This past week Marilu Henner was a guest star, a person I hadn’t seen in many years. My wife and I were at a loss to recall what series she had been in. So after the show was over I went to my trusty PC and Googled ‘Marilu Henner’. (Well, actually I input Marilou because I didn’t know that her stage name was a combination of her real first and middle names, Mary and Lucy.)

The series she played in was, of course, Taxi, a show that made stars out of several people including Judd Hirsch, Danny DeVito, Tony Danza, Christopher Lloyd and Andy Kauffman.

What really shocked me was another link that referred to ‘Marilu Henner’s Super-Memory Summit’. That peaked my interest, so I clicked on the link and learned that Marilu is one of only a handful of people who actually have super autobiographical memory. You can give a calendar date for any day she has been alive and she can tell you what day of the week it was and relate many details about what happened that day, including what clothes she wore and many other trivial facts.

It was no shock for me to also learn that Marilu Henner is a consultant for Unforgettable. Who better to consult than a person with the gift on which the show is based?

I read on and learned that Marilu is a personal friend of Leslie Stahl, one of the reporters on CBS’s 60 Minutes. It seems that that show wanted to do a feature on super autobiographical memory, and tried to talk Leslie into doing it. She refused at first, but then took on the assignment after it was learned that Marilu Henner would be one of the subjects.

The resultant clip featured half-a-dozen people, including Henner, who were assembled at one location and showcased their talents. If you care to see Marilu Henner's Super-Memory Summit, click on the link.

Now here is a really humorous fact about the show I watched on Tuesday… The character that Marilu Henner played was an aunt of Poppy’s character who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. How’s that for irony?