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Without looking back at an appointment calendar or diary or searching Google, what can you recall about the day of Nov. 5, 2021? Unless that date happens to hold an anniversary or other special meaning, probably not too much.

But if you ask one young woman living near Atlanta, she can easily name that day of the week and rattle off what she was wearing, the local parade that happened that day and how impressive the sunset was that evening. Her ability doesn't come from a memory-building parlor trick, and it can be displayed for any number of other seemingly random dates across her life. Instead, the ability stems from a rare condition known as highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM—the ability to recollect nearly all of one's past personal experiences in vivid detail.

She is the anonymous subject of a case report published in Neurocase that was led by Professor Anne Cleary at Colorado State University. Findings support a better foundational understanding of how memories are made and then retrieved, with broad implications for medical procedures such as brain surgery and understanding of changes to memory late in life from diseases like Alzheimer's.

HSAM was first diagnosed 20 years ago.

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