Super-memory mutants herald new age of intelligence

If you follow quirks in neuroscience you'll know that there are a rare few people who can remember specific details from every single day in their life. Two of these people have already been identified, but now a third has come out and been verified:

The third person found to have an ultra-rare memory gift — recalling in detail most days of his life — is 50-year-old Rick Baron of suburban Cleveland, scientists confirmed Monday after Baron contacted USA TODAY.

Baron came forward after a USA TODAY story Thursday on Jill Price of Los Angeles (health.usatoday.com). She is the first person to be verified by memory experts at the University of California-Irvine to have such a superior autobiographical memory. The second, La Crosse, Wis., radio newscaster Brad Williams, already had made his identity known. Baron wasn't in the USA TODAY story because researchers didn't have permission to release his name.

As is true for the others, he can tell the day of the week for given dates, and the day and date of noted events during his life. "It's got to be something I've seen or heard or read about once in my life. Then it stays in my head eternally," he says.

Now some have suggested that this super-memory thing may actually be a simple trick employing an elaborate mnemonic device, or perhaps a kind of savant mutation only seen once or twice in a generation. It would be interesting to do a genetic workup on these people to see if there is some generic synaptic pruning mechanism which has been disabled, or if they have an extra sequence for expressing essential memory formation enzymes. Either way they are probably mutant freaks plotting to rule us all, and we should outlaw their kind immediately.