POETICKS

What does HSAM stand for? HSAM stands for Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. I recently read about it in Steve Mirsky’s Anti Gravity in the November 2014 issue of Scientific American.  Mirsky didn’t say much about it, so I looked it up in Wikipedia where I found an excellent article about it here (which terms it “hyperthymesia,” and connects it to the super-memory abilities of the autistic, as well as to obsessive compulsion disorders.  It resembles the latter inasmuch as it seems to cause those with it obsessively to remember their personal pasts.

Mirsky mentions that the uncinate fasciculus may be involved in HSAM, so I looked that up in Wikipedia, too, stole the following from it:

The uncinate fasciculus is a white matter tract in the human brain that connects parts of the limbic system such as the hippocampus and amygdala in the temporal lobe with frontal ones such as the orbitofrontal cortex. Its function is unknown though it is affected in several psychiatric conditions. It is the last white matter tract to mature in the human brain.

Needless to say, I immediately began forming a knowlecular psychology understanding of HSAM.  Does is indicate I’m right that the brain records everything that its sensors bring to it about the environment?  Actually, my quick processing of the Wikipedia article left me thinking that those with HSAM don’t fully re-experience previous moments or days in their lives, although perhaps do fully re-experience portions of them, but mainly remember them the same way all of us remember vivid durations of our pasts; they just bring to mind many many more such durations.

I wondered if the anthroceptual awareness occupies the uncinate fasciculus.  I think too little is known of it to be sure, although it either contains at least a portion of the awareness or connections to it.  The existence of HSAM seems to me to come close to proving the existence of the anthroceptual awareness.  Similar, various autistic persons’ abilities indicate the existence of certain sub-awarenesses like the matheceptual awareness.

I am also wondering if I should add a new awareness to my theory, the chronoceptual awareness.  I’ve thought about some kind of urceptual mechanism that tags memories throughout life with day-indicators: day 1, day 2, etc.  I haven’t gone anywhere much with it.  HSAM got me thinking about it because people with HSAM seem to date the records of the past: if given a date, they can tell you what happened to them on that date.  If there is a chronoceptual awareness, it could explain HSAM as the result not of an anthroceptual awareness with high charactration but a chronoceptual awareness with that.  In the latter case, the chronoceptual awareness would pretty much co-exist (i.e., be simultaneously active) with the anthroceptual awareness.

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I’d love to have a map of all the areas of the brain like the ones above, with a list of what each one has been implicated with.  This, of course, is a point against my being mostly an autodidact rather than someone properly trained.  Which makes me immediately think that someone with HSAM may remember the specifics of his past life because he lacks the ability to generalize–by which I (vaguely) mean the ability to form knowleplexes in which repeating data of significance merge into understandings of . . . things like kindergarten–as, say a jungle gym, a particular teacher (mine was Miss Sherman), drawing, the schoolyard where we played during recesses) instead of a series of days.

A healthy memory would form a hierarchy of memories–not the name of every kid in one’s kindergarten class, just the names of the few important ones.  Ergo, another possible explanation of HSAM would be an inability to increase or decrease the brain’s ability to activate a given memory, so no memory would be too available to keep one from easily remembering smaller details from one’s past.  I strongly feel animportant characteristic of one with high cerebreffectiveness is the ability to remember essences–at the expense of details.

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