Mr. Petrella's memory is a mixture of personal experiences and verifiable public events. He leans toward sports, but historical dates are embedded in his brain as well.

It's a mystery how he does it. "We don't know how it works, and we would like to know how it works," said Dr. James McGaugh, the founding director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine.

Petrella and the three others with super memory have been the subjects of study at the center. "I always explain to people that it's like I'm walking around with a video camera on my shoulder and every day is a videotape," "So if you throw a date out at me, it's as if I pulled the videotape out, put it in the VCR and just watched the day as it happened, like from my point of view."

Doctors are just beginning to observe, let alone understand, this phenomenon.

"First, three of our four top subjects are left-handed, and our fourth has strong tendencies to be left-handed but uses a right hand in writing," said McGaugh. "They all have slightly obsessive tendencies. They save a lot of things. They keep a lot of things. The Salvation Army will never get rich off these people because they keep it, and so they covet collections the way they covet their memories. We find that interesting."

Also, it turns out certain parts of the super-autobiographical memory subjects' brains are larger than they are in people who don't have super-autobiographical memory. Also, their potential to store information appears infinite.

"There's no capacity limitation on what we can learn," said McGaugh, "no limit to our capacity to learn."

He recalls where he was and what he did with high school buddies. Grainy images of the 1970s are vivid pictures in his head. "I remember all my ATM codes," he said. "I remember people's numbers. I lost my cell phone Sept. 24, 2006. A lot of people, if they lost their cell phone, they would panic because they have all these numbers. I didn't have any numbers in my cell phone because I know everybody's numbers up here in my head." ------------------------------------

Remember you can click two times
on any word and a dictionary will pop up. 

Questions :

1) If you were a police officer what would you want to verify before making your report ?  What is something you recently verified ?

2) What is meant by the word embedded ? Can you think of two uses of the word embedded - try to make two sentences using this word.  

3) Who is James McGaugh ? What is his specialty ?

4) How does Petrella explain his memory style ?

5) Do you think being a left handed person has any relation to the ability of these people ?

6) When we say someone has an obsessive personal issue what are we saying ?

7) Do you prefer biography's or auto-biography's ?

8) If you had this kind of memory what would you really want to remember perfectly forever ?

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Writing Exercise:

What are you thoughts about this ability. Is it a gift or a curse ?  Would you want this ability ?

Here is one student reply:

In my personal opinion, having super-memory would be an awesome trait to have. I would love to be able to go back to specific dates like my seventh birthday or my first day of pre-school. The fact that a few individuals can remember precise moments and the average person cannot is fascinating. The average human blocks out certain times in their lives or simply cannot remember because their brain will not let them but these few people are using a larger part of their brain then the average person would. I think this makes a person more intelligent because they have the ability to do something that many others cannot do.