‘I’ll be honest, it does get annoying. I get headaches and it causes anxiety.’
View image in fullscreen
‘I’ll be honest, it does get annoying. I get headaches and it causes anxiety.’ Illustration: Lucas Varela/The Observer
I can basically remember all the way back to the beginning, just after my first birthday, being held in my mum’s arms. From then on it’s every conversation, every day out, every celebration. It’s mostly entirely useless, though – like what I had for breakfast, or the most mundane of thoughts. All these memories are in chronological order, so I can work backwards or forwards. If I go back to the days before I really understood calendars, I use the image of my birthday cake and its number of candles as a reference to start. I even remember dreams – those from the first 20 minutes of sleeping. When I had my first at eight months it was quite a shock.
I’ll be honest, it does get annoying. I get headaches and it causes anxiety; I have to listen to music every night as I fall asleep or else I’m constantly having random flashbacks. For a long time I saw it as a curse. Slowly, as I’ve grown a little older, I’ve come to appreciate what my brain gives me. I can memorise lines, which is great for public speaking. That’s what I want to make my career, sharing my experiences with people across the world. While the sentence structures of foreign languages take some getting used to – I’ve been learning a few so I can travel – the words all just stick right away.
Soon I want to put my life down on paper, the moments – big or small – that hold significance. I hope to look at how each affected my life and my future in a way few people can. And I’m starting a business, a support group for other people with autism to overcome obstacles and find their passion.
Nobody is quite sure how my brain can actually hold all this information. It’s why medical researchers from Queensland to California are so keen to poke around up there. They’re attempting to discover which part of the brain is responsible for long-term memory, in the hope of finding ways to help those who are affected by Alzheimer’s, brain damage or strokes. I spend a lot of time having my brain scanned. In the initial tests I was asked to work out which day of the week random dates had been throughout my life. I’d be asked random questions and then to recall my answers five months later.
I’ve spent 90 minutes in an MRI scanner that showed how the conscious and subconscious parts of my mind are more strongly connected than usual. Now they know what my brain can do, they’re more interested in studying its biology. The scientists have already discovered that the memories of people with HSAM usually get clearer with the passage of time, which is the opposite to how most people experience them.