72 | March• 2018
MY INSANELY POWERFUL MEMORY
my memory] ... and she didn’t know,”
Pasternak says. “She just thought it’d
be cool if I went on David Letterman.”
Researchers at the University of
California-Irvinereportedthefirst-
knowncaseofHSAMin2006and
havebeenfurtherstudyingitsince.
When a potential HSAMer is identi-
fied, researchers conduct a two-part
test to confirm the
diagnosis. First, they
provide several dates
(s a y, Ju ne 2 5, 2 0 0 9)
and participants
must recall what ma-
jor current event took
place each day (that
was a Thursday, and
that’s when Michael
Jacksondied).Ifthey
pass that test, they
move onto the sec-
ond. A generator spits
out ten random dates,
and participants must
name the day of the
week, verifiable events that occurred
that day, and other descriptors like
what the weather was like.
Upon the recommendation of her
professor, Pasternak took the tests
overthephoneonMonday,March
9,2015.Shegot9outof10,theav-
eragescoreforpeoplewithHSAM.
The average score for those without
HSAM is 2 out of 10.
People who have HSAM have
differentmeansofrecallingdates.
Pasternak describes her memorymap out an entire city after seeing it
only once. They might even study a
relatively new subject in the field of
psychology: people who are able to
remember every day of their lives.
That’s me, Pasternak thought.
I can do that.
Pasternak, now 23, is currently
one of the youngest people with
Highly Superior Auto-
biographical Memory
(HSAM), a rare condi-
tion that only around
60 people in the world
are known to have.
Give her any date be-
tween 2005 and the
present day, and she
will tell you what day
of the week it was
and everything she
did that day in extra-
ordinary detail. On
December 11, 2006,
her dad got distracted
watching the Chicago
Bears play Monday Night Football
and accidentally cut off the top of
their Christmas tree instead of the
stump. On that day in 2009 (a Fri-
day), she chaperoned a school dance
and then went on a date with a guy
she had started seeing two days ear-
lier. But before that psychology class,
she and those with knowledge of her
ability only knew it as “the fun trick
Markie can do”.
“I asked my high school psychology
teacher [if she knew anything about
Superior memory:
Markie PasternakPHOTO: COURTESY LINDSEY SNOW