Everyone remembers a certain number of significant events that happened in his or her own life. These events usually have an emotional component, such as the birth of a child or the death of a relative. But remembering what you had for breakfast on a specific day 6 years ago is not relevant and you most certainly don’t remember it. There are however some people who do remember such events. They can actually remember every day of their life, dating back to mid-childhood. These individuals are not extraordinary learners, with average memory performance on other memory tasks. The exact mechanism behind this atypical ability is unknown. We have the unique opportunity to acquire high resolution brain images of one such individual, and investigate whether certain regions or connections in his brain also are out of the norm. To properly answer such a question, we need a large and carefully matched set of control male participants in the same age range, with identical brain imaging information. Only the UK Biobank can provide us with such a population, together with the tools to analyse the data in a similar manner. Understanding such extraordinary capacities could in the long run prove useful to better understand memory deficits occurring with age and psychiatric diseases. We hope to conduct the project to its end in 2023.
