We do not remember everything that happens to us; we select only highlights. If we didn’t forget, our minds could not work efficiently, because they would be cluttered with mental junk—the temperature last Wednesday, a boring conversation on the bus, the price of peaches at the market yesterday. A very few people have a condition that allows them to remember just about everything, from a random fact like the weather on March 12, 1997, to public events to personal experiences, but this talent is not always the blessing it might appear. One woman with this ability described her memory as
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