Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
It’s raining today—just like it did on the same date in 2011, except that was a Monday, and Jake Hausler was driving to lacrosse practice with his older brother and listening to The Beatles on his iPhone. “When I’m Sixty-Four” came on, and he realized that the year that song turns 100, he’ll be 64.
He’s only 10 right now. But he’s crammed his brain with more memories than most of us could gather in 10 lifetimes.
He remembers the stats, inning by inning, from every baseball game he’s seen. He says Gracie, the family dog, has thumped him with her tail 31 times. When he was 3 years old, he knew the inspection-sticker numbers for every car in the neighborhood and the songs on every iTunes playlist his parents let him create. At 4, he could tell his dad the precise location of every item in the grocery store. At 5, he came home from kindergarten and told his mother what the weather was—not just that day, but the previous 30.
Over time, his parents got used to it. Idle conversation at a restaurant—“Can’t remember the last time we were here”—got an instant rebound from Jake: “January 19, 2008. It was a Saturday night.” His brother nicknamed him Sherlock. And their mother, Sari Hausler, started trying to teach him to forget.
*****
Did you see 60 Minutes? They were totally describing Jake!” Sari’s friend exclaimed.
Sari said OK and hung up, intrigued. Her friend had seen a re-airing of Lesley Stahl’s December 2010 piece on adults with something called “highly superior autobiographical memory.” Sari and her husband, Eric Hausler, went online and watched the episode.
It described an extraordinary kind of memory first identified by James McGaugh, a neurobiology professor at the University of California–Irvine, in 2006. His team had found only a handful of adults who possessed it. None of them remembered (and they would) having a superior memory in early childhood. Most said it seemed to start at age 10.
But everything they could do, Jake had been doing for years. The Hauslers clicked the show off and looked at their son.
His wife would never have to worry about him forgetting their anniversary, Sari thought.
By the same token, she’d never be able to count on him forgetting a mistake.
Only one of the five people interviewed for 60 Minutes—Marilu Henner, who played Elaine on the late-’70s sitcom Taxi—was married, and she was on her third marriage. Would Jake have trouble with relationships?
Sari worried about his mental state—that was an awful lot of information to carry around in one tiny tousled head. She worried about his future, about grief. No one Jake loved had died yet, but it would happen. How would his heart heal, when all his memories stayed vivid and immediate?
Forgetting is a built-in coping mechanism. It lets embarrassment fall away, blurs slights, and softens heartaches.
One day, when something was troubling Jake, Sari urged him to just let it go.
“Well, if I forget that, then I would have to forget that it was Anna and Katherine’s birthday, and…” He rattled off everything else that had happened to him that day. And the previous day. And the day before that.
She didn’t ask again.
*****
Seven months after the Hauslers saw the 60 Minutes repeat, Sari wrote to McGaugh. She and Eric needed more information about their son’s unusual memory—and guidance in protecting his tender heart.
Back in 2010, McGaugh had received more than 600 emails in the first two days after the broadcast. They all came from people claiming to possess highly superior autobiographical memory. After a battery of tests, he’d winnowed that to 55. He was still focusing on only adults, he told Sari. But in late June 2013, his team contacted her to discuss Skypeing with Jake. After the Skype conversation, McGaugh asked the Hauslers to take Jake to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to be tested.
A 10-year-old whose superior memory had shown up at age 3 was a fat clue for neuroscience. And McGaugh was a pioneer in this field. When he met his first subject, Jill Price, in 2000, he was doing lab research on memory—but he was injecting adrenaline to boost learning. And his lab subjects had four paws and long pink tails. Price interrupted all of that, telling him she had a memory problem and needed his help.
McGaugh figured she forgot too much. But it turned out she remembered too much—with flawless accuracy. And she’d kept a diary, “a dusty book tied with little ribbons,” that he could use to verify her recall of the smallest details. One wonders why, with that kind of memory, she’d need a diary. “She thought that if she wrote it down, it would go away,” McGaugh explains.
“Scientists are skeptics by nature,” he says. “Then, the skepticism began to wear away.” He published his first paper on highly superior autobiographical memory in 2006. There was nothing to cite at the end, not a single article in the scientific literature on this topic.
Since then, McGaugh’s done all sorts of imaging and testing with his lengthening roster of subjects. “There are structural differences in nine regions,” he says. “But this is a mystery. We still don’t know what is going on in the brain with autobiographical memory. This is not like the kind of science I did before.”
MRI scans show size differences: The temporal lobe, which stores new memories, is bigger, and so is the caudate nucleus, which is involved in habit, learning, and memory. There’s also a more active pathway between the front and back of the brain, increasing various areas’ access to each other.
Many of the people McGaugh has studied have huge, minutely catalogued collections of one thing or another. That might be because they have a larger caudate nucleus, the part of the brain involved in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Or it might simply be a satisfying way to collect and collate a lot of free-floating facts and impressions. “The guess is that the same processes in the brain underlie both,” says McGaugh. “But how the hell we’re going to find out if the correlation is valid is not entirely clear to me at this time.”
He keeps searching.
After he tested Jake, 60 Minutes called back: They wanted to do a follow-up and include the 10-year-old.
The new episode aired January 12, 2014. “It was a Sunday. How about that? I’m pretty good,” McGaugh says, chortling. “It’s always on a Sunday.”
One of the adults who returned to be interviewed again was Bob Petrella. He eased Sari’s mind about grief, telling her that his brother had died, but memory proved a sweet consolation, because he can remember their times together so clearly.
Sari asked the grown-ups about her next worry: Jake’s tendency to remember the negative more strongly than the positive. It’s a universal trait—adrenaline makes powerful memories stick—but when you can already remember just about everything, that bias could dump a mountain of anguish on your shoulders.
One participant acknowledged doing the same thing as a kid, but said that age brings so many more memories to draw from and so many more positive days to focus on that you gain perspective.
People described their superior memories in different ways: as movie montages, super-efficient file cabinets, split-field video with the present on one side and the past on the other. (Sari calls Jake her Google.)
Louise Owen, a professional violinist, tried to sum up their shared ability. “It’s like having a superpower,” she told Jake. “You can be normal… You can be Clark Kent. [But] when you really need to fly, you can totally fly.”
*****
Jake sits cross-legged on his bed, Gracie next to him. “What I care about’s my license plates,” he says, pointing to the bright strip of metal plates that wraps around the room. “I really like Brooklyn. That’s nearly my favorite.” He talks about the family trip to Florida and how he’d love to go to Yellowstone National Park and all of the teams he follows. But he doesn’t mention fourth grade.
“I don’t want to bring up school,” he says when prodded. “Bad subject. Worst subject ever. It’s dreadful. I mean, it’s not getting bullied, but…I’m with immature kids. I get very bored. And they call that not paying attention. They have these things called weekly reviews. I hate it so much! If you do something wrong, that goes on there—everything.”
Which is sort of the way his brain works, in capturing his experiences.
“I’m really good at remembering days,” he explains. “How it felt. If you ask me a bad day in my life, I could tell you one. Or 100.” He’s matter-of-fact, not maudlin. But his mother worries about the combination of super memory and super sensitivity. “He can walk into a room and get a feeling for everyone,” she says.
Asked whether the happy memories balance the sad, Jake says, “I wouldn’t say that much. ’Cause my mom always says, ‘Oh, think of the positive.’ I can’t. That’s the problem.
“I find physical education really interesting,” he says abruptly, “because we actually do stuff that’s fun. Today was 30 jumping squats. Six kids had knee injuries from basketball. I’ll bring up basketball, but not just now. ’Cause basketball’s pretty funny and it’s also pretty sad. I don’t really have any friends. I’m pretty lonely. ’Cause, like, my two friends are—” he picks up Mr. Penguin and Sally the teddy bear.
It’s heartbreaking, seeing that cherubic face with the eyes downcast, long lashes against his rosy cheeks—until he admits he’s exaggerating a little. “Kids at school asked who my crush is, and I said, ‘Stop!’ and they wouldn’t.” He shrugs. “I guess I have one or two friends who are human.”
The lonely part is accurate, though: “I know every capital of every country in the world,” Jake says. “I have, like, one friend who can also kind of do it, but he won’t name every country in the world, and he won’t name the obvious ones. If I ask him what the capital of Lithuania is, he probably won’t even know. I’m kind of on my own.”
In class, Jake blurted a spoiler, no alert, and his teacher thought he’d looked ahead to the book’s ending. He hadn’t. He’d just remembered a key detail and figured it out. “She called me a know-it-all,” he says, “but I’m not. I’m a remember-it-all. And voilà, I’m in trouble.” He sighs. “Sometimes, I wish more people had this. I’m happy that I have it. But maybe I want it to be more popular.”
*****
The weirdest part of all is that superior memory breaks even: People remember so much that it’s hard to glean any extra wisdom; irrelevancies don’t fall away. Nor do they excel at standard memory tests.
“They don’t do a good job of remembering where their eyeglasses are!” says McGaugh. “We have very different kinds of memory, and they have almost nothing to do with each other. This is a memory for things that are important and significant to them. You have to look at the context; the situation in which something occurs is important. And then they select the details out of that and remember them. They are not exceptional learners; they are poor forgetters.”
And what do we know about what allows the brain to forget? McGaugh laughs. “Nobody knows. There is no adequate theory of forgetting. The best is not a good one, and that’s that memories decay like the rusting of iron.”
Jake uses the same image: “Sometimes, I’ll try to forget stuff. Um…not. It just stays in my head. Some stuff gets a little rusty over time.” His brain’s always buzzing: “I never have it rest unless I try and make it rest. Like at a birthday party, I got hit in the head, and I tried to rest it.”
At his mother’s urging, he keeps a diary. “I think it helps at least get it out of your head,” she says.
“It stays in my head,” he points out.
“But does it help keep it from going on and on and on?”
He considers her question gravely. “I think it does.”
Eric says Jake’s “probably close to 100 percent by day going back two years. But it’s quirky, and it doesn’t follow a regular pattern. It’s stuff he’s experienced, but on the other hand, he has huge recall, too—facts and figures.” Jake happens to be really smart, but his intelligence isn’t necessarily connected to his extraordinary memory.
McGaugh—who says he would not want to possess this kind of memory—is intrigued by his subjects’ pleasure whenever they’re asked a memory question. “None would wish not to have it, not a single one,” he says. “They say they feel sorry for the rest of us who do not.”
Jake loves firing back the date something happened or winning a geography bee (which he did recently). But at some point, he’s bound to get sick of the parlor tricks. Will they leave traces, the way showing off double-jointed fingers can make them hard to straighten years later?
Probably not. Jake’s not a showoff, and he’s gracious about typical humans’ absentmindedness. “He never makes you feel bad,” Sari says.
She’s intrigued by one of McGaugh’s ideas: Maybe we all have detailed memories of every day we’ve ever lived and just can’t get at them. She also hopes the ongoing research involving her son will offer insights into preventing or treating Alzheimer’s disease.
For Jake, the practical benefits are surprisingly few. Last year, he decided he needed glasses. Months later, the ophthalmologist asked, “When did this all start?” and Jake said, “On February 24, I woke up and my eyes were different.”
One morning in July, Jake woke up and announced it was his 4,000th day on Earth.
In years to come, he can tell blithe, sociable friends, “We went there on a Tuesday in March two years ago.”
And who knows what career applications his memory might have? Henner is a consultant for the CBS TV series Unforgettable, in which a police detective taps into her superior memory to solve crimes.
So far, Jake’s written a murder mystery. But he really wants to be a brain surgeon. “So I can take out people’s brains. If you got to keep them, that would be really fun. You know, you can’t see a memory. It’s invisible. But the brain’s not pink. It’s kinda green, maybe a little highlighter-yellow and gray and white.
“Memory’s good ’cause you can remember your grocery list or that the Oscars are tonight,” Jake says. He follows three sports teams every season, and he can remember not only all of their scores, but also all of the stadium giveaways for each home game.
“And it sometimes might help with homework,” he says, before adding, “No, not really.”
Does he believe his memory will make him wiser when he grows up?
“No. Maybe I’ll be like one of those people you see in the streets of India,” he says. But he knows the past, not the future, right?
“I can kind of do both,” he says. He pretzels himself, lifting his ankles behind his head with the flexibility of an untried body.
Sari reminds him about how he used to set up correspondences between the numbers of the cars in his Disney Pixar collection and CDs and the Magic Tree House book series, “which has, like, 50 books.”
“Fifty-one,” Jake says.
“Thanks, Jake.”
Does this prodigious memory ever drive her crazy?
“Yep.”
“Like maybe 5,000 times,” Jake adds, grinning at his mom.
“Before we knew about his memory, there would be a song on the radio,” she says, “and maybe the first time he heard it he was sick or unhappy. He’d know three chords in—it was like that old game show Name That Tune—and he’d want us to switch the station. Now, we understand, but then we were like, ‘What?’”
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released June 1, 1967,” Jake remarks. “That was a Thursday.”
Sari asks Siri. The pleasant iPhone voice confirms it.
We talk about Jake’s favorite books. He loves Carl Hiaasen’s young-adult novels because “they are descriptive. They don’t leave you in a blank spot.” He collects trophies and baseball cards. He’s got a flag map and a map of the world stuck to his wall.
“My top movies, I think, are all PG-13,” he says. “Austin Powers movies, Billy Madison, 50 First Dates—it’s really funny. He’s trying to get a girl, and she has short-term memory loss.”
When did Jake first realize his own memory was extraordinary?
“Too long ago,” he says, and sighs. “That’s one question I cannot answer."
