An Italian man has been struggling to adjust to daily life following a hit-and-run accident that put him in a coma and ultimately erased 39 years worth of memories, including his own family.

Imagine living in the 1980s and then suddenly being transported to present day. Things like smartphones, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, the internet or social media must seem like real-life science fiction, and everyone you used to know is now either gone or much older. It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood movie, but it’s the life story of Luciano d’Adamo, an Italian man who lost the last 39 years of memories following a hit-and-run accident in 2019. After waking up from a coma a few days later, he was convinced he was 24 years old and waiting to be married to his 19-year-old fiance; he didn’t recognize the old woman claiming to be his wife, the 30-something man calling him ‘dad’, or the old man staring back at him from the mirror.

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An Indian man with an incredible memory recently set a new world record by reciting a whopping 14,000 digits of Euler’s number in just 49 minutes.

Deepu V has always had an uncanny memory when it came to numbers. He once set a national record by reciting 2,000 digits of the irrational number pi faster than anyone else, and claims to have committed 500 telephone numbers to memory. But when he heard about a world record for memorizing the most decimal places of Euler’s number, he saw an opportunity to have his name featured in the renowned Guinness Book of Records. He spent four months preparing for this epic attempt and took under an hour to blow the previous record of 10,122 digits right out of the water.

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A German man who survived a terrible car crash six years ago was left unable to transfer short-term memories to his long-term memory, which means he forgets everything when he goes to sleep unless he writes them down.

Daniel Schmidt is lucky to be alive. In 2015, he was involved in a motorway accident that left him with severe physical and brain injuries. He underwent intensive phisyo and speech therapy to regain his ability to speak, but the one thing he couldn’t get back was his memory. After sustaining level three traumatic brain injuries, Schmidt was rendered unable to transfer short-term memories into long-term, which means that whenever he goes to sleep at night, he forgets everything that happened that day, the people he met, the places he visited, the things he did, everything.

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A 37-year-old father of one from Texas woke up one day ready to go to school, thinking it was the 1990s, after losing the last two decades of his life, including ever marrying his wife and having a daughter.

In July of last year, Daniel Porter, a hearing specialist from Texas woke up in his bed just like any other morning, only something was wrong. A woman who he had never seen before was sleeping next to him, and when he looked in the mirror, an “old and fat” man was looking back at him. Daniel had gotten up thinking it was time to go to school, not knowing that he had graduated high-school nearly two decades before, and that the strange woman in his bed was his wife, with whom he had a 10-year-old daughter.

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For the past three months, Riley Horner, a teenage girl from Illinois, has been waking up every morning thinking it’s June 11. To make matters worse, her memory resets every couple of hours, so she can’t even remember things she did or people she met that very day.

Riley’s troubles began after she got accidentally kicked in the head by a teenager who was crowd-surfing during a dance at the FFA State Convention. She was taken to the hospital, but doctors there only diagnosed her with a concussion and sent her home with crutches. Tests showed no brain bleed, tumor, or anything else out of the ordinary, but Riley’s family soon noticed that there was something wrong with her. It was like her brain was suck in the past and refused to make any new memories. But apart from her memory constantly resetting, Riley has also experienced dozens of seizures in the last three months.

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Developed by researchers and designers specializing in typography and behavioral science, Sans Forgetica is a new font designed to help readers better remember the information they read by forcing them to spend a bit more time on each word.

The design of Sans Forgetica is based on a font called Albion, but with substantial modifications to reduce familiarity and attain its goal of engaging the brain more and helping the reader retain more information. It was developed by scientists at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, who believe it could help students studying for exams.

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Most people could probably spend a whole year just looking at IKEA’s 2018 catalogue and still not remember all the details in its 328 pages. But then again, Yaanja Wintersoul is not most people, she is a two-time World Memory Champion so she only needed one week to accomplish the seemingly impossible task.

23-years-old Yaanja Wintersoul says that there’s no such thing as a photographic memory, and that it’s all about training your brain to memorize tiny details that most of us forget almost instantly. She knows what she’s talking about, too. Not only has she won the World Memory Championship twice, set a the world record for the the largest number of names and faces ever memorized by a person, but she’s also become IKEA’s “human catalogue”, memorizing most of the details in the company’s 328-page 2018 catalogue in only a week.

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Can you imagine being able to remember every single experience of your life, every conversation you have ever had, every meal you’ve eaten, every word in your favorite book and even the feel of the clothes you wore on your very first birthday? That’s what Becky Sharrock’s life is like, and as amazing as that ability sounds, she says it can also be quite terrifying at times.

Three years ago, Rebecca Sharrock was reading a newspaper article which mentioned that it was impossible for people to remember details of their lives that had occurred during the first four years of their existence. “What absolute nonsense,” she thought to herself, because she could clearly remember her life all the way back to when she was just 12 days old. Her parents had carried her to the driver’s seat of their car and laid her down for a photo. She remembers looking around and wondering what the seat cover and steering wheel above her were. But it wasn’t nonsense, she was just one of only 80 known people suffering from a mysterious condition called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM).

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