her mind is one
of a kind... or almost

Imagine your first memory being that of your own baptism. Your baptism as a baby that is. You are just a few weeks old and you can actually remember being placed on the altar, feeling the sensations, experiencing the moments.

That is how Marilu Henner’s memories began and this is her everyday life. A flood of never-ending instances and details locked in a permanent memory vault.

Not only is she a beautiful and talented actor, but she is also among a handful of people on this earth with a section of her brain about ten times larger than the rest of us. The condition is called superior autobiographical memory. She can dial up the details of any given date at any given time. What the weather was like on a particular day, what she ate for lunch, how she felt when she heard the news.

Although she’s had this ability all of her life, Marilu realized the significance of her memory as a young woman. Like many teenagers, she had struggled with her weight and yo-yo dieted her way through high school. When the unthinkable happened and her father passed away when she was only seventeen, Marilu literally began to eat her feelings. At one point, her 5' 7" frame reached 174 pounds, and she knew she had to change her diet and how she looked at her own health.

SHE’S GOT IT

superior autobio- graphical memory
First identified
in 2006 in a
University of
Califronia, Irvine
study, only 33
people share a
mind for dates
and details like a
super hard drive
recording the
minutia of life.

As she moved out of adolescence, Marilu successfully managed to get her weight under control. When in her mid-twenties she was faced with her mother’s untimely passing due to arthritis, she decided the grieving process was not going to be about her weight, it was going to be about her health. It was the memory of how she dealt with her father’s death that kept her from eating her way through her feelings. Instead she would remember. She would remember what meant the most to her, savor the memories of her parents and move forward with a healthy spirit.

Memory work at work
Marilu began to educate herself about nutrition and once she got that information in her head, it was not to be forgotten. So, if she considered going off the food wagon, it was the memory work that kept her from going down the road of overeating. She simply took herself back to what it felt like to feel uncomfortable in her own body and she would choose the healthy action not the food.

We’re all familiar with Albert Einstein’s famous quote: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Marilu rephrases that old quote by stating that it’s not insanity, just a bad memory that keeps us going down the wrong roads repeatedly. And, that’s something we can all change.

One of the ways to break the negative cycles in our lives is to stop trying to forget our bad memories. Marilu recommends doing the exact opposite. She feels it is critical to let the bad memories inform your life, because the truth is you’re never going to block them out anyway. And when you try to, they just become an emotional bogeyman. If you can confront things head on and understand your role in what went well and what went awry, it is then that you can make real change to impact your future.

“We don’t have to rely on taxing our memories
as much because of things like speed dial and GPS. We know that things are so easily accessed that it’s not necessary to put it anywhere. So, we’ve kinda gotten lazy about letting things sear into our brains a bit in order to carry it from one day to the next.”