Geniuses do not remember everything. While geniuses possess extraordinary intellectual abilities, the notion that they remember everything is a misconception, for it remains largely unrealistic for a human to remember everything by heart.
One may want to argue that the Hyperthymesia condition can make one remember everything. But first, only a few people are affected with hyperthymesia, so the chances that geniuses generally operate under this condition is not really there.
Similarly, the truth behind this notion is that it only comes close to being factual except that victims do not exactly remember everything.
One LinkedIn publication says, “They can remember everything that occurred in their lives”, but much credibility shouldn’t be attached to this as the source is not scientific and may have been sentimental. On the other hand, Medical News Today would be quoted as saying: “…that allows people to remember nearly every event of their lives”— in a publication on the condition of hyperthymesia.
More so, Life Hack had this to say about remembering everything: “Our brains are not made to remember everything that we encounter”.
For the purpose of doing justice to this topic, we have consulted other well-known medical sites and gathered that it is scientifically impossible to remember everything.
But come on, remembering ‘almost everything’ as Mental Floss puts it, is more than enough for a human being.
By and large, we have come to gather that forgetting such details as birthdays, festival dates, rendezvous and things alike are not uncommon with highly intelligent people.
These things don’t stay up in your memory for long as a genius because they are relatively unnecessary and should not take up the space you need for more relevant things up there. Your ability to remember everything could therefore make you struggle with taking in new details. You can compare the human brain with the device you use in reading this piece. There’s usually a storage limit for such devices and the more free they are, the better they work. You see!
With this, it is reasonable to draw a conclusion that that exceptionally intelligent dude in your class forget things too, may be more than the avergely intelligent ones.
There is this popular joke about Albert Einstein once forgetting the route to his house and another time when he wore his wife’s shoes out, mistaking it for his. This may be untrue, but it is out there, and you know what that means.
Before reaching a defined conclusion, I will give you a good real-time example to back our proposition.
Wole Soyinka is an African famous writer, the first black to be awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature. He was wrongly accused sometime in 1967 and consequently imprisoned. To, according to him stay sane, he wrote on toilet papers and discarded cigarettes packages while in the confinement. But upon his release, he couldn’t find the notes. He had to rewrite the notes, but later found the missing composition. Both notes put side-by-side were reportedly the same. He didn’t leave out a thing.
He could have been said to be an example of geniuses who can remember everything except for the fact that he forgot little details like dates and people’s names in subsequent interviews.
“Do geniuses remember everything? No, geniuses are exceptionally intelligent people and not necessarily nonhuman intellectuals..”
— AGE, Prof AGE.
Of course, it cannot be more true that “Everybody forgets something from time to time.” Conclusively, geniuses do not remember everything and that is likely an advantage they maximize for the practice of mindfulness on important details.
Disclaimer: This topic is subject to further research. Your contributions are also welcome, you can throw them to us in the comment below.
