I know this is not really on topic, but I've always been interested in the connections between memory and intelligence, perhaps because I'm so absent-minded. And I never like to miss an opportunity to plug a Borges short-story. (Borges is the Simpsons of literary reference, since virtually any topic of conversation can be connected in some way to one of his stories.) This story in USA Today about a woman who can remember every day of her life since age 14 is terrifically interesting, particularly because of the trouble she has with abstract concepts. It calls to mind the Borges story, Funes el memorioso (Funes, the Memorious), about Irineo Funes, a young man who, after a fall from a horse, remembers every detail of everything he experiences. Borges talks about how Funes, who is bed-ridden after his fall, passed the time. On several occasions, he recalled his memories of particular days in the past, a project that, each time, took an entire day. On another occasion, using his powers of memory, he created a numbering system in which every number had a different name (names like "Luis Melian Lanifur" and "Agustin de Vedia"). At the end of the story, Borges ventures some comments on the connections between memory and thought. Describing Funes, he says:

He had effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes, there was nothing but particulars -- they were virtually immediate particulars.

The comment about about ignoring is interesting (and additional proof of Borges's perceptiveness), because the USA Today story talks about another person with a prodigious memory who has no trouble with abstract concepts. The difference between the man with perfect memory who can abstract and the woman who cannot seems to be the control the man has over his memories. The woman describes them as crowding in on her even when she doesn't want them, while the man talks about his ability to call them up at will. So Borges is correct in suggesting that perfect memory may not be fatal to the ability to generalize and abstract if one has sufficient control over his thoughts to be able to ignore the memories when they're not useful. In any event, the possibility that a certain degree of forgetting is actually helpful for thinking has always given me some hope.