As Healy got older, he realized that painful events that happened 20 or 30 years ago would come back to him with the same emotional intensity, as if he were reliving those moments again, like when he pledged a fraternity in college but did not get in because he was heavyset and shy. Or when he was let go from his first job out of college after just two months. But he learned to live with the negative memories and put a positive spin on them. He went on to work as a counselor helping others do the same, even writing books on his experiences of living with phenomenal memory.

When he saw a 20/20 episode on May 9, 2008, about McGaugh’s research. Healy sent UC Irvine researchers his memoir, and began answering quiz questions conducted by graduate students over the phone, leading up to the eventual UC Irvine visit. Remembering that day, Healy told me he could again picture McGaugh, whose left eyeglass was cloudy. He described the long table, the nondescript room, and he saw me sitting to his left.

“The first thing they asked me to do, was to write down a series of letters and numbers,” Healy said. He remembered entering the room and immediately being asked to approach the board, which he saw so clearly that he described it to me as green, not black. He said he wrote with chalk. He was then told to turn around with his back against the board and recall what he had written.

“I didn't do so well with letters,” Healy said. But he still remembered the numbers, like 1, 9, 6, and 4. After the board demonstration, he remembered answering a long series of additional questions.

Part of what he wrote on the board that day was indeed 1, 9, 6, and 4, in that order, according to my tape recorder and notes. But the green board was actually a whiteboard. And he used colored markers, not chalk.

Also, Healy was asked to write on the board 46 minutes after answering a series of memory questions—not first thing. And I sat on his right, on the outside of circle, not on his left at the table. My reporting counted seven people, plus myself in the room, while Healy put the number at “15 or so.”

It seems “puzzling why (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) individuals remember some trivial details, such as what they had for lunch 10 years ago, but not others, such as words on a word list or photographs in a slideshow,” Patihis and colleagues noted in the PNAS study. “The answer to this may be that they may extract some personally relevant meaning from only some trivial details and weave them into the narrative for a given day.”

For all of us, the stronger the emotion attached to a moment, the more likely those parts of our brains involved in memory will become activated. As McGaugh told me, you wouldn't remember every commute you took to work each day. But if along one you witnessed a deadly crash, you would likely remember that one. Memories that stick with us are tinged with emotion.