Anybody who can understand the implications this has for understanding how memory works, creating memory enhancing drugs or gene alterations, and enhancing human cognition? I mean, DUH!
So? They don't want to use her as a trove of historically important information, but to study her as a person which "super memory".
For that, it doesn't matter if it's about human anatomy, quantum physics, or what was said in every episode of Melrose Place.
The mechanism by which those are absorbed and retained, and in such quality and recall is what's interesting, the content is not important.
>Kinda like a camera with an endless hard drive. Interesting, but what do you do with it?
If I was an engineer for a storage company I'd very much like to know how an "endless hard drive" works. It would solve tons of storage and archiving problems, and could make trillions.
For human memory, a 2x or 3x or 10x increase in storage/recall efficiency would be a huge thing.
Yes, now it kind of makes sense. But why assume her ability is counterbalanced by having trouble remembering other stuff? Nothing of the short is hinted at in the article, and if she had any such issue, I'd expect her or her parents to have noticed. And even if that was the case, why would that make it any less interesting to study?
"Passively absorving banal shit" and remembering it would be any less important to study than some conscious ability to chose what important thing to remember. The latter might be more apparently useful to the person and in general, but a super memory mechanism is interesting enough to study on its own, even it just concerns past lotto numbers.
It's also not the case that "all the examples given are out of the tabloid headlines" - the article gives all kinds of other examples (from a "memory game" as a kid, to answering questions about what she wore, ate, etc at random dates on past years).
In any case, this Nash person has a beautiful mind!
That's kind of the point, though -- she retains trivial information that 99.9999% of brains will discard.
It's almost like everyone wanted to believe and didn't want to push the limits to break their impression of it being some super power.
I just checked her Wikipedia page, and besides a passing mention of her HSAM its pretty spare. I seem to remember (ba-dum-tiss) that it used to be mote comprehensive.
This is pretty normal. Most kids aren't keeping up on politics or business news, especially if they're hyper focused on school (as she seems to be).