Here’s a fascinating story from 60 Minutes about something called “superior autobiographical memory,” which basically means being able to remember every day and every moment in your life down to insignificant details. Actress Marilu Henner, 58, best known for her role on Taxi, has this ability. She’s one of only six people that have been identified with it. 60 Minutes anchor Leslie Stahl is good friends with Henner and initially told her producer that she wasn’t interested in this story, because she knew Henner and didn’t think this was as rare as it is.

This ability has only recently been discovered. The handful of people with superior autobiographical memory have proven to scientists that their memories are infallibly accurate by quickly recounting known details from random dates provided to them, including weather conditions and public events. They usually describe their extraordinary ability by simply saying that they “see” the day in question as if it were yesterday.

The people with this talent shown on 60 Minutes seem superficially “normal.” They deny that they’re autistic or savants and researchers say they seem to function normally. They all have OCD-like behaviors, such as organizing and hand washing, but don’t seem to be crippled by them. This may reveal how they’re not overwhelmed by all those vivid memories, because as Henner explained she’s organized them so well she can recall any day at a moments notice.

If you’d like to watch this story, it’s available in two parts online and below. Marilu Henner comes in at around 6:00 in the first video. It cracks me up so much how she can tell you everything that she’s done ever. Fast forward to 9:50 in the first video to see five people with this ability all recall random events and dates at the same time.

MRI results show that people with this ability have parts of their brain that are “significantly larger” than control subjects. The temporal lobe, where memories are stored, and another part of the brain the caudate nucleus, are much larger in this group than in average people. This is somewhat consistent with MRI findings in people with obsessive compulsive disorder, although the results with this group are much more significant.

I had a girlfriend in high school who could recount entire conversations she’d had word for word. It didn’t seem like she was making up dialog at all, and she could tell you the exact words. It was interesting (i.e. gossip worthy) only about 10% of the time and soon became boring. You don’t want to hear about something in real time, you only want to know the important details. This ability to remember every day of your life is fascinating, though. It seems like such a mixed blessing. One person with
superior autobiographical memory declined to be interviewed by 60 Minutes as she finds that it interferes too much with her life.

On a superficial level, I want Marilu Henner to come organize my closet. She’s incredible.

You can read more about this phenomenal ability on CBS.com.

Marilu Henner on “Time Traveling.” This is a one minute video demonstrating her ability:

60 Minutes episode on superior autobiographical memory Part 1

60 Minutes episode on superior autobiographical memory Part 2

We’re not just escaping thoughts of debt, boredom, and general disappointment in life by focusing on celebrities instead of our problems – we’re getting a taste of immortality too, according to a recent study. Researchers at the University of Illinois found that when people thought about their death, they gave higher estimates for how long that they thought various dead and living celebrities would be remembered. The assumption is that people who identify with and study famous people are somehow hoping they’ll live on in the hearts and minds of others too. By finding that celebrities are just like us, we hope to live on beyond our earthly boundaries as well. Psychologists say it’s a healthy way to cope with fear of death. This article is kind of worded confusingly, but I think I get the gist.

According to “terror management theory,” much of our anxieties and motivations emerge from an existential terror of the nothingness that comes after death. Dozens of studies show that activating thoughts of death (increasing “mortality salience”), even subconsciously, leads us to grasp for meaning and structure in the world by, say, identifying with and endorsing authorities or social groups or cultural mores that will survive our own demise. Because then a part of our essential self–our beliefs and values–will carry on in some form outside our worm-baiting bodies.

Pelin Kesebir and Chi-Yue Chiu at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who presented their research at the 2008 meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, found that after people thought about their own deaths, their estimates of how long various living and dead celebrities would be remembered increased. And the magnitude of the increase for each famous person was related to how representative of American values people considered them. If you’re preoccupied with leaving your mark on the world, and someone famous embodies your beliefs, you peg your legacy on his or her legacy.

In another study, people thought a plane was less likely to crash when it carried a celeb who represented their cultural values. And the more iconic the person, the greater his protective force on the plane, even after controlling for how much the subjects liked or respected the person. We unintentionally convince ourselves that symbols of our identity approach immortality not just figuratively but literally.

In a third study, also unpublished, subjects imagined an encounter with Oprah Winfrey (a figure Kesebir and Chiu dub “quisi-immortal”) at a Chicago coffee shop. Those with death on the mind pictured the experience as being more pleasant than others did.

Is celebrity obsession unhealthy? “We all need these buffers,” Kesebir says. “Famous people can serve as inspirational figures. They can provide the kind of existential stamina. They can show that you yourself can become immortal. So they’re in a way what’s best about a culture. They can serve as compasses. I don’t think that’s unhealthy.”

[From Blogs.psychologytoday.com via WeSmirch]

You’re not procrastinating at work – you’re making yourself feel better so you can do your work and not get too bummed out by the reality of our existence. We can at least spend some time looking at the beautiful rich people and dreaming that we’ll be young, lovely and immortal in our way too. This is the best justification for my career that I’ve heard all week.

The NY Daily News reports on a new study in the Journal of Family Psychology that shows that couples are happier and more satisfied in their marriages when the man is less attractive than the woman. This could be partially due to the fact that men, the ones who are traditionally more likely to cheat, are less interested in other women when their wives are hot.

“Both spouses tended to behave more positively when wives were more attractive than their husbands and more negatively when husbands were more attractive than their wives,” said the study by UCLA’s Benjamin Karney.

Karney also found that it doesn’t matter how much better looking the wife is than the husband – just that there is a discrepancy.

From Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller to Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, beautiful women have been marrying less attractive men through the ages.

Consider Howard Stern and his fiancée, Beth Ostrosky; Christina Aguilera and her geeky husband, Jordan Bratman, or Sienna Miller’s latest fling with homely actor Rhys Ifans.

According to the study, it is evolution that dictates that physical attractiveness of long-term mates is more important to men than to women.

Men are looking for a way to carry on their genes and see physical attractiveness as an indicator of strong genetics.

“Because physical attractiveness is less important to women, in contrast, relative attractiveness may only affect them through its effect on their husbands,” the study says.

[From The NY Daily News]

This is interesting, because I thought I learned in psychology class that couples who were matched in levels of attractiveness were the ones who lasted. This story made me think of Cate Blanchett’s husband and I feel bad for using them as an example, but they’re the first ones who came to mind. Cate, 38, has been married to screenwriter and playwright Andrew Upton, 41, for just over 10 years and they are expecting their third child together next month. Cate is one of Hollywood’s most beautiful actresses and her husband looks refreshingly plain.

The Daily News quotes people explaining the ugly guy = happy marriage phenomenon by saying that “When a woman looks better in a relationship she feels like she has nothing to worry about,” and “the men try harder so it makes for a better marriage.”

And I thought it had more to do with shared interests and communication. It would seem to help if the less attractive man was incredibly rich and kind too.

Christina Aguilera and Jordan Bratman are shown on 9/29/07. Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton are shown on 11/4/07 and 6/14/07, thanks to Splash News.

Evolutionary psychology is the study of human behavior as the result of natural selection. Our patterns in choosing mates, reproducing, and going about our daily activities are explained as adaptations of how our ancestors adjusted to their environments. Our primary goal as humans, claim followers of evolutionary psychology, is to make sure that our genes are passed on to the next generation. For that reason, women may seek out older, more wealthy mates that can provide for offspring, while men may look for younger, more fertile females who can produce more heirs.

Our primitive ancestors lived in small groups, under which they had to ensure that their needs were met. Our tendencies to help others, even in modern-day society in which we receive no direct benefit, are explained as an adaptive way that we ensured our own survival through reciprocity.

In primitive societies where everyone lived together, it was also incredibly important to pay attention to who was sleeping with whom and who did what. We’re naturally nosy because we once needed gossip to survive. If someone was pregnant, breaking up or hooking up, our ancestors needed to know because it directly affected them. The media makes celebrities recognizable to everyone, and it’s in our nature to talk about them as if they were friends and family:

Morality most likely evolved in these tiny bands of 100-200 people as a form of reciprocal altruism, or I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine. But as Lincoln noted, men are not angels. There are cheaters. Individuals defect from informal contracts. Reciprocal altruism, in the long run, only works when you know who will cooperate and who will defect. In these small groups cooperation is regulated through a complex feedback loop of communication between members of the community. (This also helps to explain why people in big cities can get away with being rude, inconsiderate, and uncooperative—they are anonymous and thus not subject to the normal checks and balances that come with knowing people and seeing them every day.) In order to play the game of reciprocation you need to know whose back needs scratching and who you will trust to scratch yours. This information is gathered through telling stories abou other people, better known as gossip. According to anthropologist Jerome Barkow (1992, 627-628):

If no one tells you the gossip, you are an outsider. Gossip from an anthropologist’s perspective is a means of social control, a sanction that forces one to adhere more closely to social norms than one would otherwise be inclined. Reputation is determined by gossip, and the casual conversations of others affect one’s relative standing and one’s acceptability as a mate or as a partner in social exchange. In Euro-American society, gossiping may at times be publicly disvalued and disowned, but it remains a favorite pastime, as it no doubt is in all human societies.

The etymology of the word “gossip,” in fact, is enlightening. The root stems are “god” and “sib” and meant “akin or related.” Its early use included “one who has contracted spiritual affinity with another,” “a godfather or godmother,” “a sponsor,” and “applied to a woman’s female friends invited to be present at a birth” (where they would gossip). The word then mutates into talk surrounding those who are akin or related to us (Oxford English Dictionary). Not surprising, we are especially interested in gossiping about the activities of others that most effects our inclusive fitness, that is, our reproductive success, the reproductive success of our relatives, and the reciprocation of those around us. In the Bio-Cultural Evolutionary Pyramid from the previous chapter, gossip and storytelling are most common and effectual in the middle levels of the family, extended family, and community. It is here where we find our favorite subjects of gossip—sex, generosity, cheating, aggression, violence, social status and standings, births and deaths, political and religious commitments, physical and psychological health, and the various nuances of human relations, particularly friendships and alliances. Normal gossip, then, is about relatives, close friends, and those in our immediate sphere of influence in the community, plus members of the community or society that are high ranking or have high social status. Gossip is the stuff of which not only soap operas, but grand operas are made.

But why, in our culture, do we gossip about total strangers, namely celebrities? The probable reason is that the mass media makes these figures so familiar to us that they seem like our relatives, friends, and members of the community. This is true even for fictional characters on television. “Who shot JR?” was a topic of much conversation in the 1980s. If we do not have Cinderella, we create one in people like Diana Spencer. Why would anyone care who Princess Diana slept with or what her status was within the Royal Family? Because our Pleistocene brains are being tricked into thinking that Princess Diana is someone we personally know and someone we should care about.

[Written by Michael Shermer and found on Human-nature.com]

So when you indulge in celebrity gossip daily, don’t feel guilty, it’s in our nature. It’s also in our nature to overeat to prepare for inevitable periods of scarcity which never come, so I guess I shouldn’t keep trying to justify my celebrity obsession with scientific reasons.

Thanks to my friend David for reminding me of this. I’ve read a few books on evolutionary psychology, but that was years ago and I’m by no means an expert. If you know more about this field please add your thoughts in the comments.

Here is Wikipedia’s entry on Evolutionary Psychology, and here’s a FAQ about the field. I also wanted to recommend David Buss’ book Evolution of Desire, but a lot of hardcore evolutionary psychologists are trashing it for being too salacious without enough substance. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed it.