You Must Remember This
June 1, 2026 at 09:57PMJonathan Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize winner and professor of science journalism, is “The Memory Man” in his family. His brother Eric, a creator of Dora the Explorer, is not. Weiner, a professor of science journalism, explores the ways in which autobiographical memory—from “highly superior” to “severely deficient,” “relentless remembering” to dry, factual recall—affect our sense of self over time. As with “Double Exposure,” his excellent essay about childhood amnesia, Weiner tests his own boundaries, finding a neuropsychologist to run a memory test on himself and his brother.
On the morning of Friday, September 19, a gentle, sunny, late-summer morning—it happened to be the anniversary of our father’s death—I went out on my terrace to take a set of memory tests. Eric was planning to take the same tests at his place, not many blocks away. The tests came from Levine, who has now been studying autobiographical memory for 30 years. He was eager to explore our case, he told me. “It’s scientifically interesting for me,” he said. “You know, two brothers, and both writers. So similar, yet so different. It’s quite interesting.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/06/01/autobiographical-memory-hyperthymesia/
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