Do you have a problem remembering some things? I have always been plagued with this problem. Even when I was a little kid, I had a hard time remembering names. As I got older the problem only got worse. I guess that is the natural way of things, our memories seems to decline. Well that happens for most of us, but not for a select few. As a matter of fact these select few have what is known as true photographic memories. They have but to look at, or read something and they retain it, sometimes forever. Can you imagine how handy this must come in when you are a student. No more cramming for tests and such, you just have to look the material over once and you have got an automatic 100% for a grade and if you don't, shame on you. Now there are a select few people who have this ability, but they have other disabilities, such as Kim Peek, the man who the movie Rainman was tailored after. He never forgets anything. He has a photographic or aidetic memory, but it comes at the price of developmental disabilities.

Brad William thought that he was an ordinary guy. He is a radio reporter for a broadcasting station. He never felt that he had any special abilities. Little did he know until relatively recently, that he was a mental superman, a sort of super hero who's powers had been unrealized. As a matter of fact he should be wearing a tight uniform with a brain that has a lighting bolt going through it. You see Brad does have special powers, powers that you and I could only wish for. Brad, like Kim Peek, remembers everything, but Brad doesn't suffer from any disabilities. You have to wonder how many people that there could be in the entire world with this ability? I think that if there was 4 or 5 that didn't have the disabilities to go along with the gift, that would be a lot. I have often wondered if there would be a downside to this thing? I thought about that and I have to feel that there are just some things that we want to forget. Maybe it is the tragic suffering of a friend or loved one who died, or some embarrassing moment that we were subject to, or it could be something that I didn't even think of? I am not saying that we can ever forget our deceased loved ones, what I am saying is that time is a healer and after awhile we are not constantly thinking about that, where as he might be.

Brad Williams started to realize that there was something different about him when he and his family reminisced about road trips that they had taken. I am sure that you remember something about those things, but if I questioned you and asked you what were the hotels that you stayed at, the room numbers and the color of the rugs and wall paper, you would start to have a hard time remembering and might not remember much of that at all. I know that I forget that stuff as soon as I leave except if something exceptional happened while I was there that caused the memory to stick in my brain. Well Brad Williams doesn't have that problem, he would remember everything, every detain, no matter how small when they discussed their prior family trips. His brain was like a filing cabinet and everything he did and saw was neatly filed in it and ready to be retrieved at a second's notice. He says, "It was just stuck there," The theory has always been that these people have their brains wired a different way. That would also seem to account for the deficiencies that some suffer, but this doesn't account for Brad Williams's incredible memory feats. He seems perfectly normal in every way. Could it be that only one connection is different in his brain? I guess I will have to leave that to the scientists to decide.

People like Brad Williams are sought out by science. They prove that having a superior memory is possible, after all he does have one. When they come across someone like this, they want to study him so that they might learn why the rest of us are stuck with a piece of equipment that only operates on a marginal basis at best. Could Brad Williams be the key to a race of supermen, men that will never experience memory loss of any kind? I know one thing, I wouldn't want to be him with all those scientists breathing down his throat. When he was in school he was the state spelling champion. Humm, no wonder. Some of his family felt that he made too big a deal about trifling things. I guess they didn't realize his powers. To ask him to stop was like asking Superman to stop bending steel bars or Spiderman to give up his web. I think he had to do that, he had to let some of those memories out. Well it turns out I was in error when I said that 4 or 5 people with these types of memories and no autism might exist, because three turned up in answer to an article, so instead of 4 or 5, there might be hundreds world wide. This makes me wonder if a superior race of humans is forming right under our noses?

Brad Williams has brothers, but they don't exhibit the same incredible memory traits. Brad Williams memory type is called hyperthymesia. There are only a few known cases, but as I stated above there may be more than we suspect. This may be hard to believe, but a test was set up between Williams and a man who was using the Google search engine on his computer. Each was asked to supply answers to twenty questions. Williams beat the Googler by over eleven minutes. So there you have it, Williams is faster than Google. As they say, this goes beyond the pale. Maybe that is not the correct idiom, since it indicates unacceptable behavior, maybe I should just say that this feat was incredible. Heck who needs Google to do research? They could just invite Brad Williams over to dinner and use him to get their research done even faster.

Erik Williams the brother of Brad, wrote an article about his brother's memory. He stated that if you mention any date, his brother will tell you everything that happened on that day. He states that you can ask him when tv shows premiered, what he was doing on any date. He said that Brad's memory was so good that double checking what he said became pointless. Even though the family noticed this, they never thought to look into this phenomena any deeper. It wasn't until June 5, 2006 that Brad and Erik went to see Dr. Larry Cahill, a researcher into perfect memory. He was tested by having all sorts of dates thrown at him and his brother stated that except for a few obscure plane crashes, Brad knew everything that transpired on any given date. I guess those plane crashes never made it to what he had read, heard and saw that day. Another doctor who was there, Dr. McGaugh, told Erik that indeed Brad had the abilities that they were looking for, he had hyperthymesia. Erik produced a documentary about Brad, since he was a screen writer and felt he had to tell the world about his brother's incredible ability. Apparently people were telling Brad that he should go to a place like Vegas and count cards and things, but that was not for him. Oh he doesn't exactly remember every single thing either, he can't remember everything that happened to him before he was around 4 years old, but after that everything is laid out neatly.

Maybe we should start looking through the population for people with other powers? Who knows what we might find? Maybe there really is a Superman out there or another Einstein or even another Da Vinci? Now that the population of the world has reached such incredible proportions there are bound to be some very unusual people in it. Maybe you are even one of them and don't realize it. I thought that I might have a super memory after all, so I wrote down some important numbers to call, but I forgot where I put the paper.