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K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, believes that at bottom, AJ might not be all that different from the rest of us. After the initial announcement of AJ's condition in the journal Neurocase, Ericsson suggested that what needs to be explained about AJ is not some extraordinary, unprecedented innate memory but rather her extraordinary obsession with her past. People always remember things that are important to them. Baseball fanatics often have an encyclopedic knowledge for statistics, chess masters often remember tricky gambits that took place years ago, actors often remember scripts long after performing them. Everyone has got a memory for something. Ericsson believes that if anyone cared about holding on to the past as much as AJ does, the feat of memorizing one's life would be well within reach.

I mention Ericsson's theory to AJ, and she becomes visibly upset. "I just want to call him on the phone and yell at him. If I spent that much time memorizing my life, then I really would be a boring person," she says. "I don't sit around and memorize it. I just know it."

Remembering everything is both maddening and lonely for AJ. "I remember good, which is very comforting. But I also remember bad—and every bad choice," she says. "And I really don't give myself a break. There are all these forks in the road, moments you have to make a choice, and then it's ten years later, and I'm still beating myself up over them. I don't forgive myself for a lot of things. Your memory is the way it is to protect you. I feel like it just hasn't protected me. I would love just for five minutes to be a simple person and not have all this stuff in my head. "Most people have called what I have a gift," AJ says, "but I call it a burden."

The whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the massive glob of neurons that interpret it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what is about to happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Our brains are fundamentally prediction machines, and to work they have to find order in the chaos of possible memories. Most of the things that pass through our brains don't need to be remembered any longer than they need to be thought about.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has developed a taxonomy of forgetting to catalog what he calls the seven sins of memory. The sin of absentmindedness: Yo-Yo Ma forgetting his 2.5-million-dollar cello in the back of a taxi. The Vietnam War veteran still haunted by the battlefield suffers from the sin of persistence. The politician who loses a word on the tip of his tongue during a stump speech is experiencing the sin of blocking. Though we curse these failures of memory on an almost daily basis, Schacter says, that's only because we don't see their benefits. Each sin is really the flip side of a virtue, "a price we pay for processes and functions that serve us well in many respects." There are good evolutionary reasons why our memories fail us in the specific ways they do. If everything we looked at, smelled, heard, or thought about was immediately filed away in the enormous database that is our long-term memory, we'd be drowning in irrelevant information.

In his short story "Funes the Memorious," Jorge Luis Borges describes a man crippled by an inability to forget. He remembers every detail of his life, but he can't distinguish between the trivial and the important. He can't prioritize, he can't generalize. He is "virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas." Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget."

To age is to forget, also. Roughly five million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, and even more suffer from mild cognitive impairment, or lesser degrees of memory loss. When asked to recall a list of 15 words read 20 minutes earlier, octogenarians in one large study recalled fewer than 60 percent, while the twentysomethings could remember close to 90 percent.

Not surprisingly, people have been searching a long time for chemicals that might halt that tide of forgetting. According to the Franciscan Bernardo de Lavinheta, writing in the early 1500s, "Artificial memory is twofold: the first part consists in medicines and poultices." The second part, of course, is the art of memory, which Lavinheta deemed both safer and more effective (since memory medicines can sometimes have the unfortunate side effect of "drying up the brain"). Today ginkgo biloba is sold as an over-the-counter supplement, or added to fruit smoothies and "smart" soft drinks, even without conclusive evidence that it either boosts memory—or dries up the brain.

Within the past decades, drug companies have elevated the search to brave new heights. Armed with a sophisticated understanding of memory's molecular underpinnings, they've sought to create new drugs that amplify the brain's natural capacity to remember. In recent years, at least three companies have been formed with the express purpose of developing memory drugs. One of those companies, Cortex Pharmaceuticals, is attempting to develop a class of molecules known as ampakines, which facilitate the transmission of the neurotransmitter glutamate. Glutamate is one of the primary excitatory chemicals passed across the synapses between neurons. By amplifying its effects, Cortex hopes to improve the brain's underlying ability to form and retrieve memories. When administered to middle-age rats, one ampakine was able to fully reverse their age-related decline in the cellular mechanism of memory.

It may not be long before drugs such as ampakines begin to reach the market; when they do, they could have an enormous impact on society. Though the pharmaceutical companies are searching for therapeutic treatments to stave off Alzheimer's and combat dementia, it seems inevitable that their pills will end up in the hands of students cramming for exams and probably a whole lot of other people who just want to enhance their brains. Already psycho-stimulants designed to treat ADHD, like Adderall and Ritalin, are used as "study buddies" by as many as one in four students at some colleges trying to increase their concentration and improve their memories.

All of this raises some troubling ethical questions. Would we choose to live in a society where people have vastly better memories? In fact, what would it even mean to have a better memory? Would it mean remembering things only exactly as they happened, free from the revisions and exaggerations that our mind naturally creates? Would it mean having a memory that forgets traumas? Would it mean having a memory that remembers only those things we want it to remember? Would it mean becoming AJ?

I want to see EP's unconscious, nondeclarative memory at work, so I ask him if he's interested in taking me on a walk around his neighborhood. He says, "not really," so I wait and ask him again a couple minutes later. This time he agrees. We walk out the front door into the high afternoon sun and turn right. I ask EP why we're not turning to the left instead.

"I'd just rather not go that way. This is just the way I go. I don't know why," he says.

If I asked him to draw a map of the route he takes at least three times a day, he'd never be able to do it. He doesn't even know his own address, or (almost as improbably for someone from San Diego) which way the ocean is. But after so many years of taking the same walk, the journey has etched itself on his unconscious. His wife, Beverly, now lets him go out alone, even though a single wrong turn would leave him completely lost. Sometimes he comes back from his walks with objects he's picked up along the way: a stack of round stones, a puppy, somebody's wallet. He's never able to explain how they came into his possession.

"Our neighbors love him because he'll come up to them and just start talking to them," Beverly says. Even though he thinks he's meeting them for the first time, he's learned through habit that these are people he should feel comfortable around, and he interprets those unconscious feelings of comfort as a good reason to stop and say hello.

We cross the street and I'm alone with EP for the first time. He doesn't know who I am or what I'm doing at his side, although he seems to sense that I'm there for some good reason. He is trapped in the ultimate existential nightmare, blind to the reality in which he lives. The impulse strikes me to help him escape, at least for a second. I want to take him by the arm and shake him. "You have a rare and debilitating memory disorder," I want to tell him. "The last 50 years have been lost to you. In less than a minute, you're going to forget that this conversation ever even happened." I imagine the sheer horror that would befall him, the momentary clarity, the gaping emptiness that would open up in front of him, and close just as quickly. And then the passing car or the singing bird that would snap him back into his oblivious bubble.

We turn around and walk back down the street whose name he's forgotten, past the waving neighbors he doesn't recognize, to a home he doesn't know. In front of the house, there is a car parked with tinted windows. We turn to look at our reflections. I ask EP what he sees.

"An old man," he says. "That's all."

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