This is a strange topic for a place where I log my Computer activities. This is the only thing I’ve ever posted that sounds bloggy. However I often enjoy listening to old radio broadcasts, often called Old Time Radio. So I was listening to You Bet Your Life, starring Groucho Marx. This episode like most episodes was before my time. It was episode 500 from 4/30/1952. Before playing the game Groucho talks to the contestants…introduced in pairs.
Se he was talking to a girl identified as Charlene Lamb who was 18yo. So her birth year must have been around 1934. She described her recent marriage, she described it down to the hour. So as he was asking Charlene questions. I noticed that she was very precise with dates. Every question was answered like…this happened June 14, 1945. The audience noticed too and would laugh when she responded this way. She answered one question and Groucho said something like at 7:30, kidding her with her preciseness, whereby she corrected him on the time. He asked her another question and once again she responded precisely with a date. Again Groucho jokingly responded oh yeah that was on a Thursday. She quickly corrected him and said no…Tuesday. So with the power of the Internet I looked up the date she gave and sure enough it was on a Tuesday.
The guy who runs this OTR program often comments, at the end of the program about contestants. But he said nothing about Charlene, so I guess it didn’t seem unusual to him. It sure did to me.
Now I (who have a very bad memory) remembered that the actress, Marilu Henner had precise recall of dates. So I googled Marilu Henner and learned the condition is called Hyperthymesia. As the Wikipedia article states “It is extraordinarily rare, with only about 60 people in the world having been diagnosed with the condition as of 2021”. I remember 60 Minutes, a TV news magazine broadcast, covered it at one point. Maybe I remember some other TV news magazine broadcast type report.
Anyway, no one will probably see this but it’s my personal platform, and I don’t have Facebook anymore where people often ask these kind of questions. And I just wondered What ever happened to Charlene Lamb? If she is still alive she would be close to 90yo as of this post. I assume she was never diagnosed with this. It appears it wasn’t even recognized until fairly recently. As a matter of fact, in the clip below, they identify a women as the first person ever diagnosed with this, and she is obviously way younger the Charlene.
This clip says it’s from Australia, but it’s not the one I saw. When this clip was made featuring Marilu, they said only 10 people in the world had it.