Ritalin made me a dull knife, Nuvigil makes me a katana. While it would let me focus and not get so overwhelmed with runaway thoughts it also made it harder to have that rapid recall that I was already used to.

As a kid I was diagnosed with ADD (though it was when that diagnosis was first becoming popular, so there's no telling if its truly accurate) but I never liked taking the medicine. I was always like this though, even when I was young. Its so easy to get lost in all of it sometimes and it happens so fast and so often that its just mentally exhausting some days. Recall is instant for anything I really need to remember but it comes with all of the extraneous information from the time of that memory and then a wave of connected and somewhat relevant memories and then all the minutia involved with them. When I'm on my Nuvigil (anti-narcoleptic) its like I can't ignore anything. I don't think i have hyperthymesia, just good memory and as such I can't pretend to know exactly how you feel. So no one knows what's going on in there. Their memory does not distract them from ongoing tasks, nor does it hinder their ability to plan future onesĪs far as I know, scientists haven't actually looked at the brain activity of people with HSAM yet. However, HSAM participants typically do not view their memories as excessively intrusive, persistent and/or unwanted or as disruptive of their daily life (rating an average of 3.5 out of 10, 1 indicating their memories are not intrusive, and 10 indicating they are highly intrusive). Although HSAM participants have yet to undergo clinical diagnosis of OCD, the LOI-SF has pointed to non-mnemonic OCD symptoms of intrusive behavior. Repetitive behaviors or mental acts (compulsions) are performed in order to decrease distress associated with these obsessions (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). The diagnostic criterion for obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) includes recurrent ideas, thoughts, impulses or images (obsessions) that are experienced as intrusive, cause marked anxiety and interfere with a person’s daily function. This is what experts say about HSAM and OCD:

No one really knows what's going on in the brains of people with hyperthymesia (now called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, or HSAM).

Photographic memory vs eidetic memory