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Would everyone be genuises... or idiot savants? The thing about recalling everything is that you're forgetting nothing, and there's a WHOLE LOT of stuff that ought to be forgotten (did you wipe your ass 10 times or did you need 15 on June 19th, 1993?). To be able to recall specifics at will, or better yet, to encode specifics in a fashion where you could recall it at will, is the skill that would make... not so much geniuses, but more abled people (there's nothing in your memory recall abilities that directly leads (fosters, though) to creativity, spontanaeity, etc).
CS: The reason for believing that everything is stored comes from A) Some hypnosis case studies but mostly B) Early live brain studies, wherein a little wand with a small electric current was used to stimulate human gray matter. So they found out where the motor area was and what part controlled which body part, where the sensory area was and what part felt which body part. What they also discovered was that you could stimulate an area and the patient would recall an event in their life (nothing spectacular or traumatic, either) with such detail, that you could literally ask them minute details about, say, a newspaper that they were reading, and they could recite verbatim the whole article.
The *really* weird shit is, if you narrowed down which event they were in that they could recall *offhand*, and then legioned (effectively destroyed) the portion of the brain that was stimulated in open surgery, they could still recall offhand as much of the incident as they normally would. This lead to some speculation about the brain working somewhat akin to hologram structures: One bit encompasses the whole shebang.
Is anyone able to sound off sources on this? I only learned about it in Psych some 2 or 3 years ago, and have no idea where to point in terms of who wrote what.
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