The boy who cannot forget

A Welsh student can remember every detail of his teenage years - including what he had to eat and what the weather was like on any given day.

Aurelien Hayman, 20, from Cardiff, is one of only a handful of people in the world with hyperthymesia, or highly superior autobiographical memory.

"It's not something that I realised overnight, but when I was 14 I discovered that I was quite good at remembering some things that had happened years before," he said.

When asked about the random date of October 1, 2006, he remembers it was a cloudy Sunday, he listened to the song When You Were Young by The Killers, and he had asked out a girl but been turned down.

Not only that, but he recalls that on the Saturday he was wearing a blue t-shirt and saw the girl who would later rebuff him, and that on the Thursday there was a power cut at his home.

The average person retrieves information such as dates from their long-term memory in the right frontal lobe of the brain.

Mr Hayman does the same, but his long-term memory capacity is increased because he also uses the left frontal lobe and occipital areas at the back of the brain.

He said: "There's no method or technique to it. I'm not aware that my memories are being coded. It's like being able to access something in a filing cabinet very quickly.

"It's like the dates have pictures. It's a very visual process - there's a sequence of images."

However, the English literature student at Durham University insists his remarkable memory does not give him an advantage when it comes to exams or essays.

"I have quite a good memory generally but, because what I have is a good autobiographical memory, I don't think it can really help with an academic piece of work at university," he said.