Daniel McCartney was born in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania back in 1817. I don’t have a lot about his childhood however, what I can tell you is he was legally blind living with relatives for his entire lifetime, he never married.
He died in 1887 at 70 in Wilton, Iowa. So not an eventful life you may say or be asking yourself. However, as you all know there is a reason I’m writing about him today and now you’ll know why. You see back then he was a walking, talking calculator of tremendous knowledge. He suffered from a (if you want to call it that) disability called Hyperthymestic Syndrome. Don’t know what that means? Well you’re in luck for here we go.
He was famous for his mental ability in two specific areas. He could recall every single day in his life from the age of nine until his death. You could give me a date and he could recall the weather conditions, what he did during the day and what he ate. He also could recall local, regional and national events on any given day. His other ability was to compute difficult mathematical equations within a matter of seconds or in a minute or two. He was once asked to provide the cube root of 4,741,632, without anything other than his mind he was able to compute the answer in three minutes. For those of you who like math the answer is (-168); and 389.017. After you get past two plus two I start to panic.
As I’m writing this there are only about 25 people in the world with this capability.
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