Click on the ‘Listen’ button above to hear the full interview.

About 15 years ago, Nima Veiseh’s life changed. His brain suddenly began recording every experience he was having in vivid detail. In the years since, his memories have been mentally archived in his brain, which has become a vast searchable database of feelings, emotions, and images.

“Almost an entire year of my life is experienced on a daily basis,” he says.

His condition is called hyperthymesia, and was first formally identified in 2006. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have sifted through thousands of individuals to confirm just a few dozen cases. Part of the exceedingly rare condition is now attributed to a higher correlation between the amount of white matter connecting to gray matter in the brain.

See Also: Study: Memories Can Be Passed Between Generations

Veiseh is an academic researcher at George Washington University and a professional painter that goes by the name EnigmaofNewYork. Just having a name to explain his condition has provided him with a sense of stability and structure.

“One half of it is understanding how the memories are organized within ourselves, which has not only taught me a lot about myself, but people around me as well,” he says.

Whether it’s remembering a joke or a dark memory, all of the feelings and emotions Veiseh originally went through come rushing back in full detail.

“The vast majority of people have a great luxury of the half-life of memories, [which] slowly fades into the background over weeks, months and years,” he says. “Whereas without that, since forgetting is not really a luxury that I have, I have to genuinely learn to forgive, since forgiving and forgetting isn’t something that, [it] isn’t really the easiest thing for me.”

See Also: Childhood Amnesia: Why Some Memories Fade and Others Don't

Click on the ‘Listen’ button above to hear the full interview with Veiseh. Check out one of his paintings below.

"The Unresolved Chord is a deconstructed abstraction of what I hear when a guitar chord or progression is played. My work is primarily about taking real-world phenomena -- like a sunrise, wind blowing through a rose bush or a guitar chord being played -- distilling those phenomena into a single-point in space and time, and exploding them as real world artifacts on canvas. This piece actually belongs to a collector in New York City. Its development was informed by my training as both scientist and artist, from a study of a phenomena used by classical Composers, like Mozart or Beethoven. We always wonder how someone like Mozart could make music that tugs on our heart-strings, and the trick he used was to leave chords unresolved until the music finally completed, providing us with a sense of emotional release. To provide a small background on musical theory, chords have progressions that move like a loop in steps. As each of my paintings are the recomposition of many layers, like a chord that is unresolved or has not completed its loop, each of the 20 layers in this painting only go three-quarters around the canvas, then stop. When you look at the piece, your eye subconsciously catches the next layer, and your eye continues around the entirety of the piece, providing a powerful continuity in movement and texture. This 200-year old phenomena used in music is an example of what I have abstracted to your eyes, in order to give the observer a multi-sensory experience that transcends the visual and taps into deeper layers of our mind."

(Enigma of New York)