Jill Price: At What Cost Super-Memory?

In an old vaudeville routine, a straight man asks his partner, "Who was the lady
you were with at 7:18 pm on the night of July 23, 1903?" to which the comic, scratches his head, looks puzzled at the audience, then answers, "That was no lady. That was my wife."

The audience laughed partly because of the improbability of remembering specifics of an exact date and time, and partly because of the unexpected reply.

When Jill Price is asked such a question, unlike vaudeville audiences people don't laugh at all.  They are astounded by her memory.  She can recite details of the days of her life since she was fourteen years old, be they sad or happy. The details can be what she had for dinner or saw on the TV.
Examined by MRI, she was found to have areas of her brain three times larger than other women her age. There is a fancy name for her condition, hyperthymestic syndrome.  For her, the continuous, automatic, autobiographical recall of every day of her life since she was fourteen. Another term for her situation is super-autobiographical memory. Her memory can be a curse.

She makes no effort to recall images. She cannot stop them and says they are like home movies "constantly playing in my head, flashing forward and backward through the years relentlessly, taking me to any given moment, entirely of their own volition." She hears a song on the radio and her mind flashes to the moment she first heard it. She writes that "the emotional stress of the rush of memories was compounded by the fact that my memory worked so differently than the norm, it was incredibly difficult to explain to anyone else what was going on in my mind."

As an example, on July 18, 1984, she recalls that it was Wednesday, a quiet summer day. She picked up the book Helter Skelter and read it for the second time. She remembers that the final episode of MASH aired on February 28, 1983, a Monday and a rainy day. The next day the windshield wipers stopped working while she was driving her car. On April 26, 1986, the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl happened on a Saturday. She was visiting friends in Phoenix..

She sought help and finally found a specialist and his team. In her introductory letter to Doctor James McGaugh, University of California, Irvine, a leading memory scientist, she wrote she "can take a date between 1974 and today, and tell you what day it falls on, what I was doing that day, and if anything of great importance occurred on that day. Whenever I see a date flash on the television I automatically go back to that day and remember where I was and what I was doing. It is non-stop, uncontrollable, and totally exhausting." Research scientist Dr. Julia Simner, at the Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, has speculated that her abilities are intimately tied to her visualizations of time in space, a form of synesthesia. While synesthesia for some can be pleasant, such as seeing colors with music, for her it can be wearying.

In her work with McGaugh and his team she learned the profound role memory plays in our identities.  Our personal narrative imparts a sense of self and meaning in life. For most people, a memory is modified slightly, or largely, when revisited. "Selective remembering and an enormous amount of forgetting," as Jill phrases the memory operation of others. This allows people to reshape the narrative of their lives and is what some therapists counsel clients to do: Re-tell the story in a different way.  Their re-shaped memories re-shape the sense of self to make them happier in life. For Jill, this can't happen. Because she can't forget and selectively remember. She is her memories.

For those of us who regret our poor memories, we at least are not captive to continual replay. Our brains allow us to privilege some memories over others as they are somewhat modified with each recall.  She enjoys no such privilege. She opens her book by writing "I know very well how tyrannical memory can be."

Despite all that, Jill Price feels sorry for people can't remember what they were doing the day they fell in love. As girls she and a friend had a marvelous trip to Disneyland but the friend remembered none of it. She rightly observes that a fundamental principle of psychology is that forgotten memories have shaped us in profound ways. Of our behavior we say it's just how we are, and without knowing the underlying cause.

She has an outstanding memory. Interestingly, her enlarged brain areas are also associated with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). She considers her condition both a curse and a blessing. She can recall the times when she was at forks in the road, and she can wish she had made another choice than the one she followed. Short of surgery, she says, nothing can be done about her brain.

At the other end of the spectrum was H.M., as known in his life, and identified as Henry Molaison after death. After a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy to control his epilepsy, he could not remember what he did five minutes before. Committed to clinical care, he could not remember a person who re-entered the room after leaving a few minutes before. He was friendly and exhibited normal intelligence.  When given a task requiring motor skills, he saw it as a new task each day and yet he became increasingly more skilled at the task. His brain remembered while "he" did not.

Jill's book is titled The Woman who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science : a Memoir