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.

Jill Price: The Woman Who Can't Forget

In an old vaudeville routine, a comedian asks his straight man, "Who was the lady you were with at 7:18 pm on the night of July 23, 1903?" to which the straight man 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 on an exact date and time, and partly because of the unexpected reply.

Maybe Jill Price would not know what happened at an exact time but she can recall any day and she can remember it. Unlike vaudeville audiences, people don't laugh at all.  They are astounded by her feats of 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.

Music, Emotion, and Memory

Music points to the role emotion plays in memories. You are driving home from work and you hear a song on the radio. Suddenly, memories come flooding back of your first date, or your first prom, and there you are, seemingly in another time as your hands guide the steering wheel down the road. The neuroscientist would tell you that for all your nostalgia, these are bio-chemical tags in your brain. The more the bio-chemistry, the more powerful the feeling. Read at Discover. The article is quite interesting. It reminds me of that old quantum physics question: how can particles be waves, and waves, particles? How can feelings and memory be chemistry and chemistry be feelings and memory? The short answer, for me anyway, is that reductionism can bring us to understandings but also to quandaries. The parts are not the whole.

Put it differently: sound waves vibrate my ear drums, a form of bio-mechanical engineering. I don't sense any of that. I hear music. In the passage from brain to mind, we may be looking for a physical link that does not exist. Could the consciousness we perceive as mind be as fundamental as gravity? Gravity is an emergent property from mass (substrate particles). Is consciousness an emergent property from some substrata as yet unidentified? This still leaves the world of our feelings unexplained. I believe it will remain so. Rather like the eyes, which see as a kind of cyclops, trying to visually perceive themselves as two.

Remembrance of A Death Foretold

Brueghel: The Triumph of Death

Remembrance of A Death Foretold

Several years ago I received a letter from an old navy buddy. . . "By the time you read this, my last letter, I'll be gone and my ashes will be scattered in the North Atlantic Ocean.". . . . We commute to work, resolved to get the promotion, finish the project, become a better parent, not cheat on the spouse. We look at the buildings we pass, edifices of public authority, proclaiming that this is the world, that it is right and fitting to bend our lives to the edict. Sometimes we stop to ask if the lie doesn't penetrate deeper, but then we shake our heads as if caught dreaming, and we scurry to the elevator to get off at the ninth or tenth or eleventh floor.

At home, the question of the lie returns before we fall asleep. We glimpse the lie of authority; listening to the nightly news, watching the commercials, we ask Is this the Good Life? But we nod off in our easy chairs, dreaming that when we retire things will get better. Better always means when. When wealthy, healthy, happy. Better always allows us to postpone the questions, Who am I? , What is the lie? Am I just John Doe, husband, father, entrepreneur; am I only dedicated, loving, ambitious, methodical, rational, or impulsive? Is it merely the lie of authority, conformity, normality, or sanity?; of capitalism or communism or democracy or autocracy?

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