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Jill Price would be a completely unremarkable person except for the fact that she can remember every moment of her life since 1980. In her memoir, The Woman Who Can't Forget (www.amazon.com/Woman-Cant-Forget-Extraordinary-Science/dp/1416561765), published this year by Simon and Schuster, she describes her capacity to recall the details of any day in her life since the age of 14. Give her the date and within seconds, she is back on that specific day, be it a boring Sunday or a non-eventful Thursday. She can remember the trip to the corner store, the conversation with the postman, and the T.V. show she watched before falling asleep that night. Her exquisite memory for the details of her personal life as well as for public events that occurred on those same days is unique in the history of memory research. She has been studied extensively by researchers at the University of California - San Diego and the results of extensive clinical and neuropsychological testing were written up in a fascinating paper, published in Neurocase in 2006 (http://today.uci.edu/pdf/AJ_2006.pdf). The primary researchers, Larry Cahill and James McGaugh, along with the neuropsychologist, Elizabeth Parker, have dubbed this syndrome, hyperthymestic syndrome, which refers to an uncontrollable, automatic, and non-ceasing extraordinary recall of autobiographical memories from one's life.
Having read the Neurocase paper and listened to Ms. Price's personal accounts of her condition through radio interviews, I have some thoughts about what might be part of the explanation for her rare memory anomaly. First, it is extremely important to note that there are areas of memory in which Ms. Price is not at all extraordinary and even performing at levels considered to be below normal functioning. Ms. Price was not a great student. Her capacity for academic facts, equations and calculations in mathematics, and conceptual abstract thought are all unexceptional. In fact, the results of her psychological testing revealed that she has rather limited abstract abilities. For example, she scored extremely low on a test of Similarities (e.g., "An apple is to fruit as a table is to...). On other tests of memory in which recall of the remembered items required an ability to see a higher order linkage or abstract category that would allow for grouping or "chunking" of the items, she was also weak. The overall pattern of these and other test results along with her own self-report of her educational and career struggles point to ongoing limitations in an ability to make more complex abstractions and to see meaningful connections among both the events and ideas that have entered her mental life. As support for this contention about the deficit in her abstract reasoning, the Neurocase authors suggested that the pattern of her intellectual testing pointed to the kind of left pre-frontal cortex deficits that are seen in individuals with Asperger's and obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
In common with these other syndromes, what Jill Price's hyperthymestic syndrome seems to reflect is a deficit in an inhibitory function controlled by areas in the left pre-frontal cortex. This inhibitory function allows the brain to step back from physical and immediate detail and slot these details into larger units of meaning. For this abstracting process to occur, the brain needs to prioritize the flood of sensory-near experience and allow much of this information to recede into the deepest and most distant recesses of memory. It languishes there, if not forgotten, then certainly banished to a kind of Lethe-like obscurity. Think of this as similar to how a silhouette artist works. Starting with a full sheet of black paper, the trick is to cut away or remove pieces in order to achieve the final abstracted image of the individual's face. Most people's autobiographical memories work like this; we start with a more detailed account of a recent significant event and slowly over time whittle away more and more of the nuances as we hone our memory of the experience to the specific interactions and events that have retained emotional and personal significance for us. The rest of the memory is no more than the narrow dark scraps that are swept away as we settle upon our unique portrait of "the way things happened."
Not so for Jill Price. In the absence of this abstracting, self-organizing system of memory, which is really the part of autobiographical memory associated with meaning and self-definition (see my article on the self-memory system in autobiographical memory written with Martin Conway and Angela Tagini, published in Social Cognition in 2005; http://www.atypon-link.com/GPI/doi/abs/10.1521/soco.22.5.491.50768), she is using an extremely literal and inefficient strategy for organizing her memory. The absence of a meaning filtering mechanism means that she relies on a calendar-dating strategy for organizing all of her previous experiences. Imagine an immense filing cabinet that contains a unique file folder for every passing day. The events of that day are placed in that day's folder, labeled by that calendar day, and placed in the cabinet. The obsessional attention to achieving this feat is indeed awe-inspiring, but eventually one would feel like the sorcerer's apprentice, inundated with facts and dates that seem to have very little use. Despite her phenomenal memory with its legerdemain quality, it is indeed a painful burden to carry.
Jill Price has said that she would not want to change the way that she remembers because it is who she is and she could not imagine being another way. I can understand that having access to the vast scroll of her life events, she would not want to blot them out or lose her ability to review them. Still, it is clear to me why her approach to memory represents an extreme deviation from the typical unremarkable human memory system. The organization of memory by meaning and category rather than simple numerical dating is both more efficient for the social and interpersonal demands posed by a complex society and more fruitful in the cause of self-definition and understanding. Knowing what television show you watched on November 3rd, 1986 is a feat for bar bets and magic shows, but it tells you very little about the quality or the meaning of your life. Jill Price's unusual memory may be one of the best examples to illustrate the point that what we forget is just as important to knowing who we are as what we ultimately remember.
