Jill Price has been dubbed The Woman Who Can’t Forget:
NYU cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus discovered the source of her hyperthymestic syndrome:
Soon, though, the limitations of her memory begin to show. My next questionnaire is on the just-concluded 2008 presidential election, and here things go less well. She is off by a few days on Hillary Clinton’s withdrawal from the race and clueless on the Iowa caucuses. Price nails both the Republican convention and the St. Louis vice presidential debate (she was at a regular Thursday dinner that night) but can’t say the precise date when Obama clinched the nomination. When it comes to the 2004 election, she opts out entirely. I soon find that except for her own personal history and certain categories like television and airplane crashes, Price’s memory isn’t much better than anyone else’s. She struggled in school, is no good at history before 1965, and seems genuinely miffed that she was once asked when the Magna Carta was signed (“Do I look like I’m 500 years old?”).
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If Price’s memory of her own history is so precise, why is it so average for everything else? Or, more to the point, if her memory for everything else is so ordinary, why is her memory of her own history so extraordinary? The answer has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with personality.Price remembers so much about herself because she thinks about herself — and her past — almost constantly. She still has every stuffed animal she’s ever gotten, enough (as she showed me in a photograph) to completely cover the surface of her childhood bed. She has 2,000 videotapes and countless audiotapes, not to mention more than 50,000 pages of diary entries in idiosyncratic handwriting — so dense that it’s almost unreadable. Until recently she owned a copy of every TV Guide since summer 1989. I’m not sure Price wants to catalog her life like this, but she can’t help herself. When she tells me that one of her biggest regrets in life is that no one followed her around with a microphone during her childhood, I’m not the least bit surprised. In her own words, she lives as if there’s a split screen running in her mind — one half on the present, the other on the past.