Book Excerpt: 'The Woman Who Can't Forget'

May 9, 2008 — -- Jill Price was 12 years old when first realized she had an amazing memory to call up events from her life. Since the age of 14, she has had total recall.

She is the first person diagnosed with the condition, which scientists have named hyperthymestic syndrome, based on the Greek word thymesis, or "remembering," and hyper, meaning "more than normal."

While Price can remember most of her life, it is difficult for her to memorize day-to-day information. In fact, she wasn't a very good student. The stress of a constant influx of memories from her past left her emotional exhausted.

Now 42, Price has detailed her condition in a new book called, "The Woman Who Can't Forget," with writer Bart Davis. You can read an excerpt from the book below.

Prologue

The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control!
-- Fanny Price, in Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park"

I know very well how tyrannical the memory can be. I have the first diagnosed case of a memory condition that the scientists who have studied me termed hyperthymestic syndrome—the continuous, automatic autobiographical recall of every day of my life from when I was age fourteen on. My memory started to become shockingly complete in 1974, when I was eight years old. From 1980 on, it is near perfect. Give me a date from that year forward and I can instantly tell you what day of the week it was, what I did on that day, and any major event that took place—or even minor events—as long as I heard about them on that day.

My memories are like scenes from home movies of every day of my life, constantly playing in my head, flashing forward and backward through the years relentlessly, taking me to any given moment, entirely of their own volition. Imagine if someone had made videos of you from the time you were a child, following you around all day, day by day, and then combined them all onto one DVD, and you sat in a room and watched that DVD on a machine set to shuffle randomly through all the tracks. There you are as a ten-year-old in your family room watching The Brady Bunch; then you're whisked off to a scene of you at seventeen driving around town with your best friends; and before long you're on the beach during a family vacation when you were three. That's how I experience my memories. I never know what I might remember next, and my recall is so vivid and true to life that it's as though I'm actually reliving the days, for good and for bad.

I can recall memories at will when I'm asked to, but on a regular basis my remembering is automatic. I don't make any effort to call memories up; they just fill my mind. In fact, they're not under my conscious control, and much as I'd like to, I can't stop them. They will pop into my head, maybe triggered by someone mentioning a date or a name, or I'll hear a song on the radio, and whether I want to return to a particular time or not, my mind is off and running right to that moment. My recall doesn't stop there, with one memory; it rushes from one to a next and a next, flipping wildly through days as though they're cards in a Rolodex.

As I sit here trying to figure out where to begin explaining why I am writing you and your colleague, I just hope somehow you can help me. I am thirty-four years old and since I was eleven I have had this unbelievable ability to recall my past. I 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....

Amazingly, he responded within 90 minutes, saying that if I lived anywhere close to UCI, he would be interested in meeting with me. That was a watershed moment in my life. How fortunate that I lived right up the highway from him, only an hour away in Los Angeles.

Though I was nervous and even scared about reaching out to the scientific community, the clarification and validation the scientists have given me about how my memory works, and that it is so unusual, has been a source of significant comfort. I am also greatly heartened to have learned that it turns out that the ways in which my memory is so different shed a good deal of light on many important mysteries about memory—and also about forgetting. My hope now is that the study of my memory will not only hold answers to long-standing questions about how normal human memory works but may lead to significant findings about the tragic disorders of memory loss.

The work I've done with Dr. McGaugh and his team has already helped me to see not only my own life in new terms, but also the lives of others and how memory plays such a powerful role in everyone's life. I've realized with more clarity, as I've reflected on my life in the process of writing this book and been exposed to findings in a broad range of memory science, just how profoundly our memories assist in constructing our sense of who we are and of the meaning of our lives. Whereas people generally create narratives of their lives that are fashioned by a process of selective remembering and an enormous amount of forgetting, and continually recraft that narrative through the course of life, I have not been able to do so. I came to realize in a flash of insight one day that whereas memory generally contributes to the construction of our sense of self, in my case, in so many ways my memory is my sense of self.I do have a storehouse of memories that are more important to me than others and that I travel to often in my mind for comfort and as a refuge, but I have all the other days there too, impressing themselves on me all the time. It's as though I have all of my prior selves still inside me, the self I was on every day of my life, like her or not, nested as in a Russian doll—inside today's Jill are complete replicas of yesterday's Jill and the Jills for all the days stretching so far back in time. In that sense, I don't so much have a story of my self as I have a remarkably detailed memory of my self.