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Copyright 2008 by Jill Price
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Price, Jill.
The woman who cant forget : the extraordinary story of living with the most remarkable memory known to science / Jill Price with Bart Davis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
1. Price, Jill, 1965. 2. Long-term memoryBiography. 3. Memory disorders
PatientsCaliforniaBiography. I. Davis, Bart, 1950. II. Title.
BF378.L65P75 2008
153.1'2092dc22
[B] 2008004257
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6252-8
ISBN-10: 1-4165-6252-4
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This book is dedicated to the three people who
know me best and I love the most:
my mother Roz, my father Lenny, and my brother Michael
and
To my husband Jim, who made life beautiful and
bearable for me. I love and miss you.
and Walter
CONTENTS
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 Austens 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 syndromethe 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 placeor even minor eventsas 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 youre whisked off to a scene of you at seventeen driving around town with your best friends; and before long youre on the beach during a family vacation when you were three. Thats how I experience my memories. I never know what I might remember next, and my recall is so vivid and true to life that its as though Im actually reliving the days, for good and for bad.
I can recall memories at will when Im asked to, but on a regular basis my remembering is automatic. I dont make any effort to call memories up; they just fill my mind. In fact, theyre not under my conscious control, and much as Id like to, I cant stop them. They will pop into my head, maybe triggered by someone mentioning a date or a name, or Ill 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 doesnt stop there, with one memory; it rushes from one to a next and a next, flipping wildly through days as though theyre cards in a Rolodex.
As I grew up and more and more memories were stored in my brain, more and more of them flashed through my mind in this endless barrage, and I became a prisoner to my memory. The emotional stress of the rush of memories was compounded by the fact that because my memory worked so differently from the norm, it was incredibly difficult to explain to anyone else what was going on in my mind. I had a condition that had never before been diagnosed, and as much as I would try to explain how my memories assaulted me, my parents couldnt really grasp the nature of what was happening.
My mother would tell me not to dwell on things so much, and Id try to explain that I wasnt dwelling, that the memories just flooded my mind. But that didnt make any sense to her. Nobody could understand, including me, and in time I was so frustrated by trying to describe the experience that I simply gave up and began keeping it almost entirely to myself.
Though I hate the idea of losing any of my memories, its also true that learning how to manage a life in the present with so much of the past continually replaying itself in my mind has been quite a challenge, often a debilitating one. I have struggled through many difficult episodes of being emotionally overwhelmed by my memory through the course of my life. Then finally I decided I had to reach out and try to discover whatever I could about what was going on in my head and why. By a stroke of what now seems to me divine providence, I went online and did a search for memory, and to my great good fortune, the first entry that came up was to Dr. James McGaugh, a leading memory researcher affiliated with the University of California at Irvine (UCI).
I had been sure that my search would send me to some Web site all about memory and that Id read about other people like me. Little did I know just how unusual my condition is. Though nothing on the Web could explain my memory, the next best thing it could have done was to take me to Dr. McGaugh. He is one of the foremost memory experts in the world and the author of over 500 scientific papers on human memory. His list of awards and honors was impressive, and I saw that he had lectured at a host of universities and institutions around the world. I cant say that I understood much of what I read about his workthe titles of the papers alone were dauntingbut as soon as I found him, I thought, This is the man whos going to tell me whats going on.
Even so, I felt some trepidation about contacting him. Would he be interested in me? Would he have time for me? I would be contacting him out of the blue, and he was clearly a very busy man. It took me three days to compose an e-mail to him, but at last, on June 8, 2000, I sent it off:
Dear Dr. McGaugh,
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 memoryand 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.
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