Med-Tech  :  Health   RSS

Total Recall: The Woman Who Can't Forget

By Gary Marcus Email 03.23.09
Media sensation Jill Price in the Southern California home she shares with her parents.
Photo: Bryce Duffy

Yet here I am, and here is Price. The three UC Irvine scientists who studied her decided that her case deserved its own name—hyperthymestic syndrome, academic Greek for "exceptional memory"—and it's not hard to see why.

I come prepared with a stack of questionnaires, and when we return to her house, Price is kind enough to let me administer my tests, easily blowing through the first few. I ask, for example, if she can tell me some dates of famous accidents and airline crashes; she's all but unstoppable. She instantly retrieves from memory the exact dates of the explosions of space shuttle Challenger and Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. She remembers not just that September 25, 1978, was when a PSA flight crashed in San Diego but also that the jet collided with a Cessna. She can go in either direction, disaster to date or date to disaster. When I say "January 13, 1982," Price has no trouble recalling the Air Florida flight that plummeted into the Potomac.

A Day in the Life

Jill Price keeps a detailed diary of her activities, including the time she spent with the author.

According to McGaugh's Neurocase article, Price is even more astounding on the events of her own life. At the scientists' behest, for example, she recalled—without warning and in just 10 minutes—what she'd done on every Easter since 1980. "April 6, 1980: 9th grade, Easter vacation ends. April 19, 1981: 10th grade, new boyfriend, H. April 11, 1982: 11th grade, grandparents visiting for Passover ..."

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?").

For a scientist like me, the real test is to see how well Price can remember something new. I am especially interested in memory distortions. If you read an average person a list of words like thread, pin, eye, sewing, sharp, point, prick, thimble, haystack, thorn, hurt, injection, syringe, cloth, and knitting, and then ask them to repeat the words, they'll likely imagine they've heard needle even though it's not on the list.

Can Price sail past the trap of memory distortion? No, she can't. I read her five lists of words drawn from a psychological test known as the DRM, and not only does she miss a number of words, she also recalls hearing three I didn't say. Her performance may be a little above average, but no more than that.

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.

The onset of Price's exceptional recall seems to be closely tied to a painful event: her family's move from South Orange, New Jersey, to Los Angeles on June 29, 1974. For Price, life can be neatly divided into periods before and after that childhood trauma, and her detailed memories begin just after the move.

Even as an adult, Price continues to be haunted by separation anxiety. She has lived with her parents her entire life, and her anxiety about moving recurred in 2003, at age 37, when her parents decided to take a smaller house. Just as Price hadn't wanted to leave South Orange as a child, she dreaded leaving the only home she'd known since she was 8. Packing her memorabilia for storage took more than a month. Perhaps the hardest part was the thought that she'd have to leave behind a piece of wallpaper on which she'd recorded minor personal details for nearly 30 years. In the end, and much to the consternation of the family's realtor, Price took a razor blade to the wall and peeled off one more cherished souvenir.

In the time I spend with her, I notice that the not-particularly-foulmouthed Price is very fond of the expression that so-and-so "shits and farts just like the rest of us"—as in "Joe Movie Star might make a lot of money, but he still shits and farts like anyone else." By the third time I hear her utter this phrase, I can't help but notice its relevance to her own life: Price may display unusually complete recall of her own past, but her memory is the same blurry patchwork as everyone else's.

The difference is that she scans her past relentlessly. Every time we think about something, and especially how it connects to something else, we get better at remembering it—a phenomenon that psychologists call elaborative encoding. Price has spent her whole life ruminating on the past, constructing timelines and lists, and contemplating the connections between one February 19 and the next. Dates and memories are her constant companions, and as a result she's really good at remembering her past. End of story.

Related Topics:

Science , Discoveries , People