The burden of total recall
Name a date from as far back as 42 years ago and without consulting her diary, Jill Price can tell you exactly what she was doing on that day. Scientists hope her extremely rare condition may transform our understanding of memory
IF YOU ask Jill Price to remember any day of her life, she can come up with an answer in a heartbeat. What was she doing on 29 August 1980? “It was a Friday, I went to Palm Springs with my friends, twins Nina and Michelle, and their family,” she says. “And before we went to Palm Springs, we went to get them bikini waxes. They were screaming through the whole thing.” Price was 14 years old at the time.
Jill was born on 30 December 1965 in New York City. Her first clear memories start from around the age of 18 months. Back then, she lived with her parents in an apartment across the street from Roosevelt Hospital in Midtown Manhattan. She remembers the screaming ambulances and traffic; how she used to love climbing on the living room couch.
When she was five her family – her father, a talent agent with William Morris who counted Ray Charles among his clients; her mother, a former variety show dancer; and her baby brother – moved to South Orange, New Jersey. They lived in a three-storey, red-brick colonial house with a big backyard and huge trees. Jill loved it.
When she was seven her father was offered a job with Columbia Pictures Television in Los Angeles. The family moved there in the spring of 1974. By 1 July 1974, when Jill was eight, they were living in a rented house in Los Angeles. That was the day her “brain snapped”.
Jill had always had a talent for remembering. She had also always dreaded change. Knowing that after they left New Jersey nothing could ever be the same, Jill tried to commit to memory the world she was being ripped away from. She made lists, took pictures, kept every artefact, every passed note and ticket stub. If this was a conscious effort to train her memory, it worked – perhaps better than she imagined it would.
She was the first person ever to be diagnosed with what is now known as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, or HSAM, a condition she shares with about 60 other people. She can remember most of the days of her life as clearly as the rest of us remember the
recent past, with a mixture of broad strokes and sharp detail. Now 51, Jill remembers the day of the week for every date since 1980. She remembers what she was doing, who she was with, where she was on each of these days. She can actively recall a memory of 20 years ago as easily as a memory of two days ago, but her memories are also triggered involuntarily.
It is, she says, like living with a split screen: on the left side is the present; on the right is a constantly rolling reel of memories, each one sparked by the appearance of present-day stimuli. With so many memories always at the ready, Jill says, it can be maddening – virtually anything she sees or hears can be a potential trigger. Before Jill, HSAM was a completely unknown condition. So what about the day she sent an email to a Dr James McGaugh at University of California, Irvine? That was 8 June 2000, a Thursday. Jill was 34. McGaugh remembers that day too. At the time he was director of UC Irvine’s Centre for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the research institute that he founded in 1983. In her email, Jill said she had a problem with her memory. “Whenever I see a date flash on the television (or anywhere else for that matter), I automatically go back to that day and remember where I was, what I was doing, what day it fell on and on and on and on and on. It’s nonstop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting. Most people have called it a gift but I call it a burden. I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!!!” McGaugh was a little wary, but he was intrigued. He invited her to his office to talk.
FOR Christmas the previous year McGaugh had received a massive coffee-table book called 20th Century Day By Day, featuring the biggest news stories of the past 100 years. To test Jill’s memory, he and his assistant used the book to come up with questions that someone with amazing powers of recall might plausibly be able to answer, beginning around 1974, when Jill said her ability to remember had really started.
Sitting across from her, McGaugh asked, “When did the Iranian hostage crisis begin?”
After a brief pause, she answered, “4 November 1979.”
“No, that’s not right,” he said. “It was 5 November.” “It was 4 November,” she said. He checked another source: Jill was right; the book was wrong.
The rest of Jill’s responses came just as quickly, confidently and, for the most part, correctly. What day did the Los Angeles police beat taxi driver Rodney King? Sunday, 3 March 1991. What happened on 16 August 1977? Elvis Presley died in his Graceland bathroom. It was a Tuesday. When did Bing Crosby die? Friday, 14 October 1977, on a golf course in Spain. Jill had heard it on the radio in the car while her mother was driving her to soccer practice.
McGaugh had been studying memory and learning for decades and he’d never seen or heard of anything like this. Jill seemed to have the strongest memories he’d ever encountered. After they’d eaten lunch she remembers saying goodbye to McGaugh as he stood on the curb outside the restaurant, “literally scratching his head”.
After his first meeting with Jill, McGaugh assembled a team to determine the depth and breadth of her memory. Confirming whether autobiographical memories are accurate is usually a tricky job but, McGaugh said, “fortunately she’d kept a diary”. Jill had begun recording the details of her life in earnest
It’s like living with a split screen: on the left side is the present, on the right is a constantly rolling reel of memories
on 24 August 1980, during a high-school romance she wanted to remember.
Jill says she doesn’t re-read her journals, and given the random dates the researchers threw at her, there’s no reason to assume she could have prepared for their questions. The UCI researchers cross-referenced what she said she had done with what was written in her diary. In some cases they were also able to verify memories with her mother.
Over time, it became clear that Jill’s autobiographical memory was potentially unprecedented. But when it came to remembering details that didn’t relate to her personally, Jill proved no better than average. She recalled the date the Iran hostage crisis began because, as a self-described “news junkie”, she had made that detail part of her personal narrative of the day it happened. School, she says, was “torture” for her – she couldn’t remember facts and figures – but she’s unbelievably good at trivia
(From previous page) about television of the ’60s and ’ 70s, her nostalgia years. Other details, if they didn’t relate to her or her interests, were forgotten.
There was very little scientific literature at the time about superior forms of memory, and none about a memory like Jill Price’s. Much of what did exist was about people who had the ability to memorise pi out to 22 514 decimal places or remember the order of a randomly shuffled deck of cards. The scientific consensus about these abilities was that they were the result of practice and acquired skill – strategy, rather than innate ability.
Other people who are able to name the day of the week for any given date are also able to do it for dates outside of their lifetimes, and they tend to be autistic.
Jill can’t and isn’t. There was no one – as far as the UCI team could find – who’d ever exhibited anything like her automatic ability to recall her personal memories.
ON 13 August 2003, McGaugh and his team presented their initial findings on Jill’s memory to the UCI medical community in a large open forum. Jill was invited to exhibit her memory, to show how she could “see” dates and memories in her head, and to explain how she conceives time: for her each year is like a circle, with January in the 11 o’clock position, and the months progressing in an anticlockwise motion.
Two years later, the UCI researchers asked Jill to read a draft of the paper they’d had written about her before they submitted it. In it, they described her as both the “warden and prisoner” of her memories. “I thought, God, if I didn’t know better, it sounds like this person has brain damage or something,” she said of “AJ”, the pseudonym they used for her. “I cried. I wept while I read it. Someone had finally heard me. Because I’ve spent my whole life screaming at the top of my lungs and nobody’s heard anything.”
A Case Of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering was published by the neuropsychology journal Neurocase in February 2006. “We made the mistake of calling it ‘hyperthymesia’ ” – from the Greek thymesis, remembering – “which was a terrible idea, because when you name it in that way, it sounds as if you know what it is,” McGaugh said. In truth, all they had in Jill was a data point of one, a lot of description, and no clear understanding of the mechanisms behind her memory. What they were about to get, however, was more people like Jill.
She remembers 12 March 2006 as a very important day. “That was the last day that my life was my own,” she told me. The following morning, the first newspaper article about the discovery of “hyperthymesia” came out in the Orange County Register. By that afternoon, McGaugh’s assistant had been contacted by five more media outlets who wanted to interview Jill. A month later the university was getting so many calls about Jill that it asked her to hire a publicist to handle all the requests.
Almost immediately, emails began to trickle in to McGaugh’s office from people who believed that they or someone they knew had the same condition.
The second person verified as having the condition was Brad Williams, a radio announcer in Wisconsin whose brother contacted McGaugh in 2007 after reading about the UCI research. The third was Rick Baron, whose sister had read about “AJ” in online reports.
The fourth was Bob Petrella, a standup comic-turned-writer and TV producer for reality programmes such as The Deadliest Catch. Bob had known since adolescence that his memory was different to other people’s, but he never thought it was all that unusual. “I just thought it was like being a redhead or being left-handed,” he says.
By 2012, researchers had identified six confirmed cases of what had been renamed Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, or HSAM. (“Hyperthymesia,” McGaugh said, sounded “like a venereal disease”.)
At this point the American TV news programme 60 Minutes had already come calling. In August 2010 the show featured the “memory wizards” Bob Petrella, Brad Williams, Rick Baron, Louise Owen and the actress Marilu Henner, best known for her role on the ’70s sitcom Taxi, for a segment entitled “Endless Memory”.
Jill wasn’t involved. By this time she was no longer anonymous, having published a memoir in 2008, but she’d begun to sour on media appearances, which she felt reduced her condition to a “sideshow”, and she’s never met any of the other people with the condition.
It was the first time the HSAM subjects had met anyone like themselves and, watching the show today, the shock and delight in their mutual recognition is evident. When they first met on camera, there was a lot of hugging. Later, when quizzed on the date of a San Francisco earthquake, they give the answer almost in unison, some of them grinning. The programme aired on 19 December 2010 – a Sunday night – and was seen by nearly
Jill is cynical but not quite bitter – her life, all the details that she can remember so clearly – seems to have made her tired
19 million people.
After the programme was over McGaugh said, “I turned on my computer and I had more than 600 emails.” Most were from people who believed they or someone they knew had HSAM.
In order to figure out how HSAM worked, researchers first needed to understand what it was and wasn’t. A follow-up study by UCI neuroscience graduate student Aurora LePort and neurobiologist Dr Craig Stark established that Jill and the 10 others in the study were not just high achievers on a spectrum of “good” to “bad” memory; they were in a separate, outlying class.
All of the HSAM subjects reported that they enjoyed replaying their memories in their minds, challenging themselves to remember days and events. When Bob Petrella is stuck in traffic he scrolls through memories of that date, catalogues the best Saturdays in June he’s ever had, or tries to remember every day from 2002.
The researchers also noted that most of the HSAM subjects exhibited obsessive behaviour. Jill has a storage space jammed with a neatly organised collection of personal artefacts that she couldn’t let go of – dolls and toys, tapes of songs she recorded off the radio. Bob Petrella used to clean his groceries with an antibacterial wipe when he got home from the grocery store. “There was a nice positive correlation there, showing that the better their memory, the more OCD they were,” LePort said.
Brain scans showed structural differences in their areas of the brain associated with autobiographical memory creation. But none of these findings fully explains what enables people with HSAM to remember so much.
UNDERSTANDING HSAM may lead to a revelation about the nature of memory, McGaugh says. “That’s what is of interest,” he told me. “It’s not that HSAM is interesting, it’s that memory is interesting.”
Jill and Bob hope that studying their memories could aid researchers looking for a cure for dementia.
Memories are the things that define us; they are us. There’s a reason people are more afraid of dementia than cancer. When someone you love dies, you fear the day you’ll forget how they laughed or the sound of their voice. It hurts to think of all the wonderful, thrilling, important, terrible, devastating things we’ve forgotten. People with HSAM do remember. But would you want a memory like that, if you could have it?
Jill is cynical but not quite bitter – her life, all the details that she can remember so clearly – seems to have made her tired, although that may also be because she doesn’t sleep well and hasn’t really ever. Her memory is a map of regrets, other lives she could have lived. “I do this a lot: what would be, what would have been, or what would be today,” she says.
She’s now a freelance script supervisor for film and TV and lives in an immaculate apartment in Encino, California, with her parents, with whom she’s lived for much of her adult life. When we talk she has a habit of looking off to the right, to the side of the split screen where her memories are.
McGaugh likes to say – and it’s written on a board in the lobby of the Centre for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory – that memory is our bridge to the future. But for Jill, it doesn’t feel like that.
“I’m paralysed, because I’m afraid I’m going to f**k up another whole decade,” she says. She’s felt this way since 30 March 2005, the day her husband, Jim (42), died. Jill bears the weight of remembering their wedding on Saturday 1 March 2003, in the house she’d lived in for most of her life in Los Angeles, just before her parents sold it, as heavily as she remembers seeing Jim’s empty, wideopen eyes after he’d suffered a major stroke, fallen into a coma and been put on life support on 25 March 2005.
But for all the terrible things that people with HSAM can never forget, there are also wonderful memories. When Bob turned 50 he put together The Book Of Bob, a catalogue of the most memorable days he’s ever had – one for each calendar day of the year. “It’s totally uninhibited; it talks about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” he says. “I didn’t hold back.”
And when he recalls 15 April 1967, he gets a kind of glow and a grin – that was the day that as a 16-year-old he sat on the rooftop of the local newspaper, where he wrote sports pieces and obituaries, and listened to a battle of the bands contest going on in the street below. He felt like the “king of the town”, he says. “I just felt so good. I just felt so good about my life. That was my second best April. But a time like that just sticks in my mind.”