fluxcapacity

A few weeks ago on 20/20 I came across the amazing story of a woman named Jill Price who remembers every detail of every day of her life. I don't really watch 20/20 that often but I like to check in every once in a while to make sure John Stossel is still rocking the mustache.

Jill's extremely rare condition is called hyperthymesia. Given any date after 1980, she can describe almost every detail of what happened that day from her point of view. This includes things that most people forget a few days later like the weather, what was on television, and what she had for lunch. Remarkably, this condition doesn't seem to have negatively affected her other thinking abilities in a significant way.

I found it interesting that she said her ability is both a gift and a curse. Her memories can be automatically triggered by any of her senses - a smell, a song, a name. Because of this lack of control, she often has to relive horrible memories along with the good ones. She describes her memories as a picture in picture that's always playing. So if something triggers a memory of a loved one dying, she is forced to experience it along with all the emotions she felt at the time. They showed photos of her over time, and it is clear that the condition has taken a toll on her.

Diane Sawyer of 20/20 asked Jill many questions like, "what happened on January 17th, 1983" and Jill was able to answer every time. Incredibly, one of the books that was used to question Jill actually had a mistake that she was able to catch.

All of the questions, however, were based on date and time. On the show Jill was never asked questions like, "when was the last time you were in Chicago?" or "who was the first person you met in college?" If she can only answer questions based on date and time, then it would seem to imply that while the temporal "index" of her brain was accessible to her in a controlled manner, she can't use other "indexes" based on location or her senses in the same way. I would love to ask her some questions to find out if this is the case. Also, I'd like to find out what happens if she is experiencing something incredibly happy in the present, and then a bad memory is triggered. What effects her more, the past or the present?

It's a fascinating case, and scientists are apparently learning a lot about our brain and memory because of her and others with the same condition.