No, they exist because they do.
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"The Woman Who Can't Forget," the memoir of a 42-year-old California woman named Jill Price, will be hard to beat. It poses a thought-provoking question—what would it be like to recall almost every day of your life since childhood?—and then unintentionally answers: it's like being stuck on an airplane watching an endless loop of security-camera video.Oddly, in this era of luridly factitious memoirs, Price's comes with unimpeachable credentials. She first came to public attention in 2006 as "AJ," the pseudonymous subject of a paper in the journal Neurocase entitled "A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering." The lead author, James L. McGaugh, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, spent five years bombarding Price with psychological, neurological and physiological tests to investigate what was going on inside her otherwise quite ordinary mind. He coined a new term for her condition, "hyperthymestic syndrome." It means "overdeveloped memory," but of a very particular kind. Price has no special aptitude for memorizing lists of words or numbers, or for facts or stories or languages. She was an average student. What Price does remember—obsessively, uncontrollably and with remarkable accuracy—is stuff that happened to her.Price's memory, which she describes as "shockingly complete" beginning in 1974, when she was 8, and "near perfect" from 1980 on, appears to be organized like a diary. Given a date from the last 30 years, she can instantly summon up the day of the week, and usually at least some tidbit of biographical trivia. "On Friday afternoon, October 19, 1979," she writes, "I came home from school and had some soup because it was unusually cold that day." Oprah, take note: Oct. 19, 1979, was, in fact, a Friday, and it was cloudy with a high of 67 in Los Angeles, well below normal. As for the soup, we can only take her word for it, but McGaugh—who checked Price's recollections against whatever documentation was available, including some 50,000 pages of her own written diaries—believes her abilities are real. "She doesn't make it up or fake it," McGaugh says. "If she doesn't know, she says so. She may say, 'I just hung out.' A lot of our days are like that." McGaugh points out that Price has extraordinary recall for news events, if they were important enough to attract her notice at the time. Does Aug. 16, 1977, mean anything to you? It did to Price, who instantly recognized that as the date Elvis Presley died.
so she's like Clarence Thomas
