Jill Price
(born December 30th 1965 in New York City, USA)
Starting at the age of 10 Jill Price began to keep a daily diary of her life but contrary to most other people in the world she did not do so to remember but rather to deal with a very unusual condition she suffers from : Hyperthymesia - which means that she can recall every event of every single day in her life. It is a condition only about 20 people in the world have been diagnosed with.
In Jill's mind events from the past play like a movie in parallel to what she experiences in the current moment and she can not turn off this second stream of images at will. She first noticed that she was different at the age of 8 (in July 1974) and she is able to recall memories from that time but not for every single day.
For Jill this memory stream becomes continuous starting February 5th, 1980 when she was 14 years old, for every single day from that date on forward she can recall exactly what she did on each day. Jill is not only able to recall details of every day of her life but she can also give precise dates for global events, the air dates and content of TV shows she watched 30 years ago or she can also simply recall the weather.
In the year 2000 Jill contacted Dr. James McGaugh from the University of California-Irvine for help. McGaugh began his investigation by asking Jill random questions from an historical almanac and he was floored by the accuracy of her answers. In one case where Jill gave a "wrong" answer, Dr. McGaugh found our weeks later that Jill actually was right and that the book was wrong.
Dr. McGaugh also investigated the over 50.000 pages of personal diary which Jill kept to verify some of her personal memories from over 30 years ago. Jill was correct of every date on every event she was checked upon.
Brain scans of Jill's brain showed that certain areas are three times the normal size of an average woman of her age but besides that no other abnormalities were found. So the deeper reasons for her condition remain a mystery. One psychologist claims that it is a result of obsessive compulsive disorder and that Jill's memory is a biproduct of compulsively making a daily diary but Jill rejected that explaination : She never reads her own journal after she has written it and simply uses this measure as a psychological tool to deal with her memories by putting them onto paper.
In 2008 Jill went on public televsion for the first time - until then she was only an anonymous test subject as far as publications on her condition from 2006 were concerned :
Since many readers might only watch one of these two videos, the more interesting second part of the interview was embedded first. For everybody who is interested, here is the first segment of the interview :
In 2008 Jill coauthored the book "The Woman Who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science—A Memoir" in which she shares how it is like to life a life with total recall.
Despite her excellent memory on dates and events, Jill's abilities do not apply to information that does not relate to her life. So memorizing a poem would cause her great difficulties and thus she also was not able to make use of her skill on exams and was not really good at school.
Jill's life has been rather difficult due to constantly remembering everything from her past. She constantly reflects of errors of the past which regular people would have simply forgotten a long time ago. After her initial interview in 2008 Jill was very reluctant to give further interviews.
In 2012 Jill granted one more interview to documentary filmmaker Barnaby Peel for "The Boy who can't forget" - a BBC documentary on Aurelien Hayman - a 20 year old student from England who has also been diagnosed with hyperthymesia.
Additional information :
This is a short treaser for the mentioned BBC documentary on Aurelien Hayman :
Recently the entire documentary by Barnaby Peel was released on Youtube:
An English CBS documentary on a couple of other people with this unusual memory skill:
