An extremely rare condition may transform our understanding of memory.

An extremely rare condition may transform our understanding of memory.

Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

Price’s reply was swift and unexpected. “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 is non-stop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting … Most 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!!!”

Over time, it became clear that Price’s autobiographical memory was potentially unprecedented. But when it came to remembering details that did not relate to her personally, Price 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 about television of the 60s and 70s, her nostalgia years. Other details, if they didn’t relate to her or her interests, were forgotten: once, she was asked to close her eyes and recall what her two interviewers, who she’d spent several hours with that day, were wearing – she couldn’t. When asked to look at a bank of random numbers and memorise their order in a given period of time, she laughed and said it was impossible. Price’s memory is as selective as yours or mine, storing the things that she finds important – she is just a good deal better at retaining and retrieving those memories.

When I first spoke to McGaugh, he told me that the real question at the heart of HSAM wasn’t why his subjects remember, but why we forget. “The overall summary of all of this is that they’re bad forgetters,” he said. And forgetting is what humans do; often what we need to do. The title character in Jorge Luis Borges’s story Funes the Memorious, who acquires a perfect memory as the result of an accident, can no longer sleep because he is kept awake by the thousand mundane memories that whined like mosquitoes in his ears. The “peculiar mixture of forgetting with our remembering,” wrote William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, “is the very keel on which our mental ship is built.” “If we remembered everything,” he continued, “we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”