Woman with perfect memory can recall every day of her life but its been hell

2023-03-24

The ability to remember everything might seem like a superpower that most people would jump at the opportunity to have.

Gone would be the days of lost car keys, embarrassingly forgetting people's names and missed appointments.

But for California woman Jill Price, being able to recall every moment of her life in vivid detail is anything but a blessing.

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Price, who has been dubbed "the woman who never forgets", was the first person ever to be diagnosed with hyperthymesia syndrome — a term coined especially to describe her highly superior autobiographical memory.

She developed the ability to recall the details of every single day of her life at the age of 14.

"I don't really know why on this day exactly, February 5, 1980, but from that day until now its every day. You pull a date out it's like 'boom' it's like I'm right there," she told 60 Minutes.

Give her a date and she can tell you exactly what she was doing, give her a world event and she can tell you exactly when it happened — as long as she knew about it at the time.

Only around 60 people across the globe are believed to share the extremely rare condition with her.

It might seem like an incredible talent, but with the ability to recall all of the good memories comes the burden of recalling all the bad ones too — every embarrassing moment, every heartbreak, every argument and every loss.

And for Price, this can make her remarkable memory feel more like a curse.

"I’ve been through hell in my life," she explained to HQBrain.

She revealed she also doesn't see many of the benefits that you'd think would come with her condition and still has to rely on a shopping list like the rest of us.

“When I first went to the doctors,” Price said, “they were like, ‘Oh, you must have been really good in school.’ I went, ‘Nope.’ In fact, I hated school. School was very painful for me.”

Many of Price's memories throughout her lifetime are painful ones, starting with her tough relationship with her mother, which she says led to an unhealthy relationship with food and her body image.

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"If you eat anything bad, you’re going to die," she recalls her mum telling her.

Another painful memory is her move from New Jersey to Los Angeles when she was eight years old.

"I really loved my life there," she said. "I should have been born, lived and died in the same house. That’s how much I don’t like change."

She believes that the trauma of the move could be behind her condition, which still baffles doctors.

The University of California-Irvine has studied price since 2000 and speculate that her brain may have structural features that stop her from switching off "episodic retrieval".

In 2006, an MRI revealed that more than two dozen areas of her brain are larger than normal but despite these findings, researchers still aren't sure how Price has such a detailed memory.

We all know what it's like to re-live an argument again and again in your head or regret something you've done or said before, but Price warns that too much memory like hers can be paralyzing.

"I still feel bad about stuff that happened 30 years ago, not one or two things, everything," she explained to ABC News.

"I really live it and feel it and I think 'god if I had just done this, then I wouldn't have done this, and I wouldn't be here' and I'm always constantly doing that."

Despite this, she wouldn't change her condition — which does come with some benefits, including being able to playback all of her favourite TV episodes in her head as if she were actually watching them.

She added: "I have, like, a very animated, vivid movie going on in my head, and that’s the part that is the good part of this."

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