Meet the Woman Who Never Forgets Anything

Jill Price is a 51-year-old American who recalls every day's events in astonishing detail. She's impossible to catch off guard. Ask her, "How did you celebrate your 16th birthday?" and she'll tell you precisely. "What did you do on November 5, 1990?" She'll recite the day's events with perfect accuracy. And before you think, "Big deal, there's no way to check what she says," well, firstly, Price has kept a detailed journal her whole life, so you actually can. Secondly, there are numerous instances where witnesses can verify her claims. Thirdly, her unique memory isn't just limited to her life's events—it extends to TV shows and air disasters, too. Mention the date of an airplane crash, and she'll tell you which plane it was, the cause of the malfunction, and the victim count.

Price's biography, titled "The Woman Who Can't Forget," depicts her as a likely one-of-a-kind phenomenon. Although friends and family have always recognized her exceptional memory, researchers discovered it only in June 2000. Price stumbled upon a web page by James McGaugh, a neuroscientist specializing in memory research, and decided to email him about her abilities. He was so impressed that he replied to her within ninety minutes. He and two colleagues, Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker, interviewed Price extensively over the next five years, eventually publishing a paper on her in a scientific journal in February 2006. The article quickly caught the media's attention, and almost overnight, Price became an accidental celebrity, appearing on TV shows to demonstrate her extraordinary memory skills. In one memorable moment, a show host thought Price was wrong—the book in her hand indicated otherwise—but Price insisted, and a recheck proved her right... and the book wrong.

According to cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus from New York University, who interviewed her extensively, Price's remarkable memory isn't due to exceptional abilities but rather her personality. Price knows exactly when she began to remember everything so vividly: after her family moved from the East Coast to the West Coast of the U.S., an event on June 29, 1974, which she recalls as a traumatic ordeal. Suffering from abandonment anxiety, she constantly replays memories and doesn't want to forget a single detail. Her childhood is documented on thousands of videotapes, and she writes lengthy diary entries every day. In other words, Price forgets nothing because her brain is continually engaged in replaying her history, both past and present. She describes feeling as if her mind is constantly split in two—one part dedicated to the past and the other to the present. Her memory for TV shows and air disasters? They're interests she is intensely passionate about, far beyond the average person. Brain scans reveal that her memory-related areas don't show anything out of the ordinary but have similarities to those found in individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

By the way, Price would never, under any circumstances, want to give up her unique memory, even though it also brings her pain. "Price not only remembers the past, she feels it in vivid colors and tough experiences stay with her," writes Gary Marcus. "But she can't imagine having a memory like the rest of the population... When I jokingly ask her, 'So, do you think we're all idiots?' she laughs. No, she says, but she wouldn't trade her memory for anything in the world."