What happens if you CAN'T FORGET?
September 21st 2008 22:35
Signature Tune
From:Timesonline,
Most of us can write a narrative of our lives, editing as we go what is too painful or unimportant, choosing what we decide to include and discard. We are shaped by our past, and remembering gives us our sense of self. Memory is notoriously unreliable. Intentional or not, our story of who we are is subjective. But there is a huge difference between remembering and being unable to forget.
Imagine if you could not choose which memories are preserved and which are relinquished. For Jill Price there is no option to edit her memory; the painful and the unpleasant, stretching back through adolescence, are as vivid as if they had just occurred. It’s no surprise that Jill feels she is held hostage by her memory.
She has written: “If someone made videos of you from the time you were a child, following you around all day, day by day, then combined them onto one DVD and you sat in a room and watched that DVD on a machine set to shuffle randomly through all the tracks.”
So rare is her condition that doctors have so far diagnosed it in only a handful of people and have coined a name for it – superior autobiographical memory, or hyperthymestic syndrome – a day-to-day life invaded, and even overwhelmed, by the detail of its past.
The article goes on to say:
In June 2000, McGaugh began studying Jill’s superior memory after receiving an e-mail from her. In it she described her memory as “nonstop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting”. She also stated: “I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy ! ! !”
The doctors were intrigued. Over the next five years they tested and probed her memory. Because her case was something they had never encountered before, the doctors had to come up with a name and chose hyperthymestic syndrome, from the Greek word “thymesis”, which means remembering, and “hyper”, which means excessive. After they published their paper in 2006 on the patient they identified only as AJ, around 200 others came forward.
“In addition to Jill Price,” McGaugh says, “there are three other people we believe are bona fide. They are not exactly alike, but have this extraordinary memory ability.”
He is referring to Brad Williams, a radio news reporter in the Midwest, and to Rick Baron, who lives in Ohio. The third is known only to the doctors.
Jill Price feels strongly that her case cannot be compared to the other cases. The trenchant difference is the emotional fallout she has suffered from her irrepressible memory. It has plagued and impacted her life in paralysing ways.
Williams says: “It hasn’t disrupted my life. It’s enhanced it.” He sounds almost apologetic. “I know Jill feels that she is in a class by herself, but I can’t help it that the doctors have put us all in the same category.”
Perhaps Jill’s frustration at being categorised with Williams and Baron is that she feels it somehow minimises her anguish to suggest they have something in common. McGaugh puts it succinctly: “I know she believes she is unique. And, no doubt, in many ways she is. It is now clear to us that there are others who have strong autobiographical memories, but they do not appear to suffer as Jill does.”
There are many types of memory and many mysteries; the neurobiology of how our brains work and process information is complex and fascinating. There is memory inhibition (the ability to ignore irrelevant information), there is motivated forgetting (where the person purposely pushes memories out of their mind), and there is autobiographical memory – our ability to recall specific experiences, and strong and accurate memories of personal or public events.
So it seems there are worse things in life than not being able to remember, and in this case it is not being able to forget.
But practice using your brain, the day may well come and sooner than you think when you'll be glad you did.
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