balthazarus says: "As I followed Price's story, I was fascinated but doubtful. I am a cognitive psychologist, and to me something didn't smell right. Everyone seems to have an uncle or cousin with "photographic" memory, but damned if they can actually give you a phone number to reach that person. The only serious scientific paper documenting photographic memory was published nearly 40 years ago, and that study has never been replicated. Price, however, is eminently real. I spent the better part of two days with her, meeting her friends and family and watching her at the office. At the end, I can honestly say that in my decade as a professor of psychology, I've never encountered anyone remotely like Jill Price." The fundamental problem is the seemingly haphazard fashion in which our memories are organized. On a computer, every single bit of information is stored at a specific location, from which it can always be retrieved. Human recall is hit or miss. Neuroscientific research tells us that our brains don't use a fixed-address system, and memories tend to overlap, combine, and disappear for reasons no one yet understands. Soon, though, the limitations of her memory begin to show. My next questionnaire is on the just-concluded 2008 presidential election, and here things go less well. She is off by a few days on Hillary Clinton's withdrawal from the race and clueless on the Iowa caucuses. Price nails ... And even more interesting: Price remembers so much about herself because she thinks about herself—and her past—almost constantly. She still has every stuffed animal she's ever gotten, enough (as she showed me in a photograph) to completely cover the surface of her childhood bed. She has 2,000 videotapes and countless audiotapes, not to mention more than 50,000 pages of diary entries in idiosyncratic handwriting—so dense that it's almost unreadable. Until recently she owned a copy of every TV Guide since summer 1989. I'm not sure Price wants to catalog her life like this, but she can't help herself. When she tells me that one of her biggest regrets in life is that no one followed her around w... How fascinating! Tell me Balth, are people like this more prone to anxiety disorders or mental illness in general? I mean, it must be horrible to be constantly thinking like that. |
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