Hyperthymesia: Total Recall, Totally Overwhelming
July 31, 2008
Due to a condition called hyperthymesia, Jill Price can recall every day of her life in vivid detail.
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At the core of popular movies like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Memento” are characters who are respectively desperate to forget or struggling to remember. The memories we keep and those we lose are central to our perception of ourselves. No one understands that better than Jill Price, a 42-year-old school administrator from Los Angeles, who has perfect recall of nearly every day of her life. As Price explained to Diane Sawyer during a “20/20” interview, “I am in the moment, but it’s like I have a split-screen in my head.”
In 2000, Price contacted James McGaugh, a researcher at the University of California Irvine, who, along with Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker, began to study her remarkable memory by testing her recall of certain events. McGaugh explains, “The significant public events are a matter of record; we fact checked them. We were able to check her personal experiences against a diary she kept from the age of 10 to 34.” Although Price’s memory for personal events is extraordinarily detailed, she isn’t particularly skilled at rote memorization. In 2006, the three researchers published a study about Price (whom they refer to as AJ) in the journal Neurocase, available in PDF format.
The researchers called her condition “hyperthymestic syndrome,” or “hyperthymesia,” which essentially means superior autobiographical memory: “thymesia” means memory in Greek.
Some studies indicate that the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with executive function and decision making, is active when subjects are trying to suppress information. Not surprisingly, Price performed poorly on tests of these functions. A New Scientist article (available in PDF format) reviewing the Neurocase study speculates that “[Price] may be better at storing memories than most while also being worse at blocking their retrieval.”
Price was the first person to call attention to the condition. McGaugh and his colleagues are currently studying two other hyperthymestic subjects: Brad Williams, 52, a radio host, and BR, who chooses to remain anonymous.
McGaugh described the commonalities among the three subjects being tested. Two of the three are left-handed. All are packrats. Future research for all three subjects will include MRIs to examine brain structure and functional MRIs to study brain activity while subjects access memories. Up to 50 other individuals may be hyperthymestic.
Brad Williams spoke to researchers after he read about the Neurocase study. Williams is a radio anchor in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. His brother is producing a documentary on his condition called “Unforgettable.”
“Jeopardy!” champion Ken Jennings competed with Brad Williams in a trivia quiz and reports that Williams “wiped the floor with me.” Jennings believes his memory and Williams’s are different creatures, and wonders what having William’s condition would be like: “Would you be more or less alert to the world around you? Would you be more inclined to learn from past mistakes and avoid repeating them? As near as I can tell, Brad is completely unmarked by his remarkable gift.”
McGaugh’s colleague, Larry Cahill, is also focused on the prevention and treatment of PTSD and believes studying hyperthymesia will “provide new insight into the how brains store memories.”
Recent studies have highlighted the benefits of brain games and physical exercises for improving memory naturally. Scientists already knew that exercise increases BDNF, a chemical that helps develop new synapses and reinforces old connections; recently, Newsweek reported on a study at Columbia University that indicated that exercise actually generates entirely new neurons in the hippocampus, a region associated with creating memories.
The blog Yes, ICantSeeYou reports on a University of California Irvine lecture in which Larry Cahill held a human brain before an audience, pointed to the hippocampus and said, “The memory must go through there in order to stick.” However, hyperthymesia case studies haven’t found anything special in the hippocampus of those subjects. Cahill explains, “My hope is that a sign may well point somewhere else entirely.”
© 2008 Dulcinea Media, Inc.
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