The Woman Who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science--A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Authors: Bart Davis, Jill Price
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: EBooks
List Price: $17.99
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $8.00 (44%)
Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 16416
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 153.12092
ASIN: B0018E5GNS
Publication Date: May 6, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
Jill Price has the first diagnosed case of a memory condition called "hyperthymestic syndrome" -- the continuous, automatic, autobiographical recall of every day of her life since she was fourteen. Give her any date from that year on, and she can almost instantly tell you what day of the week it was, what she did on that day, and any major world event or cultural happening that took place, as long as she heard about it that day. Her memories are like scenes from home movies, constantly playing in her head, backward and forward, through the years; not only does she make no effort to call her memories to mind, she cannot stop them.The Woman Who Can't Forget is the beautifully written and moving story of Jill's quest to come to terms with her extraordinary memory, living with a condition that no one understood, including her, until the scientific team who studied her finally charted the extraordinary terrain of her abilities. Her fascinating journey speaks volumes about the delicate dance of remembering and forgetting in all of our lives and the many mysteries about how our memories shape us.As we learn of Jill's struggles first to realize how unusual her memory is and then to contend, as she grows up, with the unique challenges of not being able to forget -- remembering both the good times and the bad, the joyous and the devastating, in such vivid and insistent detail -- the way her memory works is contrasted to a wealth of discoveries about the workings of normal human memory and normal human forgetting. Intriguing light is shed on the vital role of what's called "motivated forgetting"; as well as theories about childhood amnesia, the loss of memory for the first two to three years of our lives; the emotional content of memories; and the way in which autobiographical memories are normally crafted into an ever-evolving and empowering life story.Would we want to remember so much more of our lives if we could? Which memories do our minds privilege over others? Do we truly relive the times we remember most vividly, feeling the emotions that coursed through us then? Why do we forget so much, and in what ways do the workings of memory tailor the reality of what's actually happened to us in our lives?In The Woman Who Can't Forget, Jill Price welcomes us into her remarkable life and takes us on a mind-opening voyage into what life would be like if we didn't forget -- a voyage after which no reader will think of the magical role of memory in our lives in the same way again.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 DVD December 22, 2008
R. Molitor (Saint Louis, Missouri United States)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Great service and product in great condition! Thank you!
Sue Molitor
 Interesting...very insightful December 20, 2008
K. Ortego
I thought the book was good and very insightful to the workings of the human brain. The book gave you quite a perspective to someone who has such a remarkable memory.
 A fascinating mind, an interesting life...but I suspect there's more to the story October 29, 2008
Nancy S. West (United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Time heals all wounds." "This too shall pass." "Give it time." "Someday we'll look back on this and laugh." Our most fundamental beliefs about emotional healing are based on the idea that memories dull as time passes. Just as shards of broken glass can cut deeply when new but, if tossed in the surf, eventually become smooth and beautifully textured, our memories, as they age, become buffered. The kernel of the story may remain, but the glass-sharp edges of emotion associated with the event dull over time.
Which is a good thing, because imagine for a moment the mental chaos if they didn't. Well, that's the story of Jill Price, the real-life Woman Who Can't Forget. With a memory so unusual in its form and function that the neurologists who documented her situation made up a new name for it, hyperthemestic syndrome, Jill Price remembers everything that has happened to her since childhood with the clarity of seeing it unfold on a movie screen. Day after day. All the time.
The memory center of Jill Price's brain is wired differently from most of us, with aberrations that actually show up on brain scans. Her memory type is specific: she isn't like Rain Man, remembering sequences of numbers or bits of trivia. What she remembers is events from her own life, or events of public importance inasmuch as they dovetailed with her own life. You probably remember exactly what you were doing the moment you heard that two planes had hit the World Trade Center or that a government building had exploded in Oklahoma City - or, depending on your age, that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded or that President Kennedy had been shot. Similarly, you probably have crystal clear recall of the moment you found out that one of your family members had a terminal illness, or that you were pregnant with twins, or that you had gotten accepted into your first-choice college. For Jill Price, every moment event is just as memorable as three or four of the most significant moments in our lives are to the rest of us.
The book is both a scientific exploration of the phenomenon and a memoir. Price quotes from the research papers written about her and explains the scientific theories that were formed based on her case, but she also talks extensively about what it's like to live like this. Price's life would make a fairly interesting memoir even without the hyperthemetic syndrome. Her father was a rising executive in the entertainment industry: the family lived first in Manhattan, then in suburban New Jersey, and then in California, where visiting Dad at work meant playing on the soundstage of The Waltons. Price was born one year before I was, so her cultural references are the same as mine, and it's fun reading about iconic 1970s moments such as the time she turned a corner at her father's agency and ran into David Cassidy.
Price has been making the talk show rounds; not being a talk show viewer, I've missed her appearances, and I have some questions that seeing the interviews might have answered. Some of her oddities, in my opinion, can't quite be explained by the memory thing. For example, although she admits to having always had intense separation issues, that doesn't quite go far enough to explain why at the age of 36 she still lived with her parents. As a child, she always hated moving - something that traumatized her in her childhood, first when the family left New York City for New Jersey and then when they headed out to Los Angeles - but it's still a little strange when in her 30's she gets frantic at the thought of her parents selling their house - because it's where she still lives. She never really addresses the subject of whether anyone thinks maybe it's time for the nearly middle-aged woman to find her own apartment. In fact, when her parents do sell their house and downsize, she moves with them - and eventually her husband and stepchildren end up moving in with her parents as well. There is more I'd like to know about this woman than how her memory works.
This is a thought-provoking book, and during the two weeks or so I was reading it (I'm a slow reader), I found my own generally sharp memory getting even more acute. For example, while falling asleep one night, I had an image of my grandmother reaching for a particular glass in her kitchen, and suddenly woke with a jolt, realizing neither the house nor my grandmother was still present in my life. For a few seconds, I missed that earlier time terribly. As I said, I've always had a good memory, but not like Jill Price. And having read her memoir, I'm convinced that's a fortunate thing.
 Interesting but VERY incomplete story on hypermemory, mental/mental health issues of MD's reporrt ignored October 4, 2008
Stephen J. Snyder (Lancaster, Texas United States)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I'm perhaps being a little more generous than some of the two-star reviewers. I did find information about her timeline and some other things interesting, but, contra her own accounts, I don't think her obsessive journaling necessarily has anything to do with her hypermemory. Certainly, it's not a direct part of her hypermemory, or the more technical, hyperthymesia.
Now, might it be part of an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder? Certainly. There's other facets of her life, that if you connect the dots, could one wonder, at least, whether Price doesn't have OCD and/or other mental health issues.
But, she and coauthor Bart Davis don't talk about that.
Nor do they talk about the report of the UCI medical and neurological professionals. After all, Price herself wonders if her hypermemory isn't connected to how she has dealt with her childhood.
Nor does she mention that she has taken Prozac and Zoloft as high as 200mg/day, and that she reported having numerous phobias, including phobias about medical professionals, to McGaugh et al. Or having hit her head at age 8.
Given the studies ongoing of links between PTSD and memory, and the fact that the Neurocase study is readily available on the Internet, it's chintzy at the least to not have discussed these issues in the book.
Available here in full: http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:n_iEEyk5ROcJ:today.uci.edu/pdf/AJ_2006.pdf+%22A+Case+of+Unusual+Autobiographical+Remembering%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
The full study also mentions some other mental functioning diagnoses; some linguistic problems, including word list problems (hence her memory problems) is one; perseveration is another, and it's linked to brain trauma. Interestingly, Price doesn't mention having had a head injury at age 8, as documented in the professional study, and which is about the time her memory started ramping up.
It's time to quote from that report:
"AJ may have a variant of a neurodevelopmental, fronto-
striatal disorder putting her at risk for her hyperthymestic syn-
drome. Deficits in executive functioning and anomalous lateral-
ization are both found in neurodevelopmental frontostriatal
disorders which include autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder
(OCD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Tourette's syn-
drome and schizophrenia."
I write none of this to put her down or beat her up, but, as I suspected at the start of this review (written before I Googled the Neurocase report), there's more behind the scenes than just a world-record autobiographical memory.
Finally, re her memory itself, and without diminishing her incredible autobiographical memory, it should be noted that she is, in some types of specific episodic memory, nothing better than normal.
In short, we didn't get anywhere near the full Jill Price in this book. And, nobody forced her to write anything at all in the first place so, sorry, it doesn't deserve more than two stars.
Interesting but very poorly written September 3, 2008
Barb M (Iowa)
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
Ditto to others who complained about the writing. It might have been a far better book had it been written and edited more skillfully. Repetition, poor sentence structure and inconsistent organization made it hard to wade through. As it reads now, it's pretty boring and I didn't even find myself liking her very much.
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