The Woman Who Can’t Forget

Serial forgetters of keys, people’s names, and gloves may wish they had a perfect memory, but scientists have finally found a woman who has one, and she says it’s no picnic. “People say to me: Oh, how fascinating, it must be a treat to have a perfect memory,” Jill Price, 42, tells Der Spiegel. “But it’s also agonizing.” Price, who runs a religious school at a synagogue in the Los Angeles area, says there are no gaps in her memory after age 15: “Starting on Feb. 5, 1980, I remember everything. That was a Tuesday.” But in addition to good memories, Price retains every insult, every terrible shock. “I don’t look back at the past with any distance,” she says. “It’s more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It’s like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there’s no stop button…All of this is incredibly exhausting.”