Memory

A woman named Jill Price can't forget.

She is blessed/cursed with the ability to recall the details of every day of her life since age 14. People talk about a "photographic" memory, but this is different: we're not talking about being able to recall data viewed once. Jill knows what her mother had for lunch in a restaurant on an otherwise unremarkable day years in the past. She's been the source of study in a new frontier of memory science, and since her story broke, two other proven cases have been found.

The brief description in the article makes it seem that she doesn't just "remember" the events of her life, but essentially relives them mentally.

This is interesting to me. People have differing abilities to remember things in their lives, and some of us remember one kind of thing (actor's names) while being unable to remember other things (what possessions are gifts, and from whom) -- while others of us have the opposite proclivities.

When it comes to experiential memory, Adam told me that he learned in psychology courses that we don't actually remember events -- we remember the last time we remembered them. This means that our memories degrade/change over time, like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy gets worse or less distinct. Clearly this is not quite the same for Jill Price.

I suspect I'm not alone in wishing I could remember some things more clearly. I loved having kids and watching them grow up. I will look at photos from the '90s and wish I could remember events more vividly. But would I really want to remember everything, all the time? Probably not. Then I would remember the struggle to get the kids into a sleeping routine, the illnesses, the conflicts. And I would remember every ordinary meal, every morning I woke up (too early) to go to work. But I really only want to remember the good things.

I'm fortunate that Sherry is so organized about keeping our photos around. This lets me call up memories, have some things I feel like I should remember get refreshed by listening to the recollections she and the kids have, focus on the good times.

In the end, I think that's the kind of memory I want.

But "the days, they pass so quickly now; the nights are seldom long."