KDL Recommends

The Woman Who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science--A Memoir

ISBN: 1416561765

Title: The Woman Who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science--A Memoir

Author: Jill Price

KDL Description:

Do you ever wish you had better memory? Or a brain that improves its performance over time? Recent research reveals the tremendous range of “normal” to human brain capacity and activity and this is a book well worth reading! The woman who can’t forget : the extraordinary story of living with the most remarkable memory known to science : a memoir by Jill Price
Jill’s personal story unfolds in amazing detail because the author has a superior memory “condition”—she literally remembers all of the events in her life since age 14—and not only the “facts”. She also remembers all the emotions and impact of each event too— Great—Good—Not so good. The author comes to understand and appreciate herself for who and what she fully is with the help of science and psychology. Reading this book has also provided me with a greater understanding of the challenges folks have due to “other” exceptional brain conditions such as traumas, dementia and/or other brain eccentricities over time.
-Laura at Plainfield

Amazon 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. 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.