What was the first piece of candy you received the first time you went trick-or-treating? What did you have for dinner while you were watching the series finale of your favorite TV show? Can you write out the dialogue from your fourth date with your spouse?
If those questions stress you out because you can’t remember the answers, consider the alternative. What if those memories, along with almost everything else that’s ever happened to you, were impossible to forget? That’s the situation faced by a small but fascinating group of people known as hyperthymesiacs. There are only about 100 known cases of this extremely rare phenomenon, which is sometimes referred to as HSAM: highly superior autobiographical memory.
Elisa Gabbert is the author of a collection of essays called “Any Person Is The Only Self.” In an excerpt from the collection that recently appeared in The Paris Review, Gabbert profiles a hyperthymesiac, and explores the curious history of the condition.
She recently spoke with The Show's Sam Dingman about the blessing — and the curse — of being unable to forget.
Full conversation
ELISA GABBERT: So, hyperthymesia is what is called excessive remembering or a highly specific autobiographical memory. And it's not the same as say having what they call a photographic memory or just a really good memory.
It's not like those people that train themselves to memorize the order of a deck of cards or digits of pi. Instead it's just this natural ability or some, some researchers, some scientists who study this condition would actually say it's a disability where you just don't ever forget anything about your own life.
SAM DINGMAN: And one of the people that you profile in your essay is Jill Price.
GABBERT: Yeah. So Jill Price was the first known case and she was really, you know, the subject that started all this kind of media attention around the condition and she was doing a lot of talk shows and stuff. At the time, a lot of news stories were coming out about her and she was on Diane Sawyer and, you know, typically when she was doing these appearances, what people would do to kind of test whether this condition was true or she was some kind of fraud.
They would call out a date to her. It had to be a date from her, you know, conscious lifetime because hyperthymesiacs they remember their own lives, not, you know, they don't remember history particularly well.
And so she was calling out names from, you know, some kind of almanac.
[AUDIO CLIP FROM SHOW]
DIANE SAWYER: Princess Grace dies September 14th, 1982.
JILL PRICE: That was the first day I started 12th grade.
GABBERT: And Diane Sawyer was looking at this book in her lap where she was, she was using it as her sources and she said, no, actually that's, that's not correct. You got it off by a couple of days.
[CLIP]
SAWYER: September 10th, 1982.
PRICE: What happened on that day?
SAWYER: Princess Grace died yesterday it says. So September 10th.
PRICE: Well, that might not be right.
GABBERT: And Jill was so sure she was like, well, you know, maybe the book is wrong and then somebody from backstage, some assistant or something looked up the fact in another source
[CLIP]
SAWYER: What! The book is wrong?
PRICE: Because I know what I was doing that day. I was, I literally started 12th grade that day and came home from school and found out and I was really upset.
GABBERT: She really knew this stuff and it wasn't because she had, you know, consciously set out to memorize it. She just remembered every day of her life.
DINGMAN: That's incredible. That's incredible. And I think this media fascination with folks who have hyperthymesia speaks to the question of whether or not this is an ability or a disability. Can you talk about why there are some researchers who consider it a disability?
GABBERT: You know, memory is not completely understood. Like, you know, so much of so much of everything, right? So much about our bodies and our minds and the world and the universe, like we don't know everything about how memory works. And for example, we don't know why we don't have any memories from early childhood.
Some people think it's because we haven't really learned how to remember things yet. Some people think it's because we don't have language and language helps us codify our memories. Other people think it's because our forgetting is better than our memory at that age.
And so there's a theory that people with hyperthymesia are just very, very bad at forgetting, but forgetting is really useful and the way this shows up in Jill Price's life, for example is that she not only remembers, you know, happy things, she remembers every sad thing, every disappointment and she remembers them in such excruciating detail that it's like she's living through those moments again. So she's, she's a very unhappy person because she feels like she can never escape her past.
DINGMAN: Yeah, I mean, one of the, the parts of the essay that was most heartbreaking for me is a quote from Jill Price where, because she can remember everything she does this thing she calls Y diagramming where she goes back over what happened and then tries to think about, well, what if, if I hadn't done this at that time, then maybe this wouldn't have happened or maybe this wouldn't have happened. And she says, “it has instilled in me an acute, persistent regret.”
GABBERT: I know it's so sad.
DINGMAN: It really is. It really is. But this part of the essay is where you make, what I think is a, a really fascinating pivot because one of the things that Jill does is she keeps an exhaustive journal and she says, I don't write to remember. I write so I don't go crazy. What was interesting to you about that?
GABBERT: I've always been really interested in memory. And so part of what made Jill Price such a figure of fascination for me was, you know, this connection between her truly exceptional memory and her sort of strange journaling habits and how it was somehow a comfort or a coping mechanism for her to be able to externalize all of the details of her own life and of her memories that were in her head and how that purged something that helped her somehow handle it a little bit better.
There's something about it that makes it a little easier to process the details of our own lives by just getting it out of our heads.
DINGMAN: Yes. Yes. Well, Jill says that she writes because it makes the memory something she can handle. And you say by handle, I think she means both that she can touch it and that because she can touch it, she can process and accept it. Most of us can cope with it in so far as we can cope with it because the reality passes so quickly and then begins to fade. But for someone in Jill's position, it seems like the journal is a way of coaxing the fade.
GABBERT: Right. Or you know, because she, she doesn't have that, you know, that lucky ability that most of us have, where fading does happen so kind of naturally and quickly it's almost wishful, like a wishful act. As though by writing this down I know that, you know, if this is in pencil or an ink, it, like it's eventually going to fade and she has said that she's wanted, she wants these diaries to be burned or buried with her when she dies. And I think that's a fascinating desire and that it kind of, it shows that she sees it as like her sort of external mind and she wants that mind to die with her with her actual mind.
DINGMAN: Yeah. But it, and it also suggests that she does not view this as some kind of superpower or something that she's grateful for or excited to have. And that, that the keeping of these journals, it seems very much like a survival mechanism rather than some attempt to prove that, you know, she's like some kind of sorcerer.
GABBERT: Right. I think it makes her feel like the memories are real if she can write them down.
DINGMAN: Yes. But all of this leads us to what for me is like the money quote from your piece that I haven't been able to stop thinking about, which is: “A journal is an effigy of the self or else is the self, the self that exists because we create it.”
GABBERT: Yeah. Well, the self is the project of the journal or the diary. It's kind of a proving ground in a way, you know, just the idea that, you know, once you put something in words on paper, even if it's just in a notebook, even if it's not published in a book, it's more real. You're making reality that way.
