Woman has perfect "episodic memory"
"People say to me: Oh, how fascinating, it must be a treat to have a perfect memory," she says. Her lips twist into a thin smile. "But it's also agonizing."An Infinite Loop in the Brain (Via Mind Hacks)In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. "I don't look back at the past with any distance. 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."
She's constantly bombarded with fragments of memories, exposed to an automatic and uncontrollable process that behaves like an infinite loop in a computer. Sometimes there are external triggers, like a certain smell, song or word. But often her memories return by themselves. Beautiful, horrific, important or banal scenes rush across her wildly chaotic "internal monitor," sometimes displacing the present. "All of this is incredibly exhausting," says Price.
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It must be slightly hard to be close to someone like this, as their remembering all -your- faults and mistakes would mean that you'd remember them, too... Or at least that would be how it is for me. I can already obsess over the most minor mistakes I've made with other people.
My memory doesn't -start- until I was at least twelve. I have a few flashes of my childhood, but nothing more, and nothing significant.
hi Tenn!
from the description,it sounds like she has no control of WHAT is recalled WHEN. Perhaps you might never be there when her memory of you scrolls by.
@1
I would think that it would be much harder for the person with the episodic memory dealing with you as you gloss over and tint memories that they still recall clearly. It is hardly uncommon for people to get angry or frustrated when dealing with people whose recall does not fit their own and that would be pretty much everyone else for this person.
Sounds like she needs to learn some mindfulness skills.
You mean Spiegel, sans internal L.
This immense excess capacity of our brains is fascinating. That we have so much more mental capacity than our needs would require is perplexing. Especially when one considers we have the same brains our ancestors had 50,000 years ago. A human child from 50,000 years ago raised today would probably have no more problems coping with modern society's demands than we do now. The question constantly comes to mind, why? If this uneducated guess is wrong, then how and why did we evolve such powerful noggins in such a short period?
I wonder if the mechanism here is the same as in post traumatic strees disorder? I know that PTSD is caused due to psychological stress, but the underlying neurological issue may be the same.
In both PTSD and this woman's case, we have uncontrolled recall of events, although in this case, it is for pretty much any event rather rather than just traumatic ones.
This story certainly gives weight to the idea that the human brain is at least *capable* of storing everything that happens to us, although it doesn't prove that it always does. It would be fascinating to know if this is a case of inadequate input filtering, or simply uncontrolled recall. Do we all remember everything, but are just bad at recalling it, or do we filter the information on the way in?
Like many of these neurological case studies this is both fascinating and tragic.
...and WHY did we evolve an organ of such power if we aren't using it? Isn't evolution based upon need?
"...and WHY did we evolve an organ of such power if we aren't using it? Isn't evolution based upon need?"
Evolution isn't based on need. We don't gain useful traits, we just die if we have situationally bad traits.
This is a horrifying and tragic disorder- I'd hate to live like that.
Why is everyone talking about unused brains? The myth about only 10% of the brain being used is a myth.
Regarding Prices excellent episodic recall, it's not like regular people don't retain something from every experience. Saying we've "forgotten" most moments in our lives isn't entirely accurate. Our recollection of the original event may fade, but the skills, knowledge, and lessons learned all remain.
Saying that we've "forgotten" the original event - like a file erased from a hard drive - is relying too much on a simplistic model of the brain. Rather than taking this as evidence that everyone has magical unused storage space that we obsessively clean up and empty out all the time, I think this is instead good evidence that there's something more going on with memory than that (Already known to be inaccurate) model can explain.
It may be that the theory where every moment of our lives is in fact always stored more or less intact, but large portions of it are "walled off" to avoid interfering with our day to day lives was the more accurate version of how things actually work.
I'm not sure I'd put any faith in hypnotic regression based on Prices' problem, but it's interesting.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote an amazing short story about someone with the same symptoms, although I do not know if he believed them to be possible. The story is called "Funes the Memorious". Here's the wikipedia summary: Funes the Memorious. I highly recommend it.
Lizardman makes a good point. Our recollection of past events is shaped and reshaped with age and subsequent experiences. Our memories still seem objective to us, but to others, jumbled fantasy. I think it would be torturous to live in a world full of episodic memories and it certainly would not work well with Eckhart Tolle's 'living in the moment' philosophy.
Anonymous @ #9,
Thank you for understanding evolution.
Why is everyone talking about unused brains?
Because conscious functions only use a tiny part of brain capacity. People tend to forget the vastness of the subconscious mind, which not only stores all our accumulated data, but runs most of our physical functions as well.
Antinous - vastness of the subconscious mind
BBC Radio 4's "In Our Time" was talking about brain-mind in this wise only a couple of weeks ago. You can Listen Again here.
As for Price, the 42-yo with the memory, I wonder if she has perfect memories of previous occasions she recalled something? When she is 60 will she remember being 42 and remembering perfectly some memory of her 25-yo self remembering something irritating or embarrassing happening to her 15-yo self?
It sounds at least as though she has a hard time experiencing any "present" to have future memories of, except for for the experience of having older memories.
The book Brain Rules talks a bit about memory, memory creation, recall, and recall filtering. The book also talked about a man who had similar memory function, which had been tested by having the man read random alphanumeric strings, then testing his recall at intervals that stretched to years. I saw the book on BoingBoing's gift guide recently, and I'd also recommend it.
"Isn't evolution based upon need?"
No. Natural selection merely rejects or chooses characteristics that fail or fit the conditions in which the organism finds itself. It's not a search engine, it's a filter.
"...how and why did we evolve such powerful noggins in such a short period?"
We didn't. It took a long time. But it appears there was a transformational leap forward a couple hundred thousand years ago, a nodal point, when the evolving brain's wiring led to something new and unique. Suddenly ... consciousness and all its attendant woes.
We left the animal kingdom and became Marlin Perkins.
The main character of Gene Wolfe's New Sun books, Severian the torturer, also has perfect recall. Every so often, he'll be caught up in a revery of memory, recalling some past episode with such fidelity that he seems to live it over, and doesn't notice what's really around him.
To make matters worse, for complicated science-fictional reasons, he's got someone else's memories in his head, too.
I did not mean to imply we have vast unused areas of the brain. But it appears to this layman, that we have much more capacity for memory and complex tasks than we need. While this assumption probably comes from ignorance, the question still remains. Our brains were essentially fully formed thousands of years before they were needed to the extent that they are put to use today.
What was it about our evolution that produced not just a brain capable of surviving and dominating the prehistoric world, but one that can understand and do all the things my rather normal brain does today. The knowledge we accumulate is amazing, the skills we develop are almost limitless, then add to this we remember a few thousand songs and adverts, etc. Not only can we use the technology that surrounds us, but many of use have very detailed understandings of how it operates and what to do when something fails.
I guess I should have said, our brains seem to have excess ability. A man born in the Dark Ages had only a lack of information and opportunity, but otherwise would fit in well today. This excess ability has given us a technological explosion of creativity and discovery.
We have always needed our memory capacity. It's just our cognitive abilities that are surprising.
To get the cognitive abilities we have we need a lot of cells which are connected in complex ways.
Now, if you see an event a certain pattern or sequence of neuron firings occur. Memory is just (pretty much) a RE-firing of that pattern (with only a few million neurons the possibly combinations are ridiculously many, the human brain has up to 100billion neurons. That gives a few possible patterns..). The tricky bit is keeping events "indexed" so you can recall them. That is one of the reasons we have a complete loss of our earliest memories, and possibly large gaps in memory in our childhood. That is the time the brain is forming the ability to consciously and purposefully recall events. Learning how to index and keep track of the vast amounts of data. And for this it has a vast amount of possible connections.
And to the one who said that a person born in the dark ages would have had less need for brain power.... Really?
Think about it.
That sounds like equating book knowledge and theoretical stuff with knowledge while ignoring completely practical knowledge.
Throughout human history we have had a need and a thirst for knowledge and specialization. A farmer may actually know some pretty interesting stuff, through training from childhood and experience. A fisherman may have an understanding of his local waters so intricate that the uninitiated may have a hard time grasping the scope of the knowledge, let alone the details.
In polynesia (iirc) some fishermen are said to find the islands based on wave patterns striking their boat. That is serious knowhow. The vikings had navigational knowledge which let them sail to America (possibly INTO America) as well as east to India, possibly further.
Credit where credit is due.
I think it would be awful to have that kind of memory. And how could one exploit it to be rich? I bet the people who have this drink a lot to try to silence their brains. I sure would.
Buddy66: "Suddenly ... consciousness and all its attendant woes."
Insert standard refusal to accept baseless assumption that humans are the only conscious entities here.
#19, the dark ages man did not lack information. He lacked scientific information, but he probably knew every square inch of his farmland, and was quite familiar with the surrounding acres of his neighbors farmland. He knew his trade, the lore related to his trade, and probably a lot of other life skills related to his trade. He knew his family, their history, and about his neighbors (TONS of gossip, trust me). He knew a lot of information that may have been based on trial and error and word of mouth and rumour instead of scientific research, and lots of it would be wrong, but he still knew it.
Going back even further, to roaving bands of barely-not-apes, you need to know your entire group and you need a lifetimes worth of memories to help you keep straight how they act and react, when you don't have the crutch of language to lean on to find out peoples motivations and interests. You need to know your territory in great detail - these trees fruit at this time of year, those trees will fruit next, these stems were succulent last week but won't be edible again for another year, there's a leopard who likes to take this path but I've only ever seen him at night, there's a crocodile in that watering hole but he ate a deer yesterday so he's probably not dangerous...
Spazzm,
Standard response: Prove it.
I remember Mark Twain describing a sitting dog as "pondering his sins." Really?
Jerril @23: There's some evidence that people in preliterate cultures have better "toss it all in the bucket" memories. The instance that comes to mind right now is a class of Indian storytellers who can recite huge blocks of traditional narratives from memory. When some of them learned to read and write in order to record these narratives, they thereafter found their memories were more fallible.
Data recording technology isn't about remembering. It's about forgetting. We let the recording do the remembering for us.
Buddy: My hamster thinks, just not very much. It's like keeping a bitty organic VIC 20 around.
Jerril,
Nice stream of, eh, consciousness here:
"...there's a leopard who likes to take this path but I've only ever seen him at night, there's a crocodile in that watering hole but he ate a deer yesterday so he's probably not dangerous..." but...
How could he see him at night? This is an extinct "barely-not-ape"? Wandering around at the leopard's hour was not selected behavior, and...
anthropomorphizing barely-not-ape. Almost-Cheeta couldn't know the digestive cycle of crocodiles. That would take an almost-Tarzan, homo sapiens sapiens.
Interesting that you would call our truly distinguishing characteristic, language, a "crutch to lean on" — although there are many, including myself, who at times seem to use it as such. : )
Wow, I'm her (less extreme) opposite.
I have terrible episodic memory. I have very few "memories" in the way I've come to realize most people use it past roughly two or three months, which means my friends and family have learned that the answer to "Remember when....." is always no. I can recall associations between things (ie, I usually can recall I met Person A at Place B in context C), but specific happenings are lost to me.
But my factual memory is excellent. I can memorize pages upon pages of text without a sweat, and my friends use me as a walking reference book, because if I've ever seen a fact or figure, I almost certainly still remember it.
I've always wondered why that was (and have constantly had to deal with, "You can recite pi to a thousand digits but you can't remember that time we went bowling!?!"), but this article really sheds light on things.
Egads. This is a problem *I* have. I don't quite remember the exact dates but I constantly remember my stupid mistakes and frustration with people.
Rationally I know they have no bearing on today but remembering them makes me feel bad and acknowledge them by sighing or groaning... which can be awkward in public.
I remember what other people say/write and they often deny it later. I got in the habit of saving every chat and email I have with people since I got tired of being obiwan'd. E.G. "That isn't what I said." (hands waved toward my face)
(Note to self: associate with more honest people, fewer amoral jedis)
Once someone knew I saved the text of all chats she didn't want to talk to me online anymore. I told her I remembered specific details anyway but this was because of the dishonest people I dealt with.
She was kind of a Venn diagram embodiment of Asperger's syndrome and elitist bitch so I wondered why I chatted with her at all.
Buddy66 @17 & Spazzm @22:
Insert refusal to accept assumption that humans other than myself are conscious entities here.
Feel free to try to prove it.
There's one too many solipsists in the room. We ought to have a convention.
Successful forgetting can be a boon - to human beings and to the information systems they inhabit.
Pollyannacowgirl...
I think my drinking did silence this stuff but there were side effects...
And I cannot get Red Army Vodka in the US anymore...
Sister Y...
Seem to have developed a method of using depression/apathy to passively repress some unpleasant memories...
Unless Omega3 really does work after all..
DarkHumour, I feel for you - I completely understand why some people choose to have electroconvulsive therapy (lobotomy might not even be so bad compared to what Jill Price has to go through every day).
Marvin Minsky has a good theory of the brain which explains how this could happen. Look up "K-lines" in his book online.
The basic ideas is that there are multiple centers in the brain, and "k-lines" are likes wires which go through all of them, and can be programmed to store which centers were active during events or episodes that the brain needs to remember. There are multiple layers of abstraction in the brain, as some centers are managers for other centers, in a layered fashion.
When the brain recognizes it needs to solve a type of problem it has seen before, it activates a k-line which enables the brain centers which turns on those centers which were used the last tie. If the k-lines extend too far up and down the hierarchy, it will seem to the person as if they are actually re-experiencing the situation, instead of just having enough of the brain centers turned on to get them in the same general frame of mind.
"What was it about our evolution that produced not just a brain capable of surviving and dominating the prehistoric world, but one that can understand and do all the things my rather normal brain does today."
I'd say because our brains' capabilities shaped the world over time, rather than just -happening- to work in the world we suddenly find ourselves in today.
The thread thus far doesn't seem to know about Turing equivalence. Once you hit the threshold of computational power equivalent to a Turing machine, there's nowhere else to go. Turing machines are fairly simple (far simpler in "architecture" than modern computers), but can compute anything that CAN be computed.
As to whether (Turing) machines can think or there's really "something more" to consciousness, there are volumes of philosophical work on the topic. Check out Alan Turing's paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.htm) for some early work on the subject that seems to have been wrongly ignored in much early work among "proper" philosophers. I will add that the Turing test is both too hard and too easy -- normal people can be fooled by things as simple as ELIZA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA), but a "proper" Turing test can involve pretty much any computationally hard problem whatsoever.
I completely agree that the amount of knowledge some pre-histroic poeples gained is daunting. The people that live in the Amazon have an unbelievable knowledge of the plants and animals in the jungle. But modern doctors have all of that, plus everything else I mentioned. And yes each age has its requirements, but then comes da Vinci. Quite a few animals possess the mental ability and knowledge to survive in complex environments as you have described, but why have our brains developed so much more than that? Surely it is not necessary for survival that we have a brain that can imagine Relativity and Time Dilation.
I... am stunned. I 'suffer' from almost this exact same thing, seriously. Specific details, like "what was the third word in the fifth paragraph on the last page" aren't there, but emotions, "photographic" memories, feelings, they are all there. Sometimes I can access them at will, other times they just pop in and override anything that I am currently thinking or feeling.
I need to finish RFTA and talk to these people.
Spazzm is right. I suffer from this plague still. But I've learned to control it with yoga and mediation. I put it simply, when confronted with the spectres of past fears and humiliations, I learned to look it in the eye, take a deep breath, and confront the ghost with its own non-reality.
People who fundamentally have compassion for others built in often need to learn compassion with themselves.
This same story was a two-parter on NPR's Morning: Edition 2.5 years ago. Hearing the researcher and subject tell their story was incredibly fascinating and moving:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5350362
It's interesting that at the time of the NPR story, Jill Price was not revealing her real name or really any other details about her life. The NPR story also has less of a dark and gloomy take.
The story has stayed with me these past couple of years as I, like others here, definitely felt a connection with this woman. I have nothing near "total recall" like Price, but my memories have always been very strong, detailed, and long lasting. From age 2 on. It does come with it's baggage (much of which people discussed above). There's no "forgive and forget" - only "forgive." Learning to adjust to what other people are capable of remembering I'd say is the trickiest. But for me, there's a lot of good and fun, too.