The sounds of the silence...

Busy week at work plus no internet access at home (coming Sat.) equals no posting on the ol' blog. Nothing to be done about that.

So, until I can get back in the swing of things, here's an article I stumbled across and enjoyed.

It's about Jill Price who has a perfect memory. Literally. She remembers every detail of every day since she was fifteen and many of the days before that. It's not all wine and roses:

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."

This put me in mind of the v. interesting book The Mind of a Mnemonist by A.R. Luria that I read a while back. It was one of that all-too-rare genre of medical case study written for a wide audience (Oliver Sacks of Awakenings fame is prob. the most well-known and prolific of the genre.) It was about a man who, like Jill Price, never forgot.

In the Mnemonist book the fellow had synaesthesia, the condition where your senses are not distinct from each other: sounds were associated with colors, tastes and smells for him. Apparently many people with phenomenal memories have varying degrees of the condition.

The Mnemonist fashioned a fairly successful career for himself as a memory showman. He would entertain audiences by having them recite random words or sounds or whatnot to any length and then he would rattle them back. Of course, as he never forgot, he could rattle them off for any of his shows no matter how many years before. The book ended, as I recall, unhappily as the fellow eventually went somewhat insane because he could no longer distinguish things that had just happened from things that had happened years before.

And, it seems from the article, much the same thing might be happening to Ms. Price, though she apparently does not possess the Mnemonist's ability to remember arbitrary strings of words.