The Unusual Mentality of Jill Price

 

Jill Price was designated as “AJ” in a 2006 report in the journal Neurocase: “A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering” by Elizabeth S. Parker, Larry Cahill and James L. McGaugh.  Her quoted self-appraisals include:

I think about the past all the time . . .

It's like a running movie that never stops.  It's like a split screen.  I'll be talking to someone and seeing something else.

When I hear a date I see the day . . . 

I see it as I saw it that day . . . I get to a portion of the day so I can see what day it was and whatever sticks out in my mind . . .

 
In the prologue of her memoir The Woman Who Can’t Forget (2008) that she wrote with Bart Davis, Jill related that if you give her a date from 1980 (when she was fourteen) to the present, she can instantly tell you what day of the week it was, what she did on that day, and any major event that took place—or even minor events—as long as she heard about them on that day.
 
In the book Jill recounted being tested in 2003 to write down the dates of all the Easters that she could remember.  “I started in 1980, the first year of my strong recall, and within 10 minutes, I wrote down all of the dates and also short notes about what I had been doing on those days.”  There was one error and it was off by two days.  Furthermore:
 

When they asked me to write the list again, spontaneously, two years later, I got all of the dates right, and when they showed me the two versions side by side, I immediately pointed out to them the one error that I had made the first time.

 
The book includes commentary about other cases of remarkable mental abilities.  Jill commented:
 

The previously documented cases of superior memory break down into two main types: people who use mnemonic devices such as imagery or rhyming to memorize vast amounts of data and savants who are naturally able to memorize incredible volumes of information, like the entire New York City phone book or a hundred years of baseball statistics.  I can't even imagine doing that.  

 
In the Neurocase article, the neuroscience researchers wrote that Jill was not able to use her talents to memorize in school.  She told them that she had great difficulty with rote memorization.  The article mentioned what was learned from neuropsychological testing, including: “As was the case for Luria’s S, AJ was not strong in analogical reasoning as seen in her low score on the Similarities subtest of the WAIS-R.  There was a notable tendency towards concrete versus abstract answers.”  
 
Reflecting about how she  remembers days so well in the book, Jill mentioned "visuals that I just 'see' in my mind.  The first of these is a time line of history . . . I see single years as circles . . . June is always at the bottom and December always at the top, and the months progress counterclockwise."
 
Jill acknowledged, “As I got older and my memory moved into high gear, with memories constantly flashing through my mind and beginning to drive me crazy, I found that journaling helped a great deal with keeping the swirl under control.”  She explained:
 

When people first hear about my journals, they often think that I must have memorized them and that they explain why I have such detailed recall.  But the truth is that I rarely look at them, and have never spent much time reading back through them.

 
The journals are voluminous: “The total number of pages in my journals written during all the years I’ve kept them is over 50,000.”  Jill’s journals provide a record of her past that allows those investigating her mentality to confirm the details she offers and find extensive evidence of her extraordinary ability to recall the past.