McLean's magazine (www.macleans.ca, May 14, 2008) recently featured an article by Kate Fillion about Jill Price, a woman with a memory that "walks right beside" her. She can unnervingly remember everything that ever happened to her, exactly what people said, and the date and day on which it happened. Somehow she has learned to integrate all this into her daily life while she keeps herself in the "now" at the same time. The medical category for Jill's condition is 'hyperthymestic syndrome," and Harvard scientists want to study her unique brain scans for the rest of her life to see if they can find something to help other people. There is still so much that doctors and scientists don't know about memory and how it works.
Jill's story, and her condition, are singular, but they resonate with me because always I have been blessed with an exceptional memory. I don't have total recall like Jill, but I do have a photographic memory to the extent that I remember exactly where particular words and paragraphs are located on pages that I have read. My ability to scan a page quickly was gained, I think, from my early live radio experience. As an actress, I would scan the words ahead of me at the same time as I was reading in the moment. So my memory is very visual in nature. Visual images from long ago can be conjured up in an instant.
My aural memory is pretty exact also. It's unnerving to others, though, when you have the ability to remember a conversation word for word (or so you believe) when they remember it differently (and, of course, they're wrong). Most of the time, it's wiser not to correct other people. Who wants a human tape recorder hanging around? Now that I'm getting older, these abilities are not yet diminished, but I'm aware that they may be in the future. Then someone will have to correct me or ask me politely to turn off the tape.
In the general realm, I remember the course of public events quite accurately, partly because of a lifelong interest in history and partly because I have lived through a lot of eventful history in the course of seven decades. Don't you find it very irritating when the media gets it all wrong when you know what really took place? What ever happened to journalists who took pride in checking their sources? The trouble is that many of the sources are wrong too, so that the errors get perpetuated.
I truly hope Jill's brain scans can help doctors and scientists apply what they learn from them to assist medical advances, in Altzheimer's disease (www.Alzfdn.org;www.medicalnewstoday.com) for instance, that affects so many people who are the repositories of history, of knowledge. Three of my mother's four siblings had Alzheimer's in their later years (very late, fortunately), and my mother had dementia. They were all brilliant people, a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, and a teacher among them, and it was so sad to watch them deteriorate mentally. This is a genetic disease, so I sure hope a cure is found before it affects me. If the same immense financial resources that went into unravelling the human genome (www.genome.gov) were put into Alzheimer's research, perhaps this terrible disease that turns people into the shells of what they were will become a thing of the past. With baby boomers getting older, a lot of people may be affected.
Some years ago, largely because of my family history, I participated in a memory training research program at the Center for Aging at UCLA. Unfortunately, I wound up in the control group, so I didn't get the training at that time. Initiated by Dr. Gary Small, who wrote the Memory Bible and the Memory Prescription (www.drgarysmall.com), the memory training course has proved very successful and is being offered to many community groups in California. I did seize the opportunity to take it this past year, however. Not that there is anything wrong with my memory yet, apart from occasional senior moments (I will never, never, never learn to remember where I put any one of my three pair of glasses!). Unlike Jill, I've never been good at remembering numbers, and the memory training course did help me with that. For example, if the first number is 5, you might image "five golden rings," and so on, and make up a story to connect all the numbers together. All of a sudden, I could remember my four daughters' landlines, cell phones, and blackberry numbers. Fax numbers are practically obsolete, so I didn't bother with those.