Jill Price, the woman who remembers everything

Imagine if you could not choose which memories are preserved and which are relinquished. For Jill Price there is no option to edit her memory; the painful and the unpleasant, stretching back through adolescence, are as vivid as if they had just occurred. It’s no surprise that Jill feels she is held hostage by her memory.

She has written: “If someone made videos of you from the time you were a child, following you around all day, day by day, then combined them onto one DVD and you sat in a room and watched that DVD on a machine set to shuffle randomly through all the tracks.”

So rare is her condition that doctors have so far diagnosed it in only a handful of people and have coined a name for it – superior autobiographical memory, or hyperthymestic syndrome – a day-to-day life invaded, and even overwhelmed, by the detail of its past.