Jill Price can recall in vivid detail every day of her life since age 14, and many earlier days, too. The Woman Who Can't Forget (Free Press), her new book with writer Bart Davis, tells the story of the first person ever confirmed by scientists to have such a superior autobiographical memory. She was studied by memory experts at University of California-Irvine for six years before they reported the feats of "AJ" in an esoteric professional journal in 2006.
[...]
One possible clue to Price's condition is that she scored poorly on abstract reasoning; it was hard to grasp concepts and see analogies.

"Most of us extract generalities. We get the gist of things, so we can navigate in similar situations," Levine says. "But if you have trouble seeing generalities, every instance becomes a unique instance, interesting in its own light."

It's like focusing extra-hard on individual trees but not seeing the forest. Because she's swamped with details, Price may find it easy to store and retrieve specific memories but hard to see the bigger picture, he speculates.

(USAToday)

Interesting in that I've also been recently reading an article on memory and consciousness. The human subconscious seems to do a lot of work in storing memories and somehow giving them different priorities. It also creates lots of links in order possibly to learn from experience but also as a possible algorithm for later searching.

I mean, think about how we try to remember something we've forgotten. Say we see someone and can't remember their name. We can't do a search because we don't know what we're looking for. We try to think back to connection. Where did we last see them? Did they say anything memorable? Did somebody else introduce us to them. Sometimes that search still yields nothing but often the mind carries on the search unconsciously, as a background process. An hour later the name pops into our head!

Now, somebody who can remember every page in a book but not the whole story is both amazing and a little sad. As the piece says, the narrative is missing. But amazingly, the brain has also managed to store all of this without deleting any. At the opposite extreme is amnesia, where memories are seemingly lost. Maybe the brain really can both remember everything and forget everything. Being selective might be the best algorithm after all.

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