The woman who remembered too much

I remember hearing about Jill Price, perhaps while she was still using a pseudonym, a few years ago. She’s a woman who has an incredible memory for events, dates and experiences she’s had, enough so that scientists have chosen to diagnose her with a newly-dubbed syndrome (“hyperthymestic” for her exceptional memory). Here’s a detailed Wired article on her by a cognitive psychologist that goes behind the media hype and figures out the real shape of things.

If Price’s memory of her own history is so precise, why is it so average for everything else? Or, more to the point, if her memory for everything else is so ordinary, why is her memory of her own history so extraordinary? The answer has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with personality.