Jill Price, a woman who remembers every detail of her life from age 14 to the present, has been getting a lot of media attention lately. Now the story has shown up on the political blog Ace of Spades.
What interests me about the Ace of Spades entry is the ridiculous knee-jerk skepticism exhibited by some of the commenters (and, to a lesser extent, Ace himself).
Remember that this woman has been extensively tested, and that she is not the only person who apparently has this condition. So there is every reason to believe that her memory is genuine.
Nevertheless, some self-styled experts immediately cry BS on the story. Ace himself opines,
I have a question about how they've determined her to be "bona fide," though. They determine this, they say, by checking her recall versus the diaries she's kept since a teenager; but that doesn't prove she remembers her life. That proves she's memorized her own diaries ....
Another big offer of proof from her as well as another man who's stepped forward to reveal his gift is the fact that she can remember what day of the week any particular date fell upon. The trouble is ... there's a mathematical formula to determine that ....
So I don't know. It's not so much that I doubt this is possible as I'm just unimpressed by the proof that these people can remember what they say they remember.
Get that? He's unimpressed. But wouldn't the scientists who've studied this and similar cases have already thought of these objections and countered them? Obviously, yes, as could be established merely by reading the USA Today article Ace links to. The article reports:
She was studied by memory experts at University of California-Irvine for six years before they reported the [results] in an esoteric professional journal in 2006....
[Neuroscientist James] McGaugh, with colleagues Elizabeth Parker and Larry Cahill, gave Price a battery of memory and cognitive tests. She'd kept a diary from ages 10 to 34, so the researchers could verify Price's recollections with pages randomly selected from 1,460 diary days, he says.
But that wasn't all. You could give her a date, "and within seconds she'd tell you what day of the week it was, not only what she did but other key events of the day," McGaugh says. Aug. 16, 1977? A Tuesday, Elvis died. May 18, 1980? A Sunday, when Mount St. Helens erupted. She also quickly could come up with the day and date of noted events: the start of the Gulf War, Rodney King's beating, Princess Diana's death (Aug. 30 or 31, 1997, depending on France or U.S. time, she told McGaugh).
In other words, it wasn't all diaries and days of the week. It was memories that could be checked from other sources. A couple of Ace's more informed readers point this out. One writes:
Actually, this woman was featured in a National Geographic cover article about memory a few months back. There are other people with similar conditions, and each time it's been the real deal. Memorizing diaries, for example, wouldn't be enough because she remembers details that wouldn't normally be written down.
To which some idiot responds:
If there is no record of the details, who's to say that they are, in fact, correct? She could be making up details that fit with the notes in the diaries.
Again, the point is that she remembers details that can be checked from other sources. But the skeptical idiot - let's call him a skeptidiot - has not even bothered to read the USA Today article and, left to his own devices, cannot imagine a team of scientists taking even the most elementary precautions.
In contrast to this idiocy, a clear-headed commenter writes:
Some of the other tests were not based on her diaries. I believe one of the checks was asking her about concrete events such as when she watched the Very Brady Christmas special. Since she had watched it 20 years ago she was able to correctly describe when it aired, even to the point of having to correct the doctors since their source material had the dates reversed with another Christmas special (which she had also watched).
That type of recall and the fact her brain is highly overstimulated in a few key areas confirmed her diagnosis.
Which of course is exactly the kind of common-sense test that any reasonably intelligent person would apply to this case. But since the skeptidiots cannot even think of such tests themselves, they blithely assume that no one else could think of them, either.
Most of the skeptical comments do not even attempt to engage the evidence.
Check if she's ever read Star Wars novels by Michael Stackpole or Timothy Zahn. Perfect memory is an ability at least two of the characters they use extensively have.
So if she's ever read about a fictional case of this condition, then she must be faking! Does this mean that if I read a book about someone with cancer - Cancer Ward, say - then I can never actually get cancer? Or if I were to read one of these Star Wars books, would I then be able to simulate memories of every event in my lifetime for the past 33 years?
Someone else snarkily asks:
But does she ever do jack shit worth remembering?
Well, she probably didn't live the kind of deeply fulfilling life exemplified by posting snark on comment threads. But that'll always be the dream.
Quoth another pompous pontificator:
This kind of claim is sooo easy to check - if one is skilled at logic and observation. Pity journalists apparently don't seem to possess those skills in abundance.
Only skeptidiots have those qualities, it seems! They can "check" a claim just by snarking about it.
Then there's the inevitable scientific fundamentalist, for whom life holds no mysteries. He already knows all the answers because he learned them in junior high:
Well I call bulls**t. Brains just don't work that way. If they did you'd run out of "space" pretty fast.
Unless, of course, humans actually remember by storing bits using quantum superposition. And supertiny flying monkeys with pens and notepads.
Ha ha! ROTFLMAO. "Flying monkeys!" Priceless! After all, everybody knows that applying quantum physics to neuroscience is just as silly as theorizing about miniature flying monkeys! We already know that "brains just don't work that way." We know everything. Ain't omniscience grand?
These people really are hopeless. Carefully researched, extensively documented, multiply verified anomalous facts stare them in the face, and rather than revising their worldview, they close their eyes and sing, "La la ... LAAA!" at the the top of their lungs. And if that fails, they crack dumb jokes about them danged wimmin and their nutty, estrogen-stoked behavior (which is what the rest of the thread consists of).
The Internet is often compared to a worldwide nervous system, a planetary brain. Maybe so.
But has anyone tried measuring its IQ?
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