Not remotely related to anything here, except maybe brains, but this article in Wired called Total Recall: The Woman Who Can’t Forget is one of the more fascinating things you’ll read today or tomorrow.

You might have heard of Jill Price, the woman who remembers everything. The piece is written by Gary Marcus, a cognitive psychologist at New York University, but there’s a twist here. Marcus approaches his subject critically, and finds that, basically, Price is not what she’s being made out to be. That she has an amazing memory (he calls her the Michael Jordan of memory), but that she’s more in tune with the day to day events of her life than anything else — due at least in part to an extremely detailed diary (pic above) she keeps.

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.

Price remembers so much about herself because she thinks about herself—and her past—almost constantly. She still has every stuffed animal she’s ever gotten, enough (as she showed me in a photograph) to completely cover the surface of her childhood bed. She has 2,000 videotapes and countless audiotapes, not to mention more than 50,000 pages of diary entries in idiosyncratic handwriting—so dense that it’s almost unreadable. Until recently she owned a copy of every TV Guide since summer 1989. I’m not sure Price wants to catalog her life like this, but she can’t help herself. When she tells me that one of her biggest regrets in life is that no one followed her around with a microphone during her childhood, I’m not the least bit surprised. In her own words, she lives as if there’s a split screen running in her mind—one half on the present, the other on the past.

While this makes her less of a circus freak, a phenomenon that could have happened 200 or 2000 years ago, in a way her story becomes all the more amazing. Essentially she’s obsessed with herself.

I got this via Adam Cromie’s twitter. Adam works for the Nationals, who deserve some Nats congrats following the debut of the very promissing Jordan Zimmerman yesterday.