Josh Foer on memory
The cover story of this month's National Geographic is a curious, provocative, and thoughtful feature about the weirdness of human memory. I was delighted to see that it was written by Joshua Foer, who is well known for his work if not his name, as the secretary/blogger of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Foer, a winner of the World US Memory Championship himself, is currently writing a book about the art and science of memory, due out in 2009. I can't wait! From his National Geographic article, titled "Remember This":
There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as "AJ," who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called "EP," who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst.Link
"My memory flows like a movie—nonstop and uncontrollable," says AJ. She remembers that at 12:34 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a young man she had a crush on called her on the telephone. She remembers what happened on Murphy Brown on December 12, 1988. And she remembers that on March 28, 1992, she had lunch with her father at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store, the weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is there. She's not easily stumped...
EP has two types of amnesia—anterograde, which means he can't form new memories, and retrograde, which means he can't remember old memories either, at least not since 1960. His childhood, his service in the merchant marine, World War II—all that is perfectly vivid. But as far as he knows, gas costs less than a dollar a gallon, and the moon landing never happened.
AJ and EP are extremes on the spectrum of human memory. And their cases say more than any brain scan about the extent to which our memories make us who we are. Though the rest of us are somewhere between those two poles of remembering everything and nothing, we've all experienced some small taste of the promise of AJ and dreaded the fate of EP. Those three pounds or so of wrinkled flesh balanced atop our spines can retain the most trivial details about childhood experiences for a lifetime but often can't hold on to even the most important telephone number for just two minutes. Memory is strange like that.
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Somem people keep a daily diary - that is not for me - but instead I make a sentence every sunday to record the best thigs that happpened tome that week. it both records my life - but also emphasizees the positive things so I feel good.
There is a video about Clive Wearing, known as a "Man Without a Memory." He has no new memories at all. It is fascinating.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDNDRDJy-vo
I am always amazed by the feats of just normal people. Its really one of the most amazing things what our bodies do, how unconscious we are of the whole process.
I'm sure this scale of memory recall isnt unique to this lady, maybe what she chooses to remember
I remember alot, terabytes of video, linked in so many ways to the stories which surround them, smells emotions, all these things can be recalled. The biggest problem with memory is it is almost completely ramdom access or link driven. Most things cannot be recalled on site, but memory needs to be navigated
I was in a rollover 3 years ago and crushed the left side of my head. It is really a bizarre experience to have no memory of an event until I am reminded by a photo or a few keywords and have the memories just suddenly appear.
For a time I forgot things the moment I turned away from them but I have fortunately recovered quite a bit better than I was expected to.
To all you bloggers out there looking for the big story that will get the hits please remember sometimes its the everyday things in your life you may someday miss more than anything and take yourself some good notes.
Check out the chapter in Jonah Lehrer's book "Proust was a Neuroscientist" dealing with memory. Its a great piece of writing that weaves together some of the science behind the creation and recollection of memories with Proust's very prescient thoughts on memory - surfaced through his text "Rememberance of Things Past"
I'm relatively sure "EP" is the man mentioned in Oliver Sacks's book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" (not the title person, but another study in the book who's memory was destroyed by years of alcohol abuse). A sad story. I actually witnessed something similar with a former co-worker whose memory was tentative at best after years of alcoholism and drugs, it was difficult if not impossible for him to count anything past about 50, he would lose track and start over.
I was in a member of a jury recently, and it amazed me how different people's accounts of the event in question varied, and our problem on the jury-- "who's memory do we trust?" Even an amalgam of the memories didn't create a clear picture.
I've always been fascinated by the notion of anterograde amnesia. In reality, there appear to be all sorts of types, as Google tells me: one man with anterograde amnesia as severe as that mentioned above - a short-term memory lasting only seconds - is nevertheless able to draw a map of the house he lives in, which he moved into four years after the accident which produced his amnesia. The theory is that he is able to remember the geography of the house because he has learned to navigate it by "muscle memory," just as people with this sort of event-related amnesia are still able to learn new skills, new words, etc.
Gene Wolfe's _Soldier in the Mist_ and the movie _Memento_ are probably the best-known fictional examples of this sort of amnesia. In both of these, short-term memory lasts about thirteen hours.
In the realm of the completly obscure, I can recommend an anime currently showing on Japanese television, _ef - a tale of memories_ (yes, it's titled in English and yes, all in lower case).
In this show, the character Chihiro suffers from a form of anterograde amnesia identical to that of Latro in _Soldier in the Mist_, and even carries, as Latro does, a diary whose first entry reads, "Read this every day." Beyond that the treatment is quite different. The show does a superb job of portraying her feelings about her condition: "I live at the end of a chain twelve years long, the length of my life at the time of the accident. My arm has a reach of thirteen hours. Everything beyond that is forever out of my reach..."
@ Ill Lich: I don't think EP was in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" because he didn't lose his memory from alcohol abuse. According to Josh Foer's story:
"15 years ago, the herpes simplex virus chewed its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in the medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of EP's memory."
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-11/memory/foer-text.html
Jack Attaway, you're a spammer. You're also banned.
Ah now that's a Directory to a Wonderful Thing! Memory has always been fascinating to me. I've long held to the theory that we never really forget anything, we simply lose the index. I've been driving down the road before and seen some scene that reminded me of a dream I'd had years ago -- the kind of dream where I'd woken up and forgotten it moments later, yet here I am remembering it with clarity because I saw some building that brought it all back out.
Interestingly, Mythbusters did a segment recently about hypnosis improving your memory. It worked for them.
I'm officially agnostic. I avoid being atheist mostly by a number of highly suspect things in life. One of them is the way memory works. Highly suspect.
One of my favorite questions to ask people is "What is your earliest memory?" Fascinating snippets and stories--sometimes concrete, sometimes ethereal, often mundane.
My earliest memory? I was 3 years old. My mischevious sister (who is 3 years older) held my hand and forced me to jump off our backyard deck to a dirt pile a story below. I can't remember any emotion--just the action.
Here is a short documentary i made about competitive memorization a few years ago.
http://victorsolomon.com/remember-me/
note Scott Hagwood's amazing story of having had lost his memory due to radioactive iodine treatments for thyroid cancer, and after seeing a piece on the memory championships while in the hospital, he took up some of their strategies, and ended up winning the event many times over.
I'm doing a thesis in philosophy of mind. Be careful of making analogies to modern technology. It's not like anything we've seen before. Hyperlinks? Navigated? Perhaps. But the resulting "links" aren't nearly as definite.
Not to mention the fact that there's nothing nearly as clean as a "result" whatsoever.
I've read the article, and it's a neat bit of reporting. I like how it doesn't pretend to know more than it does. Neuroscience and philosophy of mind are really nascent at this point, and the article reflects this feeling.
It's completely possible within five years to measure the activity of a random person's brain from a distance using a range of scanning techniques. determine the probability of the mood they're in. Hello advertising!
The "preview" button for comments seems to be broken (Mac X.2 FF 2.0.0.9); there's no link to post after previewing. I thought I'd mention this in my last post, but... I forgot.
Absentmindedness, Blocking, Transience, Bias, Misattribution, Persistence, and Suggestibility. Interesting. A search for "the seven sins of memory" turned up this further piece from Psychology Today. I'll have to commit those sins to... hm, memory.