The Woman Who Can't Forget Page 2

  Friday, November 21, 1980: I was in the 10th grade and I went to the Homecoming football game at my high school and then I went to Karen’s house to watch Dallas. That was also the day that the MGM Grand Hotel went up in flames in Las Vegas.

  Wednesday, January 16, 1991: I was watching Casper [Caspar] Weinberger on CNN and they broke in with the news that we were at war. I looked out the window and wondered how people could go on with life as usual when we were at war. I felt the same way on Tuesday 1/28/1986 when the Challenger exploded.

  Sunday, March 3, 1991: Personal

  Tuesday, October 3, 1995: Sitting in my den watching and waiting

  Friday, July 26, 1996: I was having dinner at the Daily Grill with my friend Andi and I saw a lot of people standing around the television in the bar area so I went over there to see what was going on. I could not believe it.

  Sunday, August 30, 1997: My friend Robin and I went shopping at Macy’s and then went to Hamburger Hamlet for dinner. After getting home, at 10 p.m., I put on The Practice on ABC and found out the princess had died.

  Tuesday, July 25, 2000: I was working and read about the crash on the Internet.

  Tuesday, November 7, 2000: Personal

  Tuesday, Nov 3, 1992: My dad and I were so happy to vote for Clinton that I was dancing around the parking lot. We came home and my mom had bagels and lox for us to celebrate. That night I went over to my friend Stacy’s house to watch his acceptance speech.

  Tuesday, November 5, 1996: The family went to The Grill in Beverly Hills for dinner to celebrate [my brother] Michael’s birthday which was the next day.

  As you can see, the recollections I get for any given date tend to be snippets at first. When I’m given a date, I have an immediate recall of some particular thing, or a few things, that happened that day. My mind takes me right to those moments, and I in effect am “in” them again; I also feel the emotion of whatever moment has popped up. If I start to focus on recalling more, I’ll “see” more and more of the day.

  The fact that my memory is not only for dates and for cultural or news events but for those events combined with the events of my own life is the reason that Dr. McGaugh identified it as distinctively autobiographical in nature. Researchers distinguish among many types of memory, for example, short-term, long-term, semantic, episodic, and working memory. There are many more. Each has its own particular functioning, and scientists are still working out how the various types of memory are created and stored in the brain and how they combine with one another in day-to-day life. For example, they have theories about how short-term memories are transformed into long-term ones, but no definitive answer. Autobiographical memory is a combination of long-term memory for the specific events in our lives, such as, for me, going to Disneyland with a good friend of mine, and knowledge about the facts of our lives, such as that we are married or that we have two children. Most people’s autobiographical memory is highly selective, emphasizing particularly important or emotionally intense events, such as one’s wedding day or a horrible car accident.

  What was so striking to Dr. McGaugh about that first test he did of my memory is that in the study of what is called superior memory, my type of autobiographical recall was unheard of. That’s why the scientists coined a new term for it: hyperthymestic syndrome, from the Greek words thymesis, which means remembering, and hyper, meaning extreme or excessive. One of my hopes is that people who have been living with the syndrome will hear word of it, as I know all too well how confusing and difficult it is to cope with and what a comfort it has been to me to understand the condition better—even just to know that I have a specific condition.

  What is so different about my sort of recall is that most cases of superior memory involve the ability to remember other types of information, such as strings of numbers like the digits of pi or long lists of unrelated words. My memory doesn’t work that way at all, and I did not perform especially well on tests that measure that sort of memorization ability. The previously documented cases of superior memory break down into two main types: people who use mnemonic devices such as imagery or rhyming to memorize vast amounts of data and savants who are naturally able to memorize incredible volumes of information, like the entire New York City phone book or a hundred years of baseball statistics. I can’t even imagine doing that.

  The history of methods for memorizing is fascinating, stretching all the way back to ancient times. One technique, called the method of loci, is attributed to the Greek poet Simonedes of Kos in 447 B.C. It consists of mentally walking down a familiar path and attaching to-be-remembered facts to places along the path. When you want to recall them, you “walk” along the path in your mind, and they are much more easily retrieved. I’ve never used mnemonic tricks like this or rehearsed the events of my life in order to remember them. Nor do I use any kind of memory aids like rhyming or imaging items in my head. I’m as awed by the feats of that sort of memorizing as anyone else is.

  One of the most famous cases of superior memory is of a man referred to in the scientific literature as S, who was studied by Russian psychologist Alexander Luria. Luria’s attention was brought to S, whose name was later revealed to be Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevskii, by the editor of the newspaper where S worked. The editor had noted that after the morning meeting he held with the reporters, S was able to recall lengthy instructions he’d been given without having taken any notes. Luria tested S at length and concluded that his memory was phenomenally strong, and that although he used some mnemonic devices, his memory was not dependent on them. More recent scrutiny of Luria’s work on S suggests that mnemonics might have been more integral to S’s ability. Regardless of whether they were necessary for his remembering, he certainly was good at using them, as he later went on to become a professional mnemonist, performing memory feats for entertainment.

  Interestingly, as is often the case with unusual types of memory, S also demonstrated other oddities in his mental abilities. He had a condition known as synesthesia, in which when one of the senses is aroused, it produces an associated sensation in another of the senses. When the person hears a certain sound, he might also see a color associated with it, or a taste might trigger an associated sound. S also had trouble with language: he couldn’t understand that two different words could be used to refer to the same thing and could not comprehend abstract concepts. In addition, he had limitations with some types of visual recognition; when shown two pictures of the same person’s face, he had trouble understanding that they were of the same face if the expressions were different. As is so often the case in the study of people with unusual memory abilities, these other quirks in S’s mental functioning offered rich clues for investigation of the ways in which memory is so intricately intertwined with other thought processes in our brains. To me, the most interesting aspect of his story is that he had no superior memory for his own life events. The details about his own life were something of a blur.

  There was also no evidence of superior autobiographical memory in another of the famous cases of superior memory, that of VP, a man who could play up to sixty games of correspondence chess without notes. By the age of five, he had memorized the street map of Riga, in Latvia, his home town of 500, 000 people.

  VP was able to memorize almost all of “The War of the Ghosts,” a strange Native American folk tale that pioneering British psychologist Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett used to test people’s memories because it is so quirky and hard to recall. He recited the story to those he was testing and then would ask them to recall it verbally to him. Most people leave out key details and change the story in significant ways. Here it is, in case you want to read it and test yourself about how much you can remember (though I warn you, it’s odd):

  One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war cries, and they thought: “Maybe this is a war-party.” They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard
the noise of paddles, and saw one canoe coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said:

  What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people.”

  One of the young men said, “I have no arrows.”

  “Arrows are in the canoe,” they said.

  “I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But you,” he said, turning to the other, “may go with them.”

  So one of the young men went, but the other returned home.

  And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama. The people came down to the water and they began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young man heard one of the warriors say, “Quick, let us go home: that Indian has been hit.” Now he thought: “Oh, they are ghosts.” He did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot.

  So the canoes went back to Egulac and the young man went ashore to his house and made a fire. And he told everybody and said: “Behold I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed. They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick.”

  He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried.

  He was dead.

  VP was able to recall the story with remarkable precision six weeks after listening to only two readings of it. A year later, he was able to recall the tale just as accurately as he had the year before.

  When I was asked to read the story and recall it, I just said, “No way,” because I knew from experience that I wasn’t going to be able to remember it. That’s not the way my memory works. I did finally agree to read it, and recalled only seven out of forty-nine nouns and eight out of sixty-eight verbs. By contrast, VP’s score was thirty-three out of forty-nine nouns and forty out of sixty-eight verbs, and his score was almost as high six weeks later.

  Another test I was given in order to compare my memory to cases like that of S and VP was about number recall. I was asked to look at a 4 © 13 matrix of numbers, such as this below, and recall as much of it as I could right thereafter:

  S was able to call off all fifty-two numbers in succession in 40 seconds after studying the matrix for only three minutes. I just laughed when they asked me to do this test. Were they kidding? I studied the matrix for 3 minutes 52 seconds and was able to recall only seven of the fifty-two numbers.

  In one book about studies of people with unusual memory, out of ten cases described, the majority had an incredible memory only for quite specific kinds of information, which they had memorized. For example, subject A had worked as a telephone operator in Britain and was able to recall nearly all the telephone exchange codes of all the towns in the British Isles. None of the ten cases, however, had more than average ability to recall autobiographical detail from their pasts. Clearly my brain works quite differently from theirs.

  As for savants such as Kim Peek, the inspiration for the character in the movie Rain Man, they tend to have particular areas of extraordinary memory, such as the ability to remember long displays of words or digits, but they do not generally have extraordinary autobiographical recall. I am neither autistic nor a savant, and the kind of calculations they do with strings of thousands of words or numbers are as foreign to me as they are to you.

  In fact, I’m horrible at memorizing. Many people have commented that school must have been a breeze for me. But my memory was actually more of a hindrance than a help in school. My mind doesn’t store information in the way that so much of school requires. I had lots of trouble memorizing history, arithmetic, foreign language, and science facts because I had to be genuinely interested in information of that kind in order to remember it. Memorizing poetry was especially painful, if not impossible. I needed math tutors from second grade on to help me memorize the way to do calculations, and I did horribly in geometry because I could never remember the theorems. Not only is my brain not good at that type of remembering, but over time, the constant rush of personal memories running through my head made it hard to pay attention. The result was my grades were mostly Cs with some Bs and an A here and there. This is also one reason that the fact that I had a superior memory didn’t become clear to my parents and teachers as I was growing up.

  Though this may sound odd, the fact that my memory is so different wasn’t always clear even to me. When I was young, I had a vague sense that I seemed to have a much better memory than lots of other people. I was always correcting my parents about things they claimed I had said, or that they had said to me, which, as you can imagine, didn’t go over very well. But my memory wasn’t always so strikingly different; it seems to have developed in stages as I grew up, and up to my mid-elementary school years, it wasn’t something that preoccupied me.

  I first began to appreciate just how detailed my memory was becoming in 1978, at age twelve. I was in seventh grade and studying on May 30 for a science final with my mother. That was a bad year at school, and as I studied, I started to drift off into thinking how much I had loved the year before. Suddenly I was aware that I was able to vividly recall exactly what I was doing the same day the year before. May 30 that year was Memorial Day, and I saw myself on Tees Beach in Santa Monica with my family by lifeguard station 4. I had another such vivid memory a couple of months later, on July 1. I was on the beach at Paradise Cove with my friend Kathy and her family, and she and I were eating vanilla custards. All of a sudden I realized that she and I had done exactly the same thing on the same beach on the same day the year before. I looked at her and said, “Do you realize we did the exact same thing on July 1 last year?” expecting that shock of recognition when she too remembered the day. But she just looked at me and said, “We did?” and I realized she didn’t remember it at all. That was when I started to understand that my memory was unusual, and from then on, flashes of recall of that kind just kept happening more and more.

  I can clearly identify three phases of my memory’s development. For my earliest years, from 1965, when I was born, to 1974, I remember a good deal more than most other people do from that part of their lives. I also have some vivid memories from much younger than the age of most people’s first memories. My earliest memory is from when I was eighteen months old and I was in my crib. My uncle’s poodle, Frenchie, woke me up, and when I opened my eyes, there he was, his big brown eyes staring at me in curiosity, and I started crying. (Before long, I grew to love Frenchie.)

  From 1974 to 1979, ages eight to thirteen, I remember most days but not every day, and I sometimes have to try for a few seconds to recall a day. From February 5, 1980, onward is when I begin to have completely accurate recall.

  My memory for dates and days of the week seems to have evolved naturally right along with my recall of events as I grew up. One of the results was that I began to simply “see” in my mind that certain years matched up by date. For example, 1969 and 1986 have exactly the same calendars, meaning that all the dates fell on the same days. January 1 was a Wednesday in both years, and all of the rest of the days were the same through the year.

  My memory is constantly making linkages between dates that way. For example, I often do what I call “chaining” through these identical years. From a given date that has popped into my mind—say, July 4, 2007, which fell on a Wednesday—I’ll find my memory drawn to traveling back to all of the other July 4ths in my life, from the period of my strong recall, that also fell on a Wednesday: in 1990, 1984, and 1979. I do this not only for days in years with identical calendars, though; I like doing it for any given date, chaining quickly back through all the days with the same date and seeing what nugget of memory first pops up for each day. This is soothing for me, bringing some order to the swirl of my memories, and often when I’m blow-drying my hair in the morning, I flip through all the days with the same date as that morning. The other day, December 19, for example, I wrot
e up a description of my recall as I chained through all of the December 19ths that I can remember, starting in 1980. I’ll spare you the complete write-up, as I’m sure a selection will make the point:

  DECEMBER 19, 1980—FRIDAY

  Last day of school (10th grade) before Christmas vacation.

  That night babysit for the Reisberg sisters (5 and 7).

  DECEMBER 19, 1981—SATURDAY

  Go shopping with Dean and Harry in Beverly Hills. See Candace in Beverly Hills—she just made the cheerleading one day earlier and she was so happy!

  That night go out with Harry—I am wearing my gray turtleneck sweater and I break my bracelet on his bed; we go to Swenson’s Ice Cream.

  DECEMBER 19, 1982—SUNDAY

  My third day as a box girl at Gelson’s supermarket.

  That night I went to see Six Weeks with Dudley Moore and Mary Tyler Moore; it was so sad and we were all crying. Liz slipped on wet paper on the floor and slid across the theater lobby.

  DECEMBER 19, 1983—MONDAY

  Home from college for Christmas vacation. My first (and last) day as a flower deliverer at the flower shop across the street from Renee’s mom’s shop. Get locked in an elevator. Get chased by a squirrel at The Buckley School. Get lost in Sun Valley. Get pulled over on the 405 south for tailgating on my way to Westwood to see Silkwood. I was with Renee, Susie and Tricia.

  DECEMBER 19, 1984—WEDNESDAY (LEAP YEAR)

  Finish first semester at LAVC (community college). Candace over and we watch Charles in Charge. We are really excited because we are going to AZ in the morning.

  DECEMBER 19, 1985—THURSDAY

  Finishing up Fall 85 semester at LAVC. I got my hair cut really short the day before so now I had really high hair and used a lot of Aqua Net Super Hold. Michael [my brother] opened the door while I was getting dressed and I slammed it shut but it swung open into my eye. I was leaving for Florida on my first trip without my parents (Boca to see grandparents and aunt and uncle and Philadelphia to see Cathi and Dan) on Sunday 12/22 and I had a black eye.