The Woman Who Can't Forget Read online

  DECEMBER 19, 1986—FRIDAY

  Finishing up my time at LAVC.

  Went to work at Nordstrom’s Rack—HATED THAT JOB.

  Perhaps one reason that I remember days so well is that my brain seems to love to organize time. One of the unusual ways it does so, which intrigued the scientists because again it was so unprecedented, is with visuals that I just “see” in my mind. The first of these is a time line of history, which covers not just my lifetime but goes back to the year 1900. I have no idea why this is the case, nor do the scientists. The way I drew this time line for them is as follows:

  When they asked me to describe how I saw the time line on several different occasions, I always drew it exactly the same way, with the same set of years and with all of the lines the same range of lengths. I can’t think of any reason that it’s this particular set of years I see or why I draw some of the lines longer and some shorter. I also have no idea why 1970 is the pivot point at the top left, where the time line switches from horizontal to vertical.

  The scientists remarked how counterintuitive it is that the dates start at the right and proceed to the left, like reading Hebrew, and then down rather than up. But to me that’s not counterintuitive at all; it’s simply the way I see them. They don’t know what the significance of this time line is in the way my memory works or why I see history in this fashion. As far as I’m concerned, I can’t imagine not seeing the time line in my mind.

  That isn’t the only visual that took shape in my mind as I grew up. I see single years as circles, as in the diagram below. June is always at the bottom and December always at the top, and the months progress counterclockwise.

  Because my memory became so complete, I began to act as the historian in my family and among my friends, regularly reminding people of the dates of events in their lives and “refereeing” disputes about when something happened. “No, it wasn’t in July of 1998 that you two went to Italy, that was August of 1996.” “You’re both wrong. The date you had that huge fight was Saturday, November 16, 2002, and you patched it up on December 11.” “Grandma didn’t come to visit us in January that year; she came on March 14.” I like dating events that way and don’t mind at all when people ask me to do so. That’s probably the most clarifying way in which people start to understand just how different my memory is. I even used to joke that I should open a “Stump the Human Calendar” booth on Venice Beach, near where I grew up in Los Angeles.

  The truth is, though, that as much as I like that my memory is so complete, it’s been terribly difficult to live with. My lack of talent for memorizing is only one of the many features of my memory that have influenced my life in ways that have been seriously challenging, often excruciating. One of the most troubling features of my memory is that it is so automatic and can spin wildly out of control. Though I can direct my memory back to particular events I want to remember—and when asked to, I can recall memories in a systematic way, such as when I’m given a date or an event—when my memory is left to its own devices, it roams through the course of my life at will. Memories are popping into my head randomly all the time, as though there is a screen in my head playing scenes from movies of years of my life that have been spliced into one another, hopping around from day to day, year to year, the good, the bad, the joyful, and the devastating, without my conscious control.

  Perhaps they’re not actually random. They do seem to be sparked by what scientists of memory call retrieval cues, such as a date being mentioned, a song on the radio, or a name coming up. The other day, for example, the song “Jessie’s Girl” came on the radio, and instantly my memory went to the first day I heard the song, March 7, 1981. I had just gotten my driver’s permit and I was driving my friend Ronni home after she spent the night at my house. Often it’s a smell that will take me back. For example, when I walked into the house the other night, the first thing I smelled was a baked potato in the oven, and it brought me right back to when I was two years old, sitting in the living room in our apartment in New York City and watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. For forty years that is exactly the moment that the smell of a baked potato always takes me back to. It’s not the same if a potato is microwaved; the memory isn’t triggered. It has to be baked in the oven.

  Sometimes I’m aware of what the cue was, as in those cases, but many times I’m not. My recall is so automatic that I’m not truly conscious most times about why I have started remembering something.

  According to one of the leading theories, normal human memory makes use of retrieval cues in this way too, probably because those words or sounds or smells were stored in the long-term memory at the same time the memory was. The more specific the cue is, the more effectively it tends to call up a memory. For example, if you went on a great trip to Yosemite Park, you might not find yourself remembering that trip if a friend just said the word park, but if she said Yosemite, the chances that your mind would flash onto that trip increase. I’m sure you can remember instances of a memory popping into your head that way when you heard a song or a place name. They’re called involuntary memories, and one study showed that most people have about three to five of them a day. Ironically the memory of having these memories fades quickly for most people, so you may be able to recount only a couple of particular instances.

  One of the things that seems to be different about my memory is that many things act powerfully and automatically as retrieval cues for me, filling my head with involuntary memories almost all the time. When I’m watching TV, I may hear a product name that will set off a rush of memories; or driving to work, I may notice a place name on a road sign, and my mind will take off. I have many, many more than three to five memories a day; they pop into my mind continually. Another key difference in my involuntary memories seems to be that normally, most such memories are of positive experiences, but mine are all over the map, from great times to horrible ones.

  A key question about my memory, in fact, is whether I remember so much because so many of my long-term memories get stored with such a richness of cues. It may be that we all encode into our long-term memories as much information about our lives as I do, but that my mind has a much greater ability to pull those memories out of storage. The problem with how many cues set my memory off is that the process is constant, and my mind doesn’t just flash on to those memories and then quickly get back to the present moment.

  In many ways, my memory has been both a blessing and a curse. When I’m feeling down, I often revisit favorite memories, which I call “traveling,” going back especially to the happiest years of my life as a young child in New York City and suburban New Jersey. I wouldn’t give my memories of those years up for anything in the world; they give me great comfort during my most difficult times. But my memory has also caused me quite a bit of pain through the years. Remembering so many of the moments of my life means I recall not only the joyful, fun times: the times of wonderful family closeness and friendship and sharing, and the esteem-building moments of achievement. I also constantly recall the fights and the insults, the excruciating embarrassments, the moments of heated anger and devastating disappointment.

  One of the features of my memories that is most difficult to cope with is that the emotion of them isn’t dialed down; my memories are apparently exceptionally emotional and sensually vivid. Some fascinating research has been done on the question of how much emotion is recalled in normal human remembering. Most people—82 percent according to one study—report that they vividly recall emotions along with their memories. But research has shown that that is probably true for only a small set of particularly momentous memories in their lives, which are called personal event memories, and are experienced as being relived when they are remembered.

  Some studies have even indicated that for many memories that people report as being highly emotional, the degree of emotion they experience while remembering them is in fact quite faint. For example, when people were asked to remember while their brains were being scanned in rea
l time, no activity in the emotional center of the brain, the amygdala, was detected. An interesting exercise to try in order to figure out what is true of your own emotional recall, suggested to me by one researcher who has worked on this question, is to quickly describe twenty highly emotional memories. Apparently in the studies she has done, this exercise is quite difficult for most people after the first few items. But I could list hundreds of them without stopping to think.

  When I remember, the effect for all of my memories is like that described for personal event memories. It’s not as though I’m looking back on the events with the distance of time and of adult perspective; it’s as though I’m actually living through them again. Though it’s difficult to describe this, when I remember, I see and feel with the fullness of watching a scene in a movie, and that can be emotionally overwhelming. For me, the emotion that comes along with every memory is every bit as potent as it was the day I first had it.

  I feel the same fear, no matter how irrational that fear might have been. When we moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1974, my parents were young and had a lot of friends and they would go out every weekend. Depending on what night of the weekend it was, we had either our housekeeper or a babysitter stay with my brother and me. The Friday night TV lineup on NBC that fall was The

  Rockford Files at 9 P.M. and PoliceWoman at 10 P.M. I always hoped my parents would be home when The Rockford Files ended at 10:00, even though I knew it would be hours before they would actually get back. As the closing credits ran and the theme song played, I would begin feeling anxious. I would have trouble getting to sleep afterward and would wake up in the middle of the night, usually around 2 A. M. If I saw that my parents’ car was not in the carport, I would start to feel really sick inside. I would go and get their pictures and lie in bed holding them, so when they came home they always found me sleeping with a bunch of pictures clenched tightly. Until now they never knew the reason for finding me like that. I loved the show but, even now that I’m forty-two years old, The Rockford Files theme song gives me a knot in my stomach every time I hear it, bringing me right back to being eight years old.

  At any given moment, anything at all that someone said to me, or some hurtful or ridiculous thing that I said to someone that I desperately wish I could take back, may pop into my mind and yank me back to that difficult day and exactly how I was feeling about myself. Often it’s excruciating to relive the past this way. I know that people generally forget—eventually, anyway—most of the details of arguments they’ve had, or of hurtful things friends and family have said or done to them, and that they’ve said and done to others. Those memories might be called to mind if they have a similar experience that brings them forth, but generally, they are not floating constantly in and out of people’s consciousness. Unfortunately, I regularly remember a vast storehouse of them, and vividly, from the time I was fourteen.

  The emotional intensity of my memories, combined with the random nature in which they’re always flashing through my mind, has, on and off through the course of my life, nearly driven me mad. As I grew older and more and more memories accumulated in my mind, my memory became not only a horrible distraction in trying to live my life today, but also the cause of my terrible struggle to come to terms with my feelings about my past. The more memories were stored, the harder and harder it became to cope with the rush of recalled events. So many painful memories kept asserting themselves. The thousands of things my parents said to discipline me, for example, or blurted out when they were having a bad day or when I provoked them have never faded.

  Dr. McGaugh told me that first day I met with him that lots of people had contacted him through the years. He had stacks of e-mails from people saying that they had special memory abilities, but almost all had turned out not to truly have the capabilities they’d described. He was convinced that my abilities, though, were real, and I felt joy and relief when he said that he wanted to work with me. I had no idea what to expect about what he would discover, but I felt sure that at last I was going to be able to begin to understand my memory and explain it to those in my life in a way I’d never been able to do.

  One of the interesting things Dr. McGaugh has explained to me during the course of our subsequent work together is that science knows a good deal about forms of impaired memory such as amnesia, but it knows very little about forms of superior memory. That was one reason he was so interested in studying my memory further. Not only did my memory appear to be unique, but in the science of memory, there is a long tradition of discoveries arising from the study of people with unusual types of memory.

  As far back as 1885, psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus wrote in his classic Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology that “our information comes almost exclusively from the observation of extreme and especially striking cases.” I was to discover that my memory does in fact shed light on many of the fascinating questions about how our memories work and how they shape our lives. One of the most intriguing of those, and a first order of business in trying to understand the workings of my memory, is why I don’t forget. As it turns out, forgetting is a topic of unexpectedly intriguing dimensions.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Gift of Forgetting

  There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are.

  —Richard Holmes, A Meander Through Memory and Forgetting

  Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.

  —William James, The Principles of Psychology

  I recently read a fascinating article by the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks about a man who has the opposite condition of mine: he remembers virtually nothing, suffering from a severe form of amnesia. He cannot even remember what he has been doing from one moment to the next. He does have some vestige of semantic memory—the recall about general knowledge—which allows him to remember who his wife is and that he loves her, but if she leaves the living room while they’re watching TV to go into the kitchen and get a drink, when she comes back, he greets her as if she has been long gone and he is overjoyed to see her again. With other people, he has no ability to recall who they are at all. When I read about him, I thought to myself that as problematic as my memory has been to live with, I wouldn’t trade it in, because it has made me who I am. I do wish, though, that some of my memories would dissolve away into the mists of inaccessible time. Though people tend to think of forgetting as an affliction and are disturbed by the loss of so much memory as they age, I’ve come to understand that there is a real value to being able to forget a good deal about our lives.

  As often as I’ve realized that other people don’t recall anywhere near as much detail about their lives as I do, I still find it hard to imagine doing all of that forgetting. Whenever people ask me to recall something for them—like the month they first met or when they moved into a new apartment—I find myself amazed that they’ve forgotten those things. I frankly can’t imagine life when so much of what you’ve done and thought and felt has simply vanished. The other morning I was watching Regis and

  Kelly, and the guest was Alyssa Milano. They asked her what it was like to be acting in Who’s the Boss when she was so young, because she started making the show when she was just eleven. She said, “It’s funny; I watch some of these episodes and I cannot remember anything about filming them.” I thought to myself that if I had that kind of what I call “vacant space” in my head, I would be horrified.

  It seems sad to me that many people forget so much of their lives, especially the most special times. I was talking to a friend not long ago about what we were doing around Christmas 1985, and the fact that she did not remember every day of that December, or at least some of it, was shocking to me because that was when she met h
er first love, and so it was such a wonderful time for her. I asked the same friend the other day, “Do you remember when we went to Disneyland?” She had no recollection at

  all of even having gone on the trip, which astounded me. I told her right away that we went on Saturday, October 19, 1991, three days after a mass murder in Killion, Texas. Even after I had reminded her, she couldn’t recall the trip. To me, that kind of forgetting is simply mind-boggling, and I can’t see the value of it at all. But that said, normal forgetting of some kind does seem to play many helpful roles in our lives, and I’m sure being able to forget in some of the ways most people do would have done me a world of good.

  One of the things that’s fascinating to me about memory research is that the question of why we forget so much is still such an open one. The process of forgetting, it turns out, seems to be almost as mysterious as the process of remembering. Scientists aren’t sure if normal forgetting is the result of so many moments not being stored securely in long-term memory, or if they are in fact stored away but we don’t generally have access to them. One notion is that a much richer trove of memories is stored than most people are able to remember, but they degenerate physically over time. Others argue that the forgetting process is an active and purposeful one. Are our brains repressing memories of a good deal of our personal experience, perhaps because those times were painful or undermining of our self-esteem, or of a view of ourselves that is important to us? That’s one theory. Another says that the key is that new information simply comes along and “interferes” with the old; we have mechanisms in our brains that specifically inhibit unnecessary or distracting memories.