The Woman Who Can't Forget (2 page)

T
ime has one fundamental principle: it moves forward. We go from birth to death, from first to last. We are young before we grow old, stimulus always precedes response, and there is no return to yesterday. The sole exception is memory. For me, because of the way my memory works, not only do I often return to yesterday, I can never escape it. I live with a constant, un-stoppable parade of the yesterdays of my life flashing furiously through my mind.

Give me a date, and I will travel right to some particular moment of that day and tell you what I was doing, as well as what day of the week it was and any major event that happened that day, as long as I heard about it then, in addition to certain events that pop into my mind that happened around the same time.
November 14, 1981,
a Saturday: My dad's forty-fifth birthday. That night a school group I was joining, the Rasonians, was initiating new members and taking us out in Westwood.
July 18, 1984,
a Wednesday: A quiet summer day. I picked up the book
Helter Skelter
and read it for the second time. In ten days, Saturday, July 28, Los Angeles would be hosting the Summer Olympics.
February 14, 1998,
a Saturday: I was working as a researcher on a television special and went into work to pick clips, a job I loved because I'm a TV fanatic.

My recall also works the other way: if you ask me about an event, again from 1980 onward, as long as I heard about it, I can give you the date and day of the week it happened, and related information.
The end of the FBI

siege on the Branch Davidian compound
: Monday, April 19, 1993. It began on Sunday, February 28, 1993, two days after the World Trade Center bombing on Friday, February 26, 1993.
The final episode of
MASH
airs:
Monday, February 28, 1983. It was raining that day and the next day when I was driving my car, the windshield wipers stopped working.
The nuclear reactor in Chernobyl melts

down
: Saturday, April 26, 1986. I was visiting friends in Phoenix.
The day the Chinese army brutally suppressed pro

tests in Tiananmen Square
: Sunday, June 4, 1989. My aunt Pauline had just passed away, so we were taking my grandmother, her sister, to lunch at Eddie Saul's Deli to break the news to her.

This ability to automatically recall not only dates but also days of the week for events, and then to flip that and recall events for dates, was the feature of my memory that initially startled Dr. McGaugh, because it was unique in the annals of memory research.

That first day I met him—Saturday, June 24, 2000—automatic recall was the kind of test that he gave me. I was excited driving down from Los Angeles to meet him at the research complex at UCI. Though I was desperately hoping that Dr. McGaugh would be able to tell me why my memory works the way it does, I was also a bit unnerved about what I might learn. Who knew what odd brain condition I might have? I had also kept so much to myself for so long about how insistent my memories were, and how they ruled my life, that the concept of disclosing to a complete stranger the weird phenomenon that was raging in my mind was disconcerting. I felt that I'd be exposing my innermost self—a self that I had not even truly revealed to my family and friends because I hadn't known how to make them understand. But I just had to know, finally, what was going on in my head, and my excitement about Dr. McGaugh having agreed to meet with me far outweighed my trepidation.

As I walked up to the research building, there he was, waiting outside for me, and from the moment he greeted me, he put me at ease. First, he gave me a simple test, which was the beginning of a process of discovery that has changed my life in so many ways.

We went up to his lab, and he had a big reference book lying on the table we sat down at—
The 20th Century Day

by Day.
He pulled two lists out of the book that he had prepared from it. One was of historically important events occurring during the past thirty years—roughly the period of my strong memory—and the other was a list of dates. He started with the list of dates and asked me to tell him what event had happened on each.

The first date on the list was November 5, 1979, and I immediately told him it was a Monday but that I didn't know what happened on that day. On the day before, though, on November 4 of that year, I said, the Iranian students had invaded the U.S. embassy in Tehran and taken the hostages whom they held for 444 days. He shook his head and said, no, that happened on the fifth. I told him I was sure it had happened on November 4, and because I was so adamant, he decided to check another source.

When it turned out that I was right and the book was wrong, I could see that Dr. McGaugh was stunned. I was right about all of the other dates on the list too. Then he quizzed me about the second list, which was of events, asking me to give him the date they happened. I got every one of those right too, and as Dr. McGaugh explained to me, one of the things that surprised him the most was how automatic my answers were. He was intrigued that I was clearly not actively trying to recall the answers; they were just there for immediate access. The complete lists, with the answers I gave, as they were reproduced in the paper Dr. McGaugh wrote about me years later, were as follows. Note that in the scientific paper, the scientists referred to me as AJ, in the tradition of preserving the anonymity of subjects of research:

ANSWERS (EVENTS) AJ GAVE TO DATES

ANSWERS (DATES) AJ GAVE TO EVENTS

When I explained to him that I could also report my recollection of what I was doing personally on those dates, he was intrigued and asked me to write those recollections down. I did so in about fifteen minutes. Some of the events of those days I'd rather not refer to, and in the paper and here as well, we just indicated that they were personal:

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.