The Woman Who Can't Forget (3 page)

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):

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 wrote 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: