The Woman Who Can't Forget (5 page)

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.

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 her 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.

Given how distracting my rush of memories is to me, the value of that process of memory inhibition is perfectly clear. What I find especially intriguing, though, about the description of that process is that my memory apparently operates so differently from the norm. The concept is that over time, we have many memories of such similar, mundane, repetitive life events of no particular consequence that this “clutter” blocks our memory of any given one of them. This is one of the things that my mind doesn't seem to do in the same way. I remember all of the clutter.

Dr. McGaugh told me that one of the unusual features of my memory, which the scientists were especially intrigued by, is just this—how comprehensive it is. It doesn't differentiate between the most dramatic or consequential events in my life, the somewhat significant benchmarks, and the completely banal day-to-day things. I remember the date my first boyfriend broke up with me—December 29, 1981—and more in the benchmark category, the date I started eighth grade—September 6, 1978, and that we started school a week early that year and ended a week late because we had a full month off for Christmas vacation. But I also remember that on Friday afternoon, October 19, 1979, I came home from school and had some soup because it was unusually cold that day. I know that my senior prom was on June 3,1983, but I also remember that on Sunday, March 28, 1999, when my mother and I went to breakfast at the Encino Glen coffee shop, I ordered scrambled eggs and I had a headache.

My memory also extends to lots of things that didn't directly involve me but that I read about or heard about on TV or radio, some of which I found of great interest and others that were of no particular importance to me. Many people have vivid memories of a few especially dramatic news or popular culture events, such as hearing when John F. Kennedy and then Martin Luther King, Jr., were shot, or when the
Challenger
space shuttle exploded, which are often referred to as flashbulb memories. This sort of memory is formed about an event that was especially emotionally powerful, and they are not only about news events but also intense personal experiences, such as of being mugged or in a bad car accident. What's different for me is I don't have to feel any great degree of emotion in order to remember any particular thing, whether something from my own life or something I heard on the news. For example, I know that Bing Crosby died on a golf course in Spain on Friday, October 14, 1977, and though I was a fan of his movies, that news certainly wasn't traumatic for me. I heard about it when I was driving to soccer practice with my mom, just as we were turning into the parking lot at Balboa Park.

One of the types of daily information that I recall vividly that often amazes people is the episodes of TV shows I watched. I was a big fan of
All in the Family
while I was growing up, for example, and if you throw out a date during its original broadcast, when I watched it religiously, I can tell you which episode ran.
January 5,1974,
a Saturday: Gloria and Mike are alone for the evening, and when Gloria makes the first move, it upsets Mike. He then makes up a girlfriend named Felicia.
September 22,1976,
a Wednesday: Archie has an affair with a waitress.
October 16,

1977,
a Sunday: It is Edith's fiftieth birthday, and she is held at gunpoint by a rapist.

Truth be told, I hate the notion of forgetting. I'm happy that I can remember so many episodes of so many TV shows I've loved through the years; that I can revisit any given day that I may suddenly think about and know what really happened to me that day; and that I know what people really said to me, and I to them, and exactly when. The accuracy of my recall is important to me, and the idea of losing some of my memories, or my recall of dates and days of the week, is actually anxiety provoking.

If it's true, though, that the normal memory has a talent for forgetting a host of happenings that we would otherwise find self-limiting or undermining, because they hold up a mirror to us about aspects of our lives and ourselves that we don't like, I do have to say that it would be a good thing for me if my mind had that talent. Imagine being able to remember every fight you ever had with a friend; every time someone let you down; all the stupid mistakes you've ever made; the meanest, most harmful things you've ever said to people and those they've said to you. Then imagine not being able to push them out of your mind no matter what you tried.

According to some recent research, the ability to push unwanted memories out of the mind seems to operate according to the same brain mechanism that empowers us to restrain ourselves physically, like stopping ourselves from slapping someone or from reaching for that extra piece of cake. Though I may not truly envy the ability to forget, this is a talent I can say without hesitation that I wish I had. Research shows that such “motivated forgetting,” as it's called, not only works in the short term but does assist people in forgetting unwanted memories for the long haul.

Forgetting is clearly of many kinds. Some is intentional and some simply natural; some is therapeutic and some tragic. Memory and forgetting perform an intricate, somewhat mystifying, dance through the course of the normal life experience, and sometimes even our memories can be a form of forgetting.

There is a short story from
The Book of Forgetting
by acclaimed Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata, titled “Yumiura,” which is well known to experts in memory due to the questions it poses about how fallible the normal human memory is. In the story, a middle-aged writer is visited by a woman who tells him in intimate detail that years ago they met in the town of Yumiura. She says that they became lovers and that Kozumi proposed to her during the Harvest Festival. Kozumi is distraught that he cannot recall her at all. How can she remember him so clearly? Is what she described true, or not? She is so certain of her memory that Kozumi begins to believe her—until he retraces his past and discovers he could not have been in Yumiura at that time. The story is fascinating to me because I could never convince myself of such a false recollection.

Kawabata's story is recounted in Dr. Daniel Schacter's important book
The Seven Sins of Memory,
in which he introduces seven primary mechanisms by which the normal human memory distorts reality. What was striking to me in reading about these seven mechanisms was that as far as I can tell, my mind doesn't seem to engage in any of them, though my recall hasn't been tested specifically by the scientists to evaluate that, so I can't be sure. These sorts of distortions and issues with memory seem alien to me. Scientists have also thrown up a thought-provoking and somewhat disconcerting mirror to the story of my life that has helped me to understand more deeply how the unusual workings of my memory have shaped my experience.

The first “sin” is what Dr. Schacter calls transience, which is the normal loss of memory over time. Apparently this normal memory loss begins within hours of the events forgotten. It's due to transience that most people remember many more things about what happened in the past few hours than about what happened the day before, and they remember even less about what happened on any given day of a week ago. An interesting question is whether this should be thought of as a weakness in normal human memory or in fact a strength, in that it clears the mind to focus on more important information. My mind just doesn't seem to work this way. As opposed to my memory growing weaker with age, it actually seems to keep growing sharper.

The second sin is absentmindedness. I've always marveled at the way people lose their ATM cards or can't find their keys or, when driving on the highway, suddenly come out of a fog and realize they've driven ten exit lengths without conscious thought or control. Some psychologists say that absentmindedness clears the way for our brains to be more creative, that the brain is working away on ideas while the mind seems to have checked out. I am never absentminded. I've never lost a single key. In fact I still have the house key my parents gave me when I was ten years old, which I used until I was thirty-seven, when we moved. I've never lost an ATM card or credit card, and I had the same driver's license until I was twenty-seven, when I had to renew it. I never find my mind wandering in this way; to the contrary, it's always crammed full of remembering. There are never times when the “film” isn't running and I can focus exclusively on the present moment.

One of the sins I find hardest to relate to is what Schacter calls blocking, which he describes as a tip-of-the-tongue feeling when you know you know something (like the name of an acquaintance or the answer to a trivia question) but you just can't get it out. For the period of my strong memory, from when I was fourteen on, I don't think I ever block the way he describes the sensation. Usually my memories come flying right out. For the earlier period when my memory was still developing, between about ages eight and fourteen, I sometimes have to think for a moment, but I don't have that tip-of-the-tongue sensation as I'm working on it.

Schacter calls these first three memory mechanisms “sins of omission.” The four others he calls “sins of commission,” which are a good deal trickier, even insidious. Misattribution is the sin when we remember doing things we didn't do, or jumble up our memories, like remembering that a friend was at a party when in fact you saw her for dinner the week before that, or thinking you've told one friend something when in fact it was a different friend you shared that story with. If you've ever watched an old movie that you absolutely clearly remember starred Gregory Peck only to discover when the opening credits roll that it stars Cary Grant, you were misattributing.