Week of May 31, 2000
When most of us think of amnesia, we think of soap opera story-lines where a character returns from a long absence with no memory of their old life or as a plot twist in Hollywood films. But amnesia that severe, where someone forgets everything, is very uncommon. Guests include author Jill Robinson; Dr. Neal Cohen, head of the Amnesia Research Laboratory at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology; Dr. Brian Richards, who treats amnesia patients at The Baycrest Hospital in Toronto; author Jonathan Lethem, reading from his upcoming book “The Vintage Book of Amnesia;” and Professor Stephen Bertman, author of “Cultural Amnesia: America’s Future and the Crisis of Memory.” Plus, commentary by John Hockenberry.
Host Dr. Fred Goodwin begins the show by sharing his thoughts on amnesia. He notes that amnesia is broken into two distinct categories: those caused by brain trauma (organic amnesia) and one caused by psychological trauma (psychogenic amnesia).
Dr. Goodwin goes on to discuss the advancements in memory research which come out of studying people with organic forms of amnesia. He also describes the mind’s process of protecting itself, which results in psychogenic amnesias.
The first guest is author Jill Robinson who reads from her book “Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found,” then speaks with The Infinite Mind’s Dempsey Rice about her personal experience with amnesia. Jill’s amnesia was caused by an epileptic seizure that occurred after a long session of swimming laps in a pool. When she woke from a coma, she felt like she was in a void, a blank space with no sense of place or time. This confusion continued even after she returned home from the hospital. She used to wake up each morning with no idea of what she was seeing.
When she left the house on her own she would make a turn at the end of her block and immediately become lost on the street. Ten years later, Jill is still missing parts of her life, she still meets people that she knows, but that she hasn’t seen for a long time, and doesn’t recognize them. Fortunately, this loss is not of great difficulty for Jill, as she says, because it’s “hard to know, what I don’t know.” How can she miss a memory that she doesn’t even remember having? “Past Forgetting” is Jill’s own detective story, her process of finding herself after loosing all of her memory. In it, she shows how it feels not to remember.
Next, we are joined by Dr. Neal Cohen, a psychology and neuroscience professor at the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign and the head of the Amnesia Research Laboratory at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. (Telephone number 217-244-4339) He is also the author of “Memory, Amnesia and the Hippocampal System.” Dr. Cohen discusses what he thinks are the three major types of amnesia: physical amnesia, psychiatric amnesia and, he jokes, “soap-opera” amnesia. The latter, he says, is the sort of amnesia often seen as a story-line in a soap opera, where a character gets hit on the head and forgets everything about his/her self.
Dr. Cohen explains that this type of amnesia is quite uncommon in real life. Physical amnesia is what occurs when there has been some sort of brain insult or trauma and it usually is due to damage to the hippocampal system in the brain.
For example, Dr. Cohen describes the famous amnesia patient ‘H.M.’ who underwent experimental brain surgery in 1953. During that surgery, some of H.M.’s brain was removed. When he woke up, it was discovered that H.M. could no longer remember daily life – he couldn’t remember things that were going on in his daily life. His only memories from his life are from before 1953. H.M.’s amnesia continues to this day.
Psychological amnesia results from some sort of psychological trauma that occurs after witnessing, or surviving, a traumatic event such as a kidnapping or war. The mind shuts down its memory systems in order to protect the individual from the memory of the trauma that occurred. Unfortunately, sometimes the brain goes too far and shuts down an individual’s autobiographical memory as well. As a result, an individual can completely forget who they are or where they come from. Unlike in soap-operas, this sort of autobiographical memory loss usually corrects itself and memory is fully regained in a matter of days.
Dr. Cohen told the story of patient ‘K’ as an example of psychological amnesia. Patient K was a 53 year old man who was under extreme stress in his life. He was left home alone one afternoon while fixing the oven. When his family returned, they found him dazed and uncommunicative, apparently as a result of an electrical shock. They were unable to rouse K. and immediately called emergency services. K. was taken to the hospital and awoke a few days later, thinking that it was 1943 and that he was 14 years old. He had lost 40 years of his life. There was no physical damage to his system that could have caused K’s amnesia; as a result, his amnesia is thought to be psychological in nature. There is no effective treatment for psychologically based amnesias; most of them recover on their own. But a few, like patient K., never regain their memories or their old lives.
The study of people with amnesia is really about the study of memory. Their memory loss helps scientists to learn about the brain’s memory systems, what types of memories that there are, how we remember and where certain types of memories are stored. Dr. Cohen concludes by saying that the brain’s hippocampal system brings together the strings of information that we receive from our senses – sight, sound, touch, taste and smell – and binds this information together to create solid memories. When the hippocampus is damaged, memories are not made. Thus, amnesia.
Next, The Infinite Mind's Mary Wein files a report from The Baycrest Hospital in Toronto, Canada. (Telephone: 416-785-2500). Wein talks to a Dr. Brian Richards, a patient with amnesia and his wife about Baycrest’s work with people with amnesia.David Askew contracted viral herpetic encephalitis, which causes brain inflammation, about seven years ago. As a result of this encephalitis, David but the part of David’s brain that allowed him to form new memories was destroyed. Yet it left David’s stores of long-term memory untouched - he remembered his wife of 16 years and, eventually, his children. Dr. Brain Richards’ program at Baycrest works with people with amnesia, like David, and helps them to build bridges from themselves to their lives. They give each person with amnesia a calendar with a beeper strapped inside. Each time the beeper goes off, the person with amnesia is trained to look in their book to see what they are supposed to be doing at that time. It took months to train David to look at his book each time the beeper went off, but he now does it as a reflex. Every evening David programs his beeper to go off for each of the next day’s chores and appointments.
Our next guest is author Jonathan Lethem who reads from his upcoming book “The Vintage Book of Amnesia.” (to be published in October of 2000.) The “Vintage Book of Amnesia” is a collection of novel excerpts, short stories and essays with amnesiac themes that range from the traditional conk on the head to more metaphorical and abstract images of amnesia. These piece often feature a character robbed of the past or instances where everyone is on the verge of paranoiac breakdown.
Lethem argues that fiction is made out of memory and that life is making a story out of memory. He calls the amnesiac a severely disabled novelist – an individual with a few clues who is trying to cobble together a world, trying to come up with a persuasive story out of mere fragments. He concludes by pointing out that everyone forgets and that amnesia is an interesting metaphor for novelists because amnesia is an exaggerated form of what were are all going through.
Our final guest is Professor Stephen Bertman, an American Professor of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Canada’s University of Windsor, whose most recent book is called, “Cultural Amnesia: America’s Future and the Crisis of Memory.”
Professor Bertman joins us to speak about the crisis of cultural amnesia that afflicts America today. Cultural amnesia, when societies for get their histories, is created by a society that suffers from it – it is a ‘self-induced’ condition. Professor Bertman argues that if a society forgets its past then the continuity of civilization breaks down. The current structure of contemporary culture is to erode historical memory. The influence of high speed technology and materialism has helped to causes cultural amnesia which is a modern social disease. Our society is becoming disconnected from the past… we are suffering from an epidemic forgetfulness. America is “immersed in a sea of impermanence,” says Professor Bertman, where old books and history are downgraded. Our educational system places an emphasis on vocationalism, materialism and technology creating a less humanistic process of leaning. We seem to focus more on new technology than on the past. The people that will lead the counter cultural fight against cultural amnesia are the people who believe in the importance of remembering – individuals, families and grass roots groups. These groups will pass on our history where society isn’t because they realize that if we forget, we will lose our anchor.
Bertman continues by saying that we cannot judge the present we have and the future we want to have without looking at our past. That we must look to the past to get a standard, a perspective on what we are doing now. Bertman stresses that he doesn’t want to bring back the past, but that he wants to keep it in our knowledge base when looking at the future.
John Hockenberry shares his thoughts on Amnesia in this week’s essay. He explores amnesia in soap opera story lines and theme of forgetting and memory in our everyday lives.
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