Memory and Forgetting

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Speaker 1 Hey, it's Lot Diff. I have now worked here so long that I sometimes forget about entire episodes.

Speaker 1 And it feels especially ironic that I forgot about this one, Memory and Forgetting from 2007. On re-listening, it was so good that I'm kind of shocked that I did forget it.

Speaker 1 The reason it came up recently is that one of our producers is working on a story about something extraordinary and surprising. She found out about her own brain and memory.

Speaker 1 I want to say more, but I can't. The episode will come out soon.
It's super fascinating. I cannot wait to share it with you.

Speaker 1 But anyway, as she was reporting, she dug up this episode, which we're going to play for you now. It is as classic Radiolab as it gets.

Speaker 1 It has cowbrains, Oliver Sacks, a 1967 Chevy Nova, everything you could possibly want in a podcast episode, obviously.

Speaker 1 Okay, so listen to this, dig it, and when the new episode comes out, don't forget that you remembered it here first.

Speaker 6 Wait, you're listening.

Speaker 4 You're listening

Speaker 4 to Radio Lab.

Speaker 4 Radio Lab. From

Speaker 7 W-N-Y-C.

Speaker 8 Re-wine.

Speaker 9 This is Radio Lab. I'm Jad Appumrod.

Speaker 6 And I'm Robert Krillwich.

Speaker 11 And today, our program is about memory.

Speaker 4 Oh, my God.

Speaker 14 I think most people think about memory kind of like

Speaker 15 a file cabinet in your brain.

Speaker 18 I'm looking for a fairly large capacity.

Speaker 20 This is traditional style.

Speaker 21 Something happens in your life.

Speaker 22 This is real wooden.

Speaker 19 Yeah, this is real wooden files.

Speaker 15 You file it away.

Speaker 17 Ooh, this is pretty good. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Then later, when you want to remember something, you flip back to the file.

Speaker 18 This file.

Speaker 23 There's the one. This one?

Speaker 24 Yeah. And you pick it up.

Speaker 4 Oh, yes, I recall.

Speaker 24 And there it is. That's the memory.

Speaker 18 Can you lock it? Yeah. You have the key.

Speaker 21 Sure, sometimes you forget where you filed it.

Speaker 17 Let me see if I can find it.

Speaker 26 But it's there.

Speaker 21 I can't find it.

Speaker 23 Somewhere.

Speaker 21 However, when we asked scientists about this analogy, they pretty much all said

Speaker 27 the filing cabinet analogy was just completely wrong.

Speaker 24 Period.

Speaker 28 Well, maybe that's because your metaphor is a little outdated, frankly.

Speaker 11 I think of memory as more like a...

Speaker 10 More like a hard drive. Here we are.

Speaker 7 About to go into BNH.

Speaker 30 You might find at a tech store.

Speaker 31 So much gear.

Speaker 5 Can you show me your hard drives?

Speaker 32 Sure.

Speaker 33 Like your brain is basically a biological disk drive.

Speaker 35 This little one is 320 gigabytes.

Speaker 34 How big is big these days for a hard drive? And everything you do.

Speaker 27 Up to two terabytes.

Speaker 34 Everything you see.

Speaker 7 Could I put all the images I've ever seen in my life? Could it go onto this hard drive?

Speaker 31 Somehow all that experience gets stored in your head in some kind of neural code.

Speaker 32 Digital information is stored in zeros and ones.

Speaker 35 Then later,

Speaker 33 when you want to go back to it, you just find the right file.

Speaker 39 And read it out.

Speaker 10 Call it right up. And there it is.

Speaker 11 Your memory.

Speaker 7 Just as you left it.

Speaker 40 The way you put it in, the way you take it out, it's all the same.

Speaker 11 Never changes.

Speaker 35 Never changes.

Speaker 4 Zeros and ones.

Speaker 30 But again, if you ask scientists about this analogy, they'll tell you.

Speaker 29 Nope. No.

Speaker 40 Wrong. Memory isn't like that.
Memory is not an inert stack of zeros and ones.

Speaker 21 Well, if neither of those metaphors are an apt description of memory, memory, then how should we think about memory?

Speaker 11 Well, maybe memory is more creative than that.

Speaker 38 Creative?

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 40 On a literal level, it's an act of creation.

Speaker 10 Exactly.

Speaker 13 We're reconstructing those memories.

Speaker 27 Construction.

Speaker 4 Maybe it's more like painting or sculpture.

Speaker 40 Everyone's constantly their own artist.

Speaker 5 We take bits and pieces of experience.

Speaker 27 Some things get sharpened, other things leveled and confused with imagination.

Speaker 13 Out of that, construct. Construct.
Construct. What feels like a recollection.

Speaker 40 It's a beautiful process.

Speaker 38 It's unbelievable.

Speaker 11 Let's begin, as simply as we can. What is a memory?

Speaker 11 Where do you find a memory? Where do you go to find it?

Speaker 34 There's a scientist, we met Joe Ledoux, who works at NYU, who started looking when he was very young in the most obvious place.

Speaker 27 As a child, I worked in my father's meat market. And the way the cows were slaughtered in those primitive days was with a 22 rifle.

Speaker 30 Did you shoot him in the head?

Speaker 16 Shoot him in the head, yeah.

Speaker 27 And my job was to clean out the clean the brains.

Speaker 27 This makes a convenient beginning to the story because perhaps the texture of the brain is very fun to play with.

Speaker 27 While the young medoo had his fingers in the cow's brain, you stick your fingers in there and had the sense that I was reaching into the cow's soul.

Speaker 37 Maybe he was also thinking, where in that mess are the cow's memories?

Speaker 27 These rough membranes over it and just strip it.

Speaker 37 Can I touch a memory? Can I pinch it between my fingers?

Speaker 30 One bullet.

Speaker 27 One bullet. One tiny little bullet, and my job was to go in and find it and remove it.
Because if you were eating brains, you didn't want to chomp down on lead.

Speaker 44 In any case, Ledoux developed a thing for brains, and many years later, in college, he'd get another chance.

Speaker 27 Taking courses in psychology, but a professor of his asked him to come into the lab studying the brain mechanism and work on rat brains.

Speaker 33 And no bullets involved.

Speaker 30 This time, he really would be

Speaker 37 searching for memories.

Speaker 16 And I got hooked on it.

Speaker 29 You with me? Yep.

Speaker 28 Alright, so it was the 60s, right? Ladoux was in school, and it was an interesting time for the field he was about to enter. Scientists had just discovered this drug.

Speaker 37 They found that if you give this particular drug to

Speaker 27 goldfish first.

Speaker 46 Yeah, give it to a goldfish.

Speaker 16 Squirt a little in the tank.

Speaker 27 Into the water. Suddenly, the goldfish can't make a memory.

Speaker 33 After a goldfish has learned something, they'll swim around, have all kinds of experiences, but later remember nothing.

Speaker 16 They won't form a long-term memory for it.

Speaker 24 What does a goldfish learn?

Speaker 46 Ah, I actually have no idea.

Speaker 37 But apparently they do learn stuff except when they have this drug in their system, in which case they'll learn stuff and forget it immediately.

Speaker 32 And the implications of this were huge.

Speaker 37 Oh, yeah. According to science writer Joan Alaire.

Speaker 10 Absolutely.

Speaker 44 Because now, for the first time, scientists could say that a memory...

Speaker 30 Well, it's a real thing.

Speaker 40 It's a physical thing. It's not simply an idea.
It's a physical trace left in your brain.

Speaker 44 A trace made largely of proteins.

Speaker 40 You know, proteins are the building blocks of memory.

Speaker 49 But how do they know that?

Speaker 40 Well, because of that drug called anisomycin.

Speaker 16 The amnesia-inducing one.

Speaker 28 What it does is target proteins.

Speaker 40 It prevents new proteins from being formed.

Speaker 11 It busts them up.

Speaker 15 And that means what exactly?

Speaker 37 Well, no proteins, no memory.

Speaker 10 Well, let me give you an example of how all this works.

Speaker 30 And this is something that you ended up doing after college.

Speaker 28 The methodology, can we start there? Sure.

Speaker 10 He would take a rat,

Speaker 33 put it in a box,

Speaker 44 then play it a tone.

Speaker 27 Just a five kilohertz pure tone.

Speaker 39 Sort of like boop.

Speaker 11 Something like that, yeah.

Speaker 44 Now imagine you're this rat.

Speaker 37 Your entire world is in this box, and suddenly

Speaker 37 a sound

Speaker 37 as if from God.

Speaker 37 And then the sound stops, and you're like, what was that?

Speaker 4 Ow! Hey!

Speaker 37 He shocked me on my feet!

Speaker 27 The shock is, you know, a mild electric shock. I mean, it's less than getting static electricity.

Speaker 28 This guy who works in Ledoux's lab, I'm David Bush.

Speaker 44 He actually demonstrated it for me.

Speaker 10 Alright, so what? Or on me.

Speaker 50 What I'm gonna do is have you put your fingers on there. Okay.

Speaker 33 He made me touch the bottom of the cage.

Speaker 37 I'm putting my fingers on the bottom of the cage.

Speaker 16 I'm a little scared.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Ha!

Speaker 11 It's

Speaker 11 really not that bad.

Speaker 28 It's like static electricity, really.

Speaker 2 How?

Speaker 18 If you're you, if you're a rat, it might be a whole other thing. Even for a rat.
But what's the point?

Speaker 17 Why are we doing this?

Speaker 11 Oh, well, they're trying to make the rat form a memory.

Speaker 33 Oh. And here's how we now know that that works.

Speaker 11 from the rat's perspective.

Speaker 44 The moment it hears the tone and then feels the shock inside its head, a bunch of neurons start to build

Speaker 17 a connection.

Speaker 40 Whenever you create a memory, it's an active cellular construction.

Speaker 27 What we're talking about now are associative memories, associations between two things in the outside world. Between

Speaker 27 and

Speaker 27 those two events have to somehow be connected.

Speaker 9 It's as if you're building a bridge over a chasm and that connection...

Speaker 33 Well, that's basically a memory.

Speaker 37 A memory is a structure that connects one brain cell to another.

Speaker 28 So the next time that the rat hears that damn tone, since inside its brain, tone brain cells are physically connected to shock brain cells It's gonna know that after this

Speaker 45 comes this

Speaker 40 and so instead of just listening passively it's gonna freeze the back is hunched and they're just frozen solid bracing itself for what is about to happen Exactly when Ledoux and his team see the rat freeze like that they know it is in the midst of remembering they'll do that the rest of their life However if you inject a chemical into the brain that prevents these neurons from building this new architecture that a new member requires

Speaker 40 the rat will never form a memory because its neurons are prevented from forming all these new proteins which a new member requires.

Speaker 44 And so whatever the rat was doing during the injection, it'll never remember.

Speaker 40 Play at the noise and then shock it and then play at the noise and then shock it and then play at the noise and then shock it and the rat never learns.

Speaker 37 It'd be like, hey, what's that? Cow!

Speaker 25 Ooh, what's that?

Speaker 4 Cow!

Speaker 29 Ooh, cool, what's that? Cow!

Speaker 40 Perpetually surprised by the shock.

Speaker 31 So the basic rule is that if you get to the memory while it's being made, you can bust it up by inserting this drug.

Speaker 21 So the memory never is actually formed.

Speaker 44 Right, never committed to memory.

Speaker 31 But if the memory gets made and the protein bridge is there in your mind, it's built and built for all time.

Speaker 21 So if you have the memory in there, then you cannot erase it.

Speaker 30 Yes, it's about timing.

Speaker 31 If you get there first, you can erase it.

Speaker 28 But if you get there after, no.

Speaker 33 Okay. And that's what everyone thought.

Speaker 33 Until 2000. One day, Ledoux is in his office and a guy walks in the door.

Speaker 27 The person who walked through the door that day is Kareem Nader.

Speaker 53 Kareem Nader? I would often go in Joe's lab and just tell him ideas and stuff.

Speaker 11 This is Kareem.

Speaker 27 This is a postdoc in the lab.

Speaker 53 I went into Joe's office and said, Joe, like, what do you think would happen if...

Speaker 5 What do you think would happen if instead of giving the drug while the rat was making the memory, what if, way after the fact, we gave it the drug while it was remembering the memory?

Speaker 53 You remembered something.

Speaker 7 Could we mess with the memory then?

Speaker 53 And he said, I mean, wouldn't it be cool if that happened?

Speaker 27 I said, well, that'll never work.

Speaker 53 He said, that's that's never going to work.

Speaker 27 Don't waste our money.

Speaker 7 It was just a very naive question.

Speaker 44 Yeah, I mean, because the memory is already there.

Speaker 9 You can't erase a memory that is already there.

Speaker 28 I mean, have you ever seen that movie, Eternal Sunshine in the Spotless Mind?

Speaker 29 No.

Speaker 4 No?

Speaker 28 Well, that's essentially what it was proposing.

Speaker 53 Yeah, I mean, it was crazy.

Speaker 32 Here at Lacuna, we have perfected a safe, effective technique for the focused erasure of troubling memory.

Speaker 27 In this movie, Jim Carrey has all these memories he wants to get rid of.

Speaker 49 I'm here to erase Clementine Christians.

Speaker 27 And so he goes to this company that

Speaker 27 performs the service.

Speaker 16 And so they

Speaker 27 have him in this room.

Speaker 29 Comfortable?

Speaker 27 Please try to focus on the memories.

Speaker 27 And

Speaker 27 he's retrieving all these memories.

Speaker 2 This is the day we met.

Speaker 16 Hi there.

Speaker 16 I'm Clementine.

Speaker 27 And each time he retrieves one,

Speaker 27 they zap his brain.

Speaker 4 Got it.

Speaker 28 Could we zap a memory that was already there?

Speaker 25 Could we go in and erase old memories?

Speaker 30 That was Kareem's question.

Speaker 53 I was just looking to do something conceptually challenging. Just kind of fun, right? And just out there.

Speaker 27 Joe thought he was crazy. I didn't think the experiment was going to work.
He said, okay. And so he went away and he did the experiment without telling me.

Speaker 11 A couple months later, Nadir walks back in the door.

Speaker 44 Walked in the door.

Speaker 27 He said, Joe, like, this is really crazy.

Speaker 38 But it actually worked. Yeah, it worked.

Speaker 32 Kareem said he took a rat, played at the tone.

Speaker 53 He gave him a tone and gave him a mild chalk to the feet.

Speaker 44 So it could form a memory, tested it just to make sure, and sure enough, when it heard the tone, it froze.

Speaker 28 Yeah.

Speaker 44 Which means it had the memory good.

Speaker 21 Then he waited.

Speaker 53 A long time.

Speaker 30 60 days. 60 days.
Yeah.

Speaker 34 Two months later, he played the rat the tone.

Speaker 28 And as it's frozen, thinking, oh no, no, no, I know what's about to happen right at that moment while it was remembering, he gave it the drug.

Speaker 53 And then the next day, we just put them back into the box. And we just gave them some tones to see how afraid they were of the tones.

Speaker 53 And the ones that got the drug, they behave as if the tones doesn't mean that their brain gets aft anymore.

Speaker 33 All of a sudden the rat had been sent back to square one and now it was like,

Speaker 33 ooh, what's that?

Speaker 37 Ow! Memory was gone. There's no memory.

Speaker 48 No memory at all?

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 40 That was the shocking result of the Laduna Dare experiment.

Speaker 9 That's Shona again.

Speaker 40 The rat is already terrified of the shock, but if you inject the chemical as the rat is remembering what the sound means, the memory disappears.

Speaker 40 It's as if the memory had never been there in the first place.

Speaker 26 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 53 Joe looked at me and he just looked very surprised.

Speaker 36 What exactly did you say to him?

Speaker 30 Holy bleep.

Speaker 15 Take a look at this because it's so bleep.

Speaker 16 Crazy.

Speaker 27 It took me a while to really kind of

Speaker 27 believe that it was all true.

Speaker 37 Plus, Joe and others had a concern.

Speaker 28 Maybe this drug isn't erasing a memory.

Speaker 9 Maybe it's just giving the rat brain damage.

Speaker 27 and erasing everything. So we designed an experiment that would test the specificity of these effects.

Speaker 44 He wondered, could he pinpoint and extract one single memory of many?

Speaker 9 So in his latest study, what he did was he taught the rat to be scared of two tones, not just one.

Speaker 37 So one's like a v

Speaker 47 and the other one's pips,

Speaker 47 like repeating sounds of a pure tone.

Speaker 9 And he teaches the rat to be afraid of both of these tones. Each one results in a

Speaker 31 only this time. And when he plays the tones 45 days later, he picks just one of them, maybe, for instance, this one, to pair with the drug.

Speaker 27 And then the next day you test both.

Speaker 27 And only the one that was paired with the drug is is affected.

Speaker 39 So you erase tone one, but not tone two?

Speaker 16 Exactly.

Speaker 10 So doe, Ray, Meeve, you can just erase Ray?

Speaker 27 That would be the idea.

Speaker 39 Wow, that really is eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

Speaker 27 Well, that movie came out about two years after we published the study that really got all this going.

Speaker 18 Do you think they stole from you?

Speaker 27 I don't think they stole, but maybe they were thinking along these lines and they heard.

Speaker 11 They must have read it and been like, oh my god.

Speaker 27 There was a write-up in the Science Times, and we proposed this would be a treatment for PTSD.

Speaker 53 Post-traumatic stress disorder.

Speaker 38 People who go to war or have been through trauma.

Speaker 30 People haunted by really bad memories.

Speaker 53 They just can't escape the thoughts and memories they keep reliving.

Speaker 39 How would that work in a therapy situation, though?

Speaker 27 Suppose you have a Holocaust victim who's lived for 50 years with these memories, and you would say,

Speaker 27 well, let's talk about what went on in the camp. And the day you saw, you know, Mary in the line to go to the chambers.

Speaker 53 You say, close your eyes and just imagine.

Speaker 39 Relive it. And right as you're talking about it, you swallow a pill?

Speaker 27 Yeah, more or less.

Speaker 53 And so, in fact, we've done that.

Speaker 23 They've done that? They have.

Speaker 44 Kareem Nader now works at McGill University in Montreal, and he has teamed up with a clinical psychologist to try this on people.

Speaker 43 And it seems that when you give this drug as a person is remembering or reliving a traumatic event, the memory is eroded somewhat.

Speaker 33 The next time they think about it, it's not quite as painful.

Speaker 53 One woman,

Speaker 53 she had been raped as a child by the doctor, and then when she told her mother,

Speaker 53 her mother said she was making up stories.

Speaker 42 Wow.

Speaker 53 Apparently she never spoke to anyone about this. She used to get undressed in the dark in front of her husband.
Wow. And so she came in to the clinic.

Speaker 28 He says she took the drug while thinking about the trauma.

Speaker 9 And then a week later, she told the story again. And this time, it wasn't nearly as hard.

Speaker 53 She improved dramatically to the point where she was telling the story on TV.

Speaker 16 On TV. Wow.

Speaker 28 So she went from telling no one about this, including herself, to

Speaker 30 being so open that she could tell thousands of people.

Speaker 53 Yeah, she just felt that the emotional part was no longer overwhelming her.

Speaker 27 Some methods say that it's wrong to mess with memory, but that's what therapy is, too. It's a process of changing your evaluation of situations, learning new things, storing new things.

Speaker 53 At one point, she said, you know, we've given her back herself.

Speaker 49 I know that she feels better, but there's something slightly creepy about this.

Speaker 14 That she feels better because something

Speaker 49 is now missing in her, something that troubled her, but she's been, in a way, a part of her has been deleted.

Speaker 21 I mean, look, I think of myself,

Speaker 17 really.

Speaker 15 I'm Robert Krolwich, and I'm a certain age, but really what I am is I'm a string of memories.

Speaker 15 I mean, that is as close to a way of describing the real me as I can find.

Speaker 21 I own those memories, and they define me. But you're saying that you can come to me when I'm already formed, when I'm already there, you can give me a shot and you can

Speaker 48 fundamentally change me.

Speaker 31 There's an assumption in what you're saying which is actually kind of wrong.

Speaker 44 There really is anything like a real memory.

Speaker 11 I mean think about it.

Speaker 30 If you can erase a memory while it's being created, that's how we started.

Speaker 31 And now we learn you can erase a memory while it's being remembered using the same drug,

Speaker 31 what that really means is that every time you are remembering remembering something, you're actually recreating it.

Speaker 28 That's the only reason the drug works.

Speaker 44 And so if you're recreating it each time, then each time you're remembering something, it's a brand new memory.

Speaker 21 Well, no, but I've always kind of assumed that underneath all this remembering, there's some kind of special, absolutely original memory locked in a vault.

Speaker 23 No.

Speaker 17 No.

Speaker 31 That is the crazy implication of this experiment.

Speaker 40 The act of remembering, on a literal level, it's an act of creation. Every memory is rebuilt anew every time you remember it.

Speaker 28 And not only is it an act of creation, as Jonah says, Kareem would say, it's an act of imagining.

Speaker 53 Every time you remember something, you're changing the memory a little bit. Or always changing the memory slightly.

Speaker 40 You think you're remembering something that took place 30 years ago. Actually, what you're remembering is that memory reinterpreted in the light of today, in the light of now.

Speaker 21 So does that mean that there's no such thing as a memory for all time that hides in a secret vault somewhere?

Speaker 14 That all you've got is the most recent recollection of the experience.

Speaker 17 Yes.

Speaker 21 Well, then how do I know that any memory is verifiably true?

Speaker 40 You don't. You don't.
And one of the ironies of this research is that the more you remember something, in a sense, the less accurate it becomes.

Speaker 40 The more it becomes about you and the less it becomes about what actually happened.

Speaker 6 So let's do something.

Speaker 21 Imagine a couple in love and it's their first kiss. He kisses her and she kisses him back.
She remembers the kiss, of course. And he remembers the kiss, of course.

Speaker 21 As they go through the rest of their romance and the next 36 years together, the kiss will essentially become replaced by two independently re-embroidered and increasingly dishonest kisses.

Speaker 40 Assuming they think about the kiss enough,

Speaker 40 that's kind of what the theory implies.

Speaker 21 But certainly there's got to be somewhere between the man and the woman, there's got to be some true kiss, or is that that kiss just gone?

Speaker 40 That true kiss vanished the minute their lips separated.

Speaker 40 As soon as reality happens, it begins diverging in all our different brains on a very synaptic level.

Speaker 21 Here's where you cue the really sad music.

Speaker 40 They just grow slowly farther and farther apart.

Speaker 21 Well, let me do it a different way. Let's suppose that Joan and Bob kiss, and then they part.

Speaker 22 It's a great kiss.

Speaker 21 And then they never think about it again. I mean, it was a great kiss in the moment, but they never think about about it again.

Speaker 21 30 years later, Bob is in a railroad station.

Speaker 14 Joan comes out of a train.

Speaker 49 Their eyes meet.

Speaker 21 Bob sees Joan, sees her eyes, and remembers suddenly that kiss.

Speaker 40 That memory is more honest than if he'd been thinking about the kiss every day of his life since.

Speaker 48 Oh.

Speaker 21 You know, that's even sadder.

Speaker 37 You know what, but it's true.

Speaker 30 That's what scientists say.

Speaker 16 Absolutely.

Speaker 27 We had a conference last week, and

Speaker 27 Yadin Dudai was here and he proposed that the safest memory, a memory that's uncontaminable,

Speaker 27 is one that exists in a patient with amnesia.

Speaker 8 What I meant is that there is a sort of a paradox.

Speaker 49 This is Yadin?

Speaker 8 This is Yadin. And I'm a professor in Israel.

Speaker 9 Reporter Ann Heberman tracked him down for us.

Speaker 8 Intuitively, you think if you use a memory, you know, you know better because you remember it better, you recall it better, you know the details better and so on and so on.

Speaker 8 But this is not what science shows. If you have a memory, the more you use it, the more you are likely to change it.
So if you never use your memory, it's secured.

Speaker 8 So taking it a bit farther, the safest memories are the memories which are in the brain of people who cannot remember.

Speaker 7 Okay, well, I guess we should go to break now.

Speaker 48 Oh, yes.

Speaker 15 And if you need more information or you want to hear anything again, one word, Radiolab.org.

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Speaker 57 It's 1972. A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes.
Their boat is hit by killer whales and it sinks in seconds.

Speaker 57 All they have left is a life raft and each other.

Speaker 57 This is the true story of the Robertson family and their fight to survive, hosted by me, Becky Milligan. Listen to Adrift, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House.

Speaker 57 Follow and listen on Apple podcasts.

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Speaker 9 This is Radiolab.

Speaker 23 I'm Jad Abu Mron, and I'm Robert Krillwick.

Speaker 11 And today on Radio Lab, we're looking at memory and

Speaker 38 forgetting.

Speaker 38 Forgetting.

Speaker 44 You're right, forgetting.

Speaker 9 And we're looking at how these two processes, remembering and forgetting, are intertwined.

Speaker 44 And writer Andrei Kudrescu has an idea about this.

Speaker 58 The other day, a friend of mine was explaining how she had to move these pixels around her computer and had to add 20 megabytes of memory to handle the operation.

Speaker 58 I had the disquieting thought that all this memory she was adding had to come from somewhere. Maybe it was coming from me because I couldn't remember a thing that day.

Speaker 58 And then it became blindingly obvious. All the memory that everybody keeps adding to their computers comes from people.
Nobody can remember a damn thing.

Speaker 58 Every time somebody adds memory to their machine, thousands of people forget everything they knew. Americans are singularly devoid of memory these days.

Speaker 58 We don't remember where we came from, who raised us, when our wars used to be, what happened last year, last month, or even last week. Schoolchildren remember practically nothing.

Speaker 58 I take the Greyhound bus every week, and I swear half the people on there don't know where they got on or where they're supposed to get off.

Speaker 58 The explanation is simple. Computer companies are stealing human memory to stuff their hard drives.

Speaker 58 Greyhound, I believe, has some kind of contract with IBM to steal the memory of everyone riding the bus. They are probably connected by a cable or something.

Speaker 58 Every hundred miles, poof, another 500 megabytes gets sucked out of the passengers' brains. The computer's thirst for memory is bottomless.
The more they suck, the more they need.

Speaker 58 Eventually, we'll all be walking around with a glazed look in our eyes trying to figure out who it is we live with.

Speaker 58 And then we'll forget our names and addresses and we'll just be milling around trying to remember them.

Speaker 58 The only thing visible about us will be these cables sticking out of our behind, feeding the scraps of our memory to Computer Central somewhere in Oblivion USA.

Speaker 58 I think think it's time for all these memory-sucking companies to start some kind of system to feed and shelter us when we forget how to eat, walk, and sleep.

Speaker 44 Andrei Kodrescu with an essay from the book 101 Damn Nations.

Speaker 11 Anyways, Robert, Monamur,

Speaker 44 Andre's he's trying to make a point about historical amnesia and America and whatever.

Speaker 28 But what if we were to take what he's saying literally

Speaker 33 and explore it?

Speaker 5 Like we know you can subtract a memory, but what if you could add a memory?

Speaker 11 Like actually add a memory back into a brain.

Speaker 48 What do you mean by add memory?

Speaker 43 Well implant a false memory.

Speaker 13 Count back okay, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. My name is Elizabeth Loftus.
I'm on the faculty at the University of California, Irvine.

Speaker 28 Depending on who you talk to, Elizabeth Loftus is either a hero

Speaker 46 or Dr. Evil.

Speaker 30 Her research, which goes back more than two decades, has completely changed how we think about memory.

Speaker 13 Well, for many

Speaker 13 years, I and other psychologists were doing experiments in which we distorted the memories of events that people had actually experienced.

Speaker 13 So we would take somebody who'd seen a simulated auto accident or a simulated crime and we would alter the details in their memory report.

Speaker 13 We'd make people believe that they saw a car go through a stop sign instead of a yield sign. And we found it was not that hard to alter people's memories of these previously experienced events.

Speaker 13 But more recently, we've gone even further and shown that you can plant entirely false memories into the minds of people. Memories for things that didn't happen.

Speaker 4 Like what?

Speaker 13 Well, we planted a memory that when you were about five or six years old, you were lost for for an extended period of time in a shopping mall.

Speaker 13 You were frightened, you were crying,

Speaker 13 and ultimately you were rescued

Speaker 13 by an elderly person

Speaker 13 and reunited with the family.

Speaker 52 And how did you implant that memory?

Speaker 13 We told them that we had talked to their parents and that we'd learned some things that happened to them when they were a child.

Speaker 28 They basically interviewed the subjects about their past.

Speaker 11 They'd say, hey, do you remember that time when you were on the bike and you fell.

Speaker 26 I wish they were making up.

Speaker 44 No, no, no, they would start with a true story. They'd start with a true story, and then they'd say, hey, do you remember that time, which was true?

Speaker 44 Remember that other time, which was true, and that other time, which was true.

Speaker 28 And somewhere in the middle of all of those true stories, they would slip in the lie.

Speaker 13 The false made-up story about being lost and frightened and crying.

Speaker 13 And in that particular study, we found that about a quarter of our subjects fell sway to the suggestion and they adopted it as their own memory.

Speaker 44 A quarter of her subjects, when she checked with them later, now had in their head a memory of being lost and then found in the mall that never happened.

Speaker 6 I would have been the number one guy in that quarter.

Speaker 13 What is happening in this situation is people take their image of an actual shopping center,

Speaker 13 actual family members,

Speaker 13 and they construct an experience

Speaker 13 out of these bits and pieces.

Speaker 13 Investigators in this field have made people believe that they had accidents at family weddings or that they were a victim of a vicious animal attack or that they nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a lifeguard.

Speaker 13 Even with these pretty traumatic ideas, you can make people believe that it happened to them.

Speaker 7 Actually, we had this very same experience.

Speaker 21 When I was in law school, we had this professor, he was a professor of property, and he was doing a lecture.

Speaker 21 And in the middle of the lecture, and this was not, you know, in any way we were not prepared for this, all of a sudden a guy zips into the class, in the very front of the class, grabs something from the professor, and then runs out.

Speaker 29 They stole it? Stole it. I don't even remember what it was, but it happened so suddenly.
And Professor Berger said, oh my God, did any of you see the curly-haired guy?

Speaker 6 He just went and

Speaker 15 the curly-haired guy. But it turned out that what he called the curly-haired guy, when the man came back later to present himself, was not a curly-haired guy at all.
He was a straight-haired guy.

Speaker 29 So the whole thing was staged.

Speaker 14 Yeah, we were all eyewitnesses, and we all had been coached inadvertently to see something that wasn't true.

Speaker 24 And we all saw it.

Speaker 45 What I find interesting is why that kind of suggestion works so well on memory.

Speaker 28 And Kareem Nader, the guy we heard from earlier scientists, he puts it this way.

Speaker 28 Suppose you witness a crime and the police ask you some questions later and they say, did you see a red Camaro leave the scene?

Speaker 34 And

Speaker 53 you're thinking about going, yeah, not, you know, no red Camaro.

Speaker 45 No, didn't see one.

Speaker 30 But then maybe the policeman asks you again, are you sure you didn't see one? And suddenly you're like, well.

Speaker 18 I think, well, maybe there was. Maybe I forgot.

Speaker 11 You start to question it because as he puts it, when you are remembering something, the memory is unstable.

Speaker 53 Memory comes back up to this unstable state.

Speaker 34 It's being rebuilt, recreated.

Speaker 28 And in that moment, someone, without even meaning to, can slide something new in.

Speaker 53 And so as memory gets restored with the image of the red Camaro, the next day when the judge asks you,

Speaker 53 was there a red Camaro there, from your perspective, it's a real memory.

Speaker 44 Yeah, but what's so fascinating to me about that phenomenon, and assuming it's true, is that the red Camaro that is now in your head is a vivid, technicolor, red Camaro.

Speaker 4 You can see the light bounce off the hood.

Speaker 34 It just feels real.

Speaker 28 You can taste the air.

Speaker 53 It's amazing how detailed these things can be.

Speaker 30 Which is why when someone contradicts your memory and says, it didn't happen that way, you're like, yeah, it did.

Speaker 16 Screw you.

Speaker 4 Well, it feels like a robbery. Right.

Speaker 33 They're taking it from you.

Speaker 28 And in fact, this got Elizabeth Loftus in a lot of trouble.

Speaker 44 Back in the mid-80s, there were a lot of people, I don't know if you remember this, coming forward with repressed memories of like, I was abused by a Shatanistic cult and performed rituals and whatever, whatever, all that stuff.

Speaker 11 Right, I remember that. We now know a lot of those memories were imagined.

Speaker 52 And she says, at the time, she was one of the only people to raise her hand and say,

Speaker 37 excuse me.

Speaker 5 And it got her in a lot of trouble.

Speaker 13 I've never really seen anything like the wrath of hostility.

Speaker 13 When I began to write articles and publish on this subject, it was pretty amazing, the

Speaker 13 vitriol.

Speaker 30 What kind of things would they do or say?

Speaker 13 Oh, that, you know, my life was threatened. Armed guards would have to be hired at universities where I was being asked to speak.
I had the bomb squad at my house on one occasion.

Speaker 13 One day I was taking an airplane flight, and when the woman sitting in the seat next to me learned who I was, she started to swap me with her newspaper.

Speaker 5 And it was kind of hard to

Speaker 13 extract myself from her

Speaker 13 because, you know, airplanes are crowded places.

Speaker 13 You know, the fact of the matter is, memory is malleable, and we might as well face the truth.

Speaker 26 Well, now,

Speaker 21 this isn't to say that you could have a repressed memory, and it might, it just might be true.

Speaker 22 Not all repressed memories are false.

Speaker 46 Sure, sure.

Speaker 21 And in that regard, this next story you're going to hear,

Speaker 21 I don't tell you much about it.

Speaker 49 I'll just tell you that it's about a painter.

Speaker 9 And it's produced by Nada Perain.

Speaker 20 The first thing you notice in Joe Ando's studio is horses.

Speaker 20 A big milky one straight ahead, sepia ones to the left and right, staring at you like they don't care about you, but they don't mind you either. They're really like dreams of horses.

Speaker 19 I never paint

Speaker 19 horses that are being manipulated with a bridle or anything. They're mostly just hanging out.

Speaker 19 It comforts me to have paintings of horses around.

Speaker 20 Over the past 10 years, the horses have multiplied, and Joe doesn't even know why he keeps painting them.

Speaker 19 I guess it's kind of like

Speaker 19 I just kind of tune it in or something or like you're tuning your guitar you know you ding ding ding ding ding into you know the two strings resonate you know you know it's in tune.

Speaker 20 In a Manhattan studio surrounded by stacks of these animals you start forgetting you're in Chelsea. Maybe you're in a stable instead.
Sometimes even the gesso starts to smell like mulch and hay.

Speaker 20 When Joe got here in the mid-80s, no galleries were offering solo or group shows, and like all the other hundreds of artists in New York, he was struggling.

Speaker 19 I'd been in New York for about six years and nothing was happening.

Speaker 48 And

Speaker 19 I was beginning to think nothing was going to happen.

Speaker 19 And I was, you know, I had a kid and

Speaker 19 I was married.

Speaker 19 So I stopped painting for a few months, which is a long time for me.

Speaker 19 And I missed it. So I started painting again for myself.

Speaker 19 You know, after the dishes were done, all my domestic chores were fulfilled. I'd sit down at the dining table and paint.

Speaker 20 And what showed up on these canvases were pastors,

Speaker 20 lush and open. The kind of pastors you'd see on a postcard from somewhere in Wyoming, or in this case, Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Joe grew up.

Speaker 19 Well, I can show you some of my painting.

Speaker 18 Me and my buddies,

Speaker 19 we'd park out here and we'd get high in the evening, like this is a summer evening, you know?

Speaker 20 Joe runs his hand through the air in front of a massive painting leaning against the wall. It's of a field at dusk.
It's like he's showing me property.

Speaker 19 And we would trip and we would contemplate the universe, you know?

Speaker 27 Like, what? What do you think's those stars? What's back?

Speaker 19 What's behind them?

Speaker 20 It's one of those fields with thick grass that's matted where people might have laid down.

Speaker 20 There's some trees to lean against, separating the grass and the road.

Speaker 19 Our high school sat on Route 66, right on the edge of Tulsa.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 19 you pull out of school at lunchtime and you take a left and you could drive right down Route 66 into the heart of Tulsa. And you could take a right and you could go out to the, there's farmland.

Speaker 19 You know, this was in the early 70s, and we would, of course, take a ride.

Speaker 20 So when Joe stopped trying to paint for anyone else, he drifted backwards into his adolescence. All those breezy ride turns out of the school parking lot.

Speaker 19 And ultimately, this is what people lined up for.

Speaker 20 Joe had one show and then another one. Studio visits from private collectors.
Then calls from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, even sitcom art directors.

Speaker 20 All the while, he kept on painting his deserted landscapes.

Speaker 19 Then, as he describes it, about 10 years ago, horses started showing up in my repertoire, so to speak.

Speaker 20 The pastures weren't empty anymore. They started to draw mares and foals to themselves.
Some in the far distance, some so close that they're out of focus.

Speaker 19 And then, about a year ago, I started painting girls.

Speaker 20 Joe's first attempt at the human form.

Speaker 16 The girls are all on their own canvases.

Speaker 20 They're undressed, stepping out of a darkened space. Some of them look like they're about to say something.

Speaker 19 And I'm just following my gut. I'm painting these pictures, and I don't really know why.

Speaker 19 You know, after a few months, I was sitting back and I was sort of reflecting. I was looking at all these things.

Speaker 19 And I noticed that they all looked the same. They all looked like the same girl.

Speaker 20 Looking over all the paintings in the studio, they clearly are the same girl, but in a dozen different angles. She has the look of a 16-year-old in 1972.

Speaker 19 Like my first love kind of thing.

Speaker 20 Her name was Kay.

Speaker 19 It was like my first soulmate, the first, you know how the first time you feel like you're not alone.

Speaker 20 She's beautiful. Oval face, almond eyes that look right into you.

Speaker 19 And then I remember this moment. with her and me and the horse in the car.

Speaker 20 Joe realized he'd been painting a memory. the fragments of one afternoon 30 years earlier, each ingredient emerging slowly.

Speaker 19 We were parked in the back seat of my NOVA, 67 NOVA,

Speaker 19 in this pasture.

Speaker 19 And we were in the back seat, and a horse looked in the window.

Speaker 19 It was just like this moment. It was just like,

Speaker 19 you know, this horse is there and she's there.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 16 I was in love.

Speaker 19 I had a beautiful naked girl with me in the back seat of my car.

Speaker 19 You know, it just didn't get any better.

Speaker 19 I was skipping out of school so I wouldn't have to speak. I wouldn't have to be in class.

Speaker 19 You know, I was on Easy Street. I probably had $5 in my pocket, you know.

Speaker 19 Enough gas to get home. I had some my cigarettes.

Speaker 19 I don't know.

Speaker 19 Why did you break up?

Speaker 19 I think I cheated on her. I think that's why.
Joe.

Speaker 19 I think that's what happened. I went to the lake and I did something I shouldn't have.

Speaker 23 Right, you know,

Speaker 19 in front of somebody she knew.

Speaker 19 She moved away

Speaker 19 to Minnesota for some reason,

Speaker 19 and

Speaker 19 she called me one day

Speaker 19 and

Speaker 19 we

Speaker 48 went to went out dancing.

Speaker 19 And we drank beer and danced.

Speaker 19 And I took her home to the place she was staying. She was staying with

Speaker 19 some friends in this

Speaker 19 old house behind an appliance store.

Speaker 19 And I dropped her off, and

Speaker 23 she

Speaker 19 looked at me like this. Says, aren't you coming in? And I says, no, I have to go see

Speaker 19 somebody else. I forget her name.
You had a new girlfriend. A new girlfriend.

Speaker 19 And she lit a cigarette, slam the door, and she died in a fire that night.

Speaker 19 I got a call the next morning.

Speaker 20 A car door slams. A girl turns and looks over her shoulder at a guy she won't be seducing that night.

Speaker 20 A fragment of a moment frozen in time.

Speaker 19 I mean, the funny thing is, she was so spirited. If anybody was going to come back and haunt me, she would.

Speaker 19 How old were you?

Speaker 19 Only 21. How old was she?

Speaker 19 She was probably

Speaker 19 19.

Speaker 20 That day in the car, with his girl and the horse looking in, Joe thinks the memory of that one afternoon in Tulsa might be some sort of post-traumatic pleasure syndrome.

Speaker 20 An echo that bounced off Jupiter and caught up with him again.

Speaker 19 And then again, they're just paintings too. They're just color and these are just excuses for me to make another painting.

Speaker 20 There's something alluring about Joe Ando's paintings. They draw you in.
Maybe that's why people pay big money for them.

Speaker 20 But the only thing that anyone who wasn't there in the field with Joe, Kay, and the horse can do is look from the outside into an impenetrable past that's finished.

Speaker 20 That memory, that story, is self-sustaining and whole, looping endlessly in an alternate universe.

Speaker 19 That's reason I don't title these.

Speaker 19 There's no ending, there's no beginning.

Speaker 19 Just every day and stir it up again.

Speaker 21 Joe Ando has a new memoir. It's called Jubilee City, and it is published by William Morrow.

Speaker 16 We will continue in a moment.

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Speaker 28 Ready? This is Radiolab.

Speaker 43 I'm Janab Umrah.

Speaker 6 And I'm Robert Quillwich.

Speaker 23 And on this show, we've been talking about memory.

Speaker 48 Remembering and forgetting. Forgetting.

Speaker 22 Yes.

Speaker 49 And this next story is about the most drastic version of this particular back and forth that I can think of. It just can't get any worse than this.

Speaker 21 This is a story of a man named Clive Waring.

Speaker 15 It was told to me by the famous neurologist and writer Oliver Sachs.

Speaker 26 First of all, who was Clive Waring when he was well?

Speaker 51 He was a gifted musician and musicologist who was really a pioneer in Renaissance music, especially the music of Orlandus Lassis.

Speaker 60 And he had a group called the London Lassus Ensemble.

Speaker 21 This is Deborah Clive's wife.

Speaker 60 And in every concert, his signature tune was Musica Dei Donum, Music the Gift of God.

Speaker 21 Boy, music the gift of God, that's sort of interesting.

Speaker 16 Exactly.

Speaker 21 And then what happened?

Speaker 51 Then, rather

Speaker 51 suddenly, in March of 85, he became ill.

Speaker 21 It began, she says, with just a headache.

Speaker 60 And he often had headaches because he often overworked, so it was nothing out of the ordinary.

Speaker 22 But it didn't go away.

Speaker 60 We called the doctor, and the local doctors pronounced that it was a very bad flu bug.

Speaker 51 The nature of the illness was not clear,

Speaker 51 nor its gravity.

Speaker 27 Yes.

Speaker 60 On the

Speaker 60 fifth day of the headache, he was suddenly out of it. Suddenly, he couldn't remember a thing.
He didn't know my name, didn't know his home address.

Speaker 51 When the diagnosis was made of a herpes encephalitis, the damage had been done.

Speaker 21 He was left, says Oliver, with the most severe amnesia ever documented.

Speaker 51 This is a man who, at least when things were very severe, would forget something in the blink of an eyelid.

Speaker 21 It's very hard to imagine what this must have been like.

Speaker 21 His wife Deborah wrote about it, though, in a book of her own, and she says, his ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired, but he didn't seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink.

Speaker 14 The view before the blink, utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back, brought him an entirely new view.

Speaker 60 Well, every moment is his first waking moment.

Speaker 41 It's a long time since I've seen anything. My eyes open today for the first time.

Speaker 60 There is no other moment for Clive except this one.

Speaker 41 In fact, I can't remember now what was going on this morning or why I was here. I've never seen a thing.

Speaker 21 This is Clive from a documentary he filmed a year after he got sick.

Speaker 41 That has no memory for me at all.

Speaker 61 Anything at all.

Speaker 2 I don't know what the hell's going on.

Speaker 17 What's wrong with you?

Speaker 14 You can hear his wife Deborah trying for the umpteenth time to explain to him what happened.

Speaker 2 I've never seen anyone at all.

Speaker 41 This is one of the things that's wrong with you.

Speaker 51 All he can feel is that he's not there.

Speaker 54 I know she doesn't recognize.

Speaker 41 I've been blind the whole time. I've been deaf the whole time.
No sense of touch. You've been conscious, but then the brain hasn't been able to see it.
Not as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 41 I mean, conscious actually means that the person involved is actually connected with it.

Speaker 41 That hasn't happened. You've not been able to store.
Well, everything that you experience is being lost, it's fading away. It's not registering in the brain.
It's not registering, that's right.

Speaker 41 It's not making any impact. It's not leaving a trace or an imprint on the brain.
So it happens and then it fades.

Speaker 51 Proust has a wonderful description of waking up from deep sleep in a hotel room, a strange room, and perhaps feeling confused and not knowing where you are, what's around you, or not even knowing who you are.

Speaker 51 He says that memory comes like a rope let down from heaven to draw one out of the abyss of unbeing.

Speaker 51 No such rope is available for Clive.

Speaker 42 But the staff at the hospital try to help.

Speaker 60 We put a diary by his bed and we initially wrote in it, you are in St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington, it is, etc., etc.

Speaker 60 And then we encourage Clive to write things down.

Speaker 51 So he starts to keep a journal.

Speaker 51 He is extremely intent on trying to

Speaker 51 document his state. He is very, very precise.

Speaker 62 He would look at his watch to see what time was this momentous event occurring of first consciousness. And so he would write down 10.06, awake first time,

Speaker 62 and then have the same sensation and put 10.07, awake first time, truly awake first time.

Speaker 62 Ignore the last entry. Now I'm awake.
This is the first real awakeness. And so

Speaker 62 the diaries are line by line a succession of astonished awakenings.

Speaker 63 People's entries in the diary are rubbish. What does that mean?

Speaker 61 I have no idea.

Speaker 63 Did you write that?

Speaker 16 I've no consciousness of conscious knowledge of it at all, no.

Speaker 61 You're showing it in now for the first time.

Speaker 63 But is it your handwriting?

Speaker 61 Yes, it is.

Speaker 50 But I know nothing about it at all.

Speaker 55 So, how do you think it got there?

Speaker 61 I don't.

Speaker 55 I presume the doctors don't know. But you must know.
No, I haven't. I haven't seen the book at all till now.
No, all I've said is... No, that's mean.
That means I haven't seen it.

Speaker 55 I have no knowledge of it at all.

Speaker 54 That's all.

Speaker 55 There's no knowledge of that book at all. It's entirely new to me.

Speaker 63 But you've put... Who would put that if I had to?

Speaker 55 I don't know, but no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, for heaven's sake, use intelligence, for heaven's sake.
I feel as if it meant a funny thing.

Speaker 49 It seems about as horrible as anything I could imagine.

Speaker 51 Clive gets a sense of deep horror many, many times a day.

Speaker 50 Same as death.

Speaker 50 No difference between day and night, no thoughts at all.

Speaker 51 No one quite knows what to do with someone with amnesia.

Speaker 50 I've never seen any human beings since I've been ill. I don't remember sitting down on this chair, for example.

Speaker 51 They're not mad, they're not retarded. This is precisely like death.

Speaker 14 Clive has now suffered with this total amnesia for more than 20 years.

Speaker 50 Can you imagine it's right to have one night 20 years long

Speaker 50 with no dream?

Speaker 50 That's what it's been like.

Speaker 38 Just like death.

Speaker 50 And in that sense, been totally painless.

Speaker 49 And yet somehow, some things have sustained.

Speaker 21 The love he has for his wife Deborah remained part of him.

Speaker 49 But even though he doesn't remember, for example, his children's names, he doesn't remember anything about his immediate past or even his relatively distant past.

Speaker 14 When Deborah walks into the hospital room and he sees her, what happens?

Speaker 51 He

Speaker 4 gasps

Speaker 51 with relief and excitement.

Speaker 51 And they hug and he kisses her with enormous passion. He has suddenly been rescued from the abyss.
There's suddenly something and someone familiar.

Speaker 41 I've never seen anyone

Speaker 17 She goes home and the phone is ringing.

Speaker 51 She's just visited him. Yeah, and

Speaker 51 she might find 20 calls

Speaker 51 on the message machine.

Speaker 21 From a man who doesn't know she's been there.

Speaker 21 Now, darling, look, it's five here. It's ten to seven.
I haven't spoken to anybody in this place. I know nothing about this case at all.
I just want to speak to you, please.

Speaker 21 Can you come and see me, please, as soon as you possibly can? I don't care about anybody else in the world, just you, please, please come. Love you.

Speaker 14 14 minutes later.

Speaker 14 This is Clive here. I don't want to speak to anyone else.
I don't want to speak to you, darling. Can you come and see me, please?

Speaker 54 I haven't seen you yet, and I want to. Please come, darling.

Speaker 19 Bye-bye.

Speaker 15 Eleven minutes later.

Speaker 15 This is Clive here. I have no idea what's going to go on.
If there's any way you can get to me tonight, please do come. I just want to see you, please.

Speaker 15 Please come, please come, darling. It's Clive here.
I don't care about anyone else.

Speaker 15 No, in case you don't recognize my voice.

Speaker 51 He does not remember her in every way. He may fail to recognize her if she just passes.
He cannot describe her.

Speaker 51 He may forget her name, but he does not forget her embrace, her warmth, her love, her kisses, her caring for him.

Speaker 14 So the question is, what happened here that he could forget everything, it seems, but not her?

Speaker 49 When I asked Oliver, he referred to an experiment, a particular experiment.

Speaker 51 Well, this was a famous or infamous experiment done by Claparade, who was a French neurologist at the beginning, and this was done at the beginning of the 20th century.

Speaker 36 And there was this famous patient who basically had a version of

Speaker 36 the memory problem that was in the film Memento.

Speaker 21 That's science writer Stephen Johnson.

Speaker 36 Basically, she couldn't remember anything longer than kind of five or ten minutes. It would just disappear.

Speaker 36 And every day she would go see her doctor, and he would greet her, and she would say hello, and then introduce herself, and he would say, well, we see each other every day. But she wouldn't remember.

Speaker 36 And then one day, this is kind of... a funny story because it's not exactly what you want your doctor doing.

Speaker 36 One day what he did was he concealed, as he was shaking her hand, he concealed a little thumbtack in his palm and reached and shook her hand and pricked her hand.

Speaker 36 And she recoiled and said, well, you're a terrible doctor. And then the next day.

Speaker 36 when she came back again and didn't know who he was, didn't recognize him at all, as usual, and said hello and introduced herself. And then he reached out to shake her hand, and she paused.

Speaker 36 And she had this instinctive kind of feeling like there's some kind of threat here. If she had no memory, if she couldn't remember who this guy was, how could she somehow remember

Speaker 33 this threat, the threat posed by the pinprick in the palm?

Speaker 15 Well, this is Oliver's notion.

Speaker 51 I think memories of pain and joy

Speaker 51 are sort of primordial.

Speaker 49 Deep down in the oldest parts of our brains, Oliver thinks, there may be a place for the memories that matter the most.

Speaker 51 And I like the idea of a sort of subcortical safe vault.

Speaker 14 For Clive, protected in the vault, out of reach from his amnesia, was love for his wife and one thing more.

Speaker 60 Yeah, I'd taken him off the ward to get some peace because he was hypersensitive to noise.

Speaker 60 And the most peaceful place happened to be the chapel. And we picked up an old hymn book.

Speaker 60 And for want of anything better to do, and because Clive talked jumble most of the time at that stage, I began to sing.

Speaker 14 And all of a sudden, like it was the most natural thing in the world,

Speaker 60 he joined in.

Speaker 60 He could sing.

Speaker 60 I was amazed that he could still read music and sing.

Speaker 21 Was it a tentative sort of stumbling music?

Speaker 16 Just like falling off a log.

Speaker 14 Full voice, strong, everything.

Speaker 4 Yep.

Speaker 21 And I was so thrilled. Did you want to sing another?

Speaker 15 Oh, you bet.

Speaker 60 And another?

Speaker 17 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 22 And if he could do that, she wondered, well, what else could he do?

Speaker 60 We even brought his choir in.

Speaker 49 The one he used to conduct in London.

Speaker 60 To the hospital chapel. I had a hunch that if we stood Clive in front of of them with a piece of music, he would be able to conduct.

Speaker 60 And

Speaker 60 it happened just as I'd hoped. His singers were flabbergasted.
There was their old conductor bringing them in completely and utterly himself.

Speaker 49 And almost the instant it was over, it was over.

Speaker 14 He had no memory what he'd just done.

Speaker 21 In fact, later on, she showed him a tape of that very performance.

Speaker 60 What would you say if I told you you conducted the Lattos ensemble?

Speaker 16 last week?

Speaker 16 That's hilarious.

Speaker 41 I thought you'd say that. That sounds hysterical.

Speaker 41 I know, no, no, no. Do you want me to prove it to you?

Speaker 54 This is the strangest thing I've ever seen.

Speaker 17 On the screen, right in front of him, there he is. On the pedestal, the tongue inhaled, and he's conducting.

Speaker 51 He is fully in the music,

Speaker 51 fully himself.

Speaker 51 So music in a way becomes this Christian rote from heaven, which will recall him to himself.

Speaker 48 And no one really knows why. I remember that now.

Speaker 21 What music does that makes this possible, not just in Clive, but in many others?

Speaker 21 Maybe it's something about music itself, that it's so richly organized, that every time you're in a song, you can feel what has been and what's about to be.

Speaker 42 Maybe Clive was just carried along in the architecture of music.

Speaker 60 But when the music stops,

Speaker 60 he falls out of time.

Speaker 60 Music gives him a piece of time in which to exist.

Speaker 49 Out of time, out of memory, out of himself, there's two things left.

Speaker 21 There's love and there's the joy of music.

Speaker 14 Everything else is gone, but for some reason, those stay.

Speaker 17 Thanks to Deborah Waring, she's written a book about Clive called Forever Today, a memoir of love and amnesia.

Speaker 15 Thanks also, once again, to Oliver Sachs, who's included a piece about Clive in his new book on music and memory called Musicophilia.

Speaker 21 And thanks to Udin Associates, producers of the 1986 Jonathan Miller documentary, Equinox, Prisoner of Consciousness.

Speaker 26 That's our show for today.

Speaker 28 And never fear fear if you didn't absorb everything you just said, because you can always go to our website, radiolab.org.

Speaker 44 We will give you links there to any of the books you just mentioned.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 26 you have subscribed to the podcast, right?

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Speaker 9 Radiolab at wnyc.org.

Speaker 44 That's the email address.

Speaker 11 I'm Jad Abumrod.

Speaker 23 And I'm Robert Gilwich.

Speaker 7 And this was Radiolab.

Speaker 13 Hey, I'm Liz Landau.

Speaker 64 I'm calling you from Washington, D.C., and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Avamrod and edited by Soren Wheeler.
Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.

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Speaker 64 Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 65 Hello, this is your computer hard drive. Thanks also to Trent Walby, Mayuke Jakaranta, Carla Setaho Murphy.

Speaker 65 Special thanks to Greg Casparino, Andy Lancet, Eric John, Vince Ardeno, Roderick Bo, Alan Smith, Sam Bingman, Lorraine Maddox.

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