Memory's Last Breath

by Gerda Saunders

  Long-and short-term memory use the same storage areas, which are scattered throughout the brain. Cognitive information such as words, concepts, and numbers is stored in the gray matter of the frontal cortex, the area in charge of the so-called higher brain functions. Sights, sounds, and touch also have their places in the frontal cortex. Smell, however, is stored in the olfactory bulb, which is located in a crucial part of the brain’s apparatus for transforming short-term memory to mid-or long-term, the limbic system.

  The limbic system’s primary function is to manage our hormones, and thereby direct our emotions and feelings, which proves to be an indispensable part of a well-functioning memory system: the stronger the emotion accompanying a perception, the more likely it is to become a vivid long-term memory.

  The crucial role of emotional significance in forming memories is a recent discovery, achieved in the last decade as a result of new neuroscientific instruments such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that enable live observation of the brain as it performs memory-making or -retrieval tasks. That there can be no memory without emotion “is a radical departure from the traditional perspective, which used to regard emotion as the antagonist of reason.” The insight has led to a paradigm shift in contemporary brain science: “We simply cannot understand thought without understanding emotion.”

  To dig a bit deeper, I extended my exploration to find out what is happening on the level of my neurons, or cells in the brain, spinal column, and nerves that are specialized to transmit nerve impulses. What is going awry with the way my memories are laid down, recalled, and refiled? Some interesting insights come from the study of disorders that are in a sense the opposite of forgetting. In post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, the sufferer is precluded from living a normal life by the inability to forget a horrific memory. The explanation, as with forgetting, lies in the cellular bricks and mortar of the brain.

  Electrical circuits that support the making, recalling, and modulation of long-term memory function like a grid of power lines across a vast landscape. The “wires” consist of neurons that have been made sensitive to each other so that when one fires, all the others go off at the same time. These neurons have been fitted with parts that make it easier “to pass on their electrical excitement.” When the limbic system decides that a memory is worth keeping, it releases hormones that trigger DNA along the activated circuit to manufacture protein building blocks. Those blocks physically strengthen the connections between neurons by shaping themselves into additional receptors or neurotransmitters, thereby reinforcing the brain’s capacity to retain memory over time.

  Once a pathway for long-term memory has been laid down, there is no guarantee that it will survive. It may end up being only a mid-term memory unless it is constantly maintained. Since typical neuron proteins start breaking down within as little as two weeks after being formed, “every long-term memory is always on the verge of vanishing.” The continuous repair of disintegrating neurons is known as reconsolidation.

  Psychiatrists have for decades used the principle that memory circuits must be reconsolidated to help people move on from a traumatic past. Through trial and error they discovered a class of drugs that was successful in taking the edge off horrific memories, thereby allowing more new pathways to be formed through suggestion or techniques of positive reinforcement. Successfully treated patients remember the traumatic experience, but have shed the fear, anger, and other negative emotions associated with it.

  Functional imaging research has now revealed that the class of drugs that had success in treating trauma-related disorders all have in common the ability to trigger the production of an enzyme, PKMzeta, that blocks maintenance proteins to the areas where emotions are stored while the sufferer recalls the traumatic event. This means that the signal-strengthening parts of the old circuit are not replaced, and the memory fades.

  The discovery that “memories are not formed and then pristinely maintained,” as neuroscientists used to think, but rather “formed and then rebuilt every time they’re accessed” has far-reaching implications: every time we think about the past “we are delicately transforming its cellular representation in the brain, changing its underlying neural circuitry.” So, a memory is changed every time it is remembered.

  These findings upend the model of memory (still) held by most people, namely that memory “works like a video camera, accurately recording the events we see and hear so that we can review and inspect them later.” It raises questions whose answers may have far-reaching consequences. Given our contrary new understanding of memory recall, what is the status of our legal system’s reliance on the veracity of eyewitness testimony? Closer to home, what is the veracity of my cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die puff adder story?

  Part II

  Enquiry into the truth of “The Tale of the Thirty-Nine Puff Adders”

  Sources of information: email interviews with two eyewitnesses and one earwitness to the snake killing.

  Results: Since no childhood photographs or family letters about the puff adder incident are available, I tasked my siblings, both the eyewitnesses and the ones who have heard the story told all their lives, to check my version of what happened.

  Our conversation was launched via email on September 27, 2013, the day after my sixty-fourth birthday. All my siblings, now in their fifties and sixties, were included. I began by recapping the story as I remembered it, accounting for the possibility that we might have counted half-snakes as wholes. I requested, in Afrikaans, that “those who had already been born and could walk and attended the snake killing” send me their variations of the story. I ended my email by passing on a conceptual schema in relation to the story that my middle brother had mentioned during a phone conversation he and I had had about my little project: “Carel came up with a lovely name for a story with so many disputable facts: ‘Quantum Puff Adders.’ Please cast your quantum in the snakeskin purse.”

  The replies came fast and furious.

  Klasie, 9-27-2013:

  If we counted halves, there would have been 19½ whole ones. No, there were 39 little ones. Your description of the rocks where the snake was shot sounds odd to me. The largest rock was drilled and blasted with dynamite, why and what for I don’t know.

  Carel, 9-27-2013:

  I suspect that Gerda is conflating two snake episodes; fusing fractional memories into integral recollection—in this instance puff adder/makoppa fusion.

  The reality, as Klasie and I concur, involves him, myself and I think Duard or Willie urinating on the pile of rock debris when the cry of “slaaaaaang” resulted in a frantic and wholly undignified scramble past and through the karee and wag-’n-bietjie bushes on the dam wall to inform what we at the time considered to be a responsible adult. Oom Koot arrived first but unfortunately unarmed. Characteristically unflustered in the way that distinguished him from his younger brother,* he kept an eye on the snake while the 12-gauge shotgun was being fetched from I think Martiens Barnard or a neighbor further down that road. In the re-telling, Oom Koot was blowing pipe smoke at the snake—presumably to keep it enthralled while awaiting its demise.

  From that point my recollection roughly concurs with Gerda’s.

  Klasie, 9-27-2013:

  Yes, Carel’s story is how I remember it too. I don’t remember the spade and Isak. Does that come from another story? If Duard were there, his father would surely have arrived with many guns.

  Carel, 9-27-2013:

  A merely honest person can’t deny another’s clear recollections; a tactful and magnanimous one is required for that. The physical evidence for the puff-adder story was destroyed in a tobacco-drying furnace almost 50 years ago—all that remains are those fragile palimpsests we call memories.

  I have little ego vested in this scenario, but I entertain the notion to start doubting my own recollection, if only for rhetorical purposes.

  I am going to make an annotated map of the events and send it out.

  Carel sent out the Goo
gle map below, whereupon Klasie responded with his own map in Excel titled “Farm by My Mem.” Below, I place the maps one beneath the other.

  Carel’s Google Map

  Klasie’s Excel Map: “Farm by My Mem.” I flipped Klasie’s map horizontally and vertically so that its orientation would be similar to Carel’s, hence the upside-down, mirror-image original labels.

  Together with his map, Carel also sent a diagram he had drawn with a note explaining “that [it] gives more detail about my memories of the slaughter.” He titled the drawing “Carel se Slagveld,” or “Carel’s Battlefield.” (Just as well drawing talent was not a prerequisite for Carel’s success as a computer entrepreneur .)

  Carel’s battlefield

  Boshoff (who had not yet been born by the time of the snake incident), 9-27-2013:

  This is history and because it’s history, I know best. I cannot recall the incident at all, but I have heard the story repeatedly from several different observers. Accordingly, I have the advantage that my personal observations are not influencing the objectivity of others.

  There were 39 snakes. Pa himself shot the snake with his .22 pistol.

  “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

  —JULIAN BARNES, THE SENSE OF AN ENDING

  Gerda, 9-27-2013:

  Boshoff, I am happy that your objective history has now placed a firearm in our own Pa’s hands, albeit one with a short barrel. What is history if it is not patriarchal?

  Carel, 10-1-2013, subject line “Laaste skoot na die pofadder,” or “Last potshot at the puff adder”:

  Klasie, I’m impressed with your map. One problem is that the dam was not round, but rectangular, as the blue line [on my map] shows.

  Two items remain before I can clock out with my puff adder memories intact and unassailable: 1), Question for Klasie: who were there when the snake was spotted the first time? 2), I will undertake an in situ inspection for terrain corroboration. Yours in Aspergers.*

  Gerda, 10-1-2013:

  Carel, your terrain corroboration will be worth exactly as much as the number of siblings you take along (obligatory smiley face here: ). What point is there to being correct when no one is there to whom you can say, “I told you so?”

  Klasie, when I mentally plot my site onto yours, they are an exact fit. Does that mean you and I actually agree on something in the universe? Carel, on your map the killing field is too far from the house. I guess that is a vote of two against one!

  In your battlefield sketch, however, my scene looks remarkably the same as yours, Carel. That makes a fifty-fifty split. However, there were definitely not as many as 20 onlookers. Our whole family was there, Oom Koot and Tannie Wientjie, Ou Isak, but no contingent of black children. The invisibility of black people under apartheid may have skewed my memory in this regard.

  Conclusion: As the conversation continued, each person’s memory was jogged by other versions in such a way that we reached a near-consensus on key aspects of the event: the approximate location of the place of slaughter, the live emergence of the baby snakes, number of snakes, and the use of a firearm as well as ad hoc tools found on the site to kill the baby snakes. While we all stick to some of the impressions with which we came to the discussion, no one believes the others are flat-out lying.

  Our family’s experience in comparing individual memories is congruent to my finding that the brain refreshes the “truth” every time you retell it. In relation to the memoirist’s assertion that a story is true, I conclude that the strongest claim she can make about a story from her past, especially those to whom there are no eyewitnesses, is that a narrative is true “as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.”*

  Part III

  Why can I still write, and are there any other dementia sufferers who similarly lose their abilities in some areas of their life while retaining them in others?

  Information sources: Peer-reviewed neuroscientific journal articles, popular science magazines, interviews with health professionals, and self-observation.

  Results: I am not the only person who appears to be “faking”! For example, a counselor friend tells of a retired philosophy professor from her alma mater who can no longer bathe, dress, or feed himself, but directs canonical philosophy discussions with visiting former colleagues. A sprinkling of peer-reviewed neurological research, too, reports the “unexpected preservation of a cognitive function in individuals with dementia”: in the neurology journal Brain, for example, researchers Julia Hailstone and Rohani Omar present the case of a sixty-four-year-old semiprofessional harpsichordist with a non-Alzheimer’s dementia who “had virtually no comprehension of oral or written language,” “was mute,” and did not understand the functions “of objects such as a corkscrew and a tuning fork,” but nevertheless demonstrated “the motor skills required in playing [his] instrument,” “the visuoperceptual skills required to read scores,” and “the cognitive skills involved in interpreting symbolic notation” as attested by his performance of “technically demanding, structurally complex compositions in an expressive manner.”

  During my search for accounts of the experience of dementia, I also came upon David Shenk’s best seller on Alzheimer’s, The Forgetting. During his research Shenk discovered Morris Friedell, a sociology professor diagnosed at age fifty-nine, whose final year of teaching, four years before his diagnosis, sounds uncannily like mine.

  … he began to have trouble remembering what his students said in class. Later, he couldn’t remember a conversation he’d just had with his mother. At the neuropsychologist’s office, he couldn’t tell the doctor about a movie he’d seen just the night before. They ran the usual tests. He got a perfect score on the MMSE [Mini Mental State Exam, a test done in the doctor’s office which includes determining the patient’s orientation to time, ability to repeat three unrelated words right after the tester has said them, naming objects, and reading and following instructions]. On the brain scans he didn’t fare so well.

  After a year of long-distance interaction, Shenk met Friedell in person at an Alzheimer’s conference at New York University, where Friedell did a poster presentation titled “Potential for Rehabilitation in Alzheimer’s.” During lunch with Shenk the next day, Friedell explained that for him rehabilitation no longer means “intensive rehab, in the spirit of what knee and hip surgery patients go through,” but rather “minimizing and slowing the cognitive loss by adapting to it.” His method includes performing an extremely simple task “just to get into a confidence mind-set,” and from there taking on the challenge “to solve problems in new, simpler ways.”

  After lunch, Friedell asked Shenk if they had “ever spoken before today.”

  So, it seems that dementia can sometimes go like this: persons having spent a lifetime mastering particular knowledge structures and intellectual skills may retain access to this expertise even after becoming utterly dependent in daily activities. I want to believe this will be my story, too. But in truth writing is getting slower and harder: the six chapters I have so far completed, excluding the current one—which, I imagine, will be my last one—took three and a half years of many eight-hour days, reams of notes, endless thesaurus-mining, scissors-and-tape cutting and pasting to figure out how a single comprehensive piece might come together, and the tough-love edits of writer friends Shen Christenson and Kirstin Scott.

  Dementia can also go like this: a person having spent a lifetime mastering particular knowledge structures and intellectual skills—a well-educated person, in other words—may for a while use a “greater ‘thinking power’” to compensate for the disease in its early stage. However, as MailOnline reporter Jenny Hope brought to light, research done at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University shows that once university graduates’ dementia becomes evident, they “suffer a memory decline that is fifty percent faster than someone with a minimal education.”

  My father: Your education is
something you can always fall back on.

  My mother: Dreams are easy, but the gander lays the egg.

  Einstein: The faster you go, the shorter you are.

  Doña Quixote: Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, her brain dried up and she went completely out of her mind.

  Part IV

  Post-hoc email commentary from the two snake-killing eyewitnesses and one earwitness

  Gerda, 10-1-2013:

  Boshoff, the new Julian Barnes quote you passed on from Daleen really puts its metaphorical finger on the combination of “facts” and the embellishment of memory: “And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life.”