The Woman Who Can't Forget
Page 13
As much pain as my dad’s leaving caused, I realize now that we all needed to grow, and ultimately their breakup helped us do that. In those eight years, we all made progress. I am extremely proud when I consider how much my family has been through, and yet we all made it back together. I might have been unhappy with my personal life because I was now over thirty and unmarried and still did not have the family of my own that I had always wanted, but we loved each other and had a better understanding of each other. Best of all, my parents seemed to have revived the magic in their relationship, and I was both happy and surprised they could have gone through so much and could still share that. What I didn’t know yet was that I was about to experience some magic in my own life, which would finally help me to come to better terms with the force of my memory in my life.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A Window Opens
Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands.
—Carl Jung, commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower
The brain is wider than the sky
—Emily Dickinson, “The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky”
The first touch of magic in my life was the response that I received on June 8, 2000, from Dr. James McGaugh, only ninety minutes after having finally sent him off my e-mail asking for help. I had realized at last that I really needed to figure out what was going on with my memory. The therapist I’d gone to had done me a world of good, but he had no explanation to offer about the swirling of my memories; I imagine he believed, as my mother had always said, that I just dwelled on my past far too much. But I was sure that I wasn’t consciously calling up my memories; they were just too random, too spontaneous, and too insistent. There was something different, and something very strange, going on in my head, and I was ready to come to new terms with the phenomenon in my mind. My memory had been ruling my life, and if there were a way for me to find some solace from the constant assault, I was ready for that.
I come from a long line of strong women, and I wanted to be more like them—to cast away my fears of change, of death, of the future and live with the survival spirit that had allowed them to overcome so many sorrows they’d faced in life. One of my favorite memories is of the time when I realized in a profound way just what a powerful, undaunted group of women I was privileged to be part of. On New Year’s Day 1989, my family gathered at my Aunt Ruth’s house, the last time we were all to be together. My Grandma Helen, Nana, was there; she had taken care of Michael and me much of the time when we were young. My father’s mother, Grandma Rose, and her second husband, whom we called Poppy Al, were there, along with my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Jack, my Great-Aunts Molly, Ann, and Minnie (who was ninety at the time and who lived to be 103), and Minnie’s daughter, Florence, and her husband, Sandy. Over the next few years, the older generation began to fail and started to pass away. That day, we all sat around the living room sharing stories, catching up on our lives. Then we moved into the dining room for a big meal and spent more wonderful hours eating and talking, and during the course of that day, I realized in a new way just how much the women of my family meant to me, how much I admired their strength and life wisdom.
These were women who were well into their eighties or nineties; they had buried children and husbands, and had faced God knows how many other challenges in their long lives, and there they were—still keeping their heads up, still laughing, still finding pleasure in life. They imparted a new awareness in me that day about the value of moving on in life, of pushing forward rather than always looking back. I had never been able to do so, but at this point I was finally ready to start down a path of discovery that I hoped might possibly free me from my ever-present past. Having taken the first decisive step, with enormous trepidation, and then to have received Dr McGaugh’s answer so quickly was simply thrilling.
I knew nothing about the science of memory and had no idea what to expect from my meeting with him. He and I had talked on the phone briefly on June 12 to pick a date to meet, but he hadn’t filled me in about what to expect when I got there. I was so excited about the meeting that I got up really early that morning—Saturday, June 24—and as I drove down to Irvine that day, my mind was racing. I wanted to be sure to describe fully what my experience with my memory had been like, to be sure that he understood what a dominant and strange role it had played in my life. I had decided that I would bring him some of my journals. They always provoked a stunned reaction when I showed them to my friends, and I figured that they would be important for him to know about. I had a terrible time deciding that morning which ones to pack; if left to my own devices, I would have hauled my whole trunk full of them down. But my dad told me not to overwhelm him and just to bring journals for a couple of years. In the end, I brought six years’ worth.
When I drove up to the research center, the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory on the UCI campus, I started to feel nervous. The center was housed in an imposing concrete building among a complex of buildings, and I felt completely out of my element. I never had a flair for science in school and had never spent any time with scientists, and the building alone was intimidating.
Dr. McGaugh’s office was just what I had envisioned, with an impressive wall of framed diplomas and awards and lined with books. There were books everywhere around the room, with sheets of paper sticking out of them, and whole bookshelves loaded with bound volumes of scientific papers.
After he gave me the tests of dates and events from The 20th Century Day by Day, I showed him my journals, and he was clearly intrigued. As he flipped through them, I was anxious. No one had ever read my journals; some of my friends had seen me writing in them, but I’d never allowed anyone to start reading them. I was determined, though, that with Dr. McGaugh, I was going to open up and tell him whatever he needed to know about my memory and my life in order to figure out what was happening in my head. At that point, I was still hoping that he would recognize right away what the reason was that my memory works the way it does.
After we talked for a little while about my life and my experience with my memory, he asked me to lunch, and I told him how the move to California had been so upsetting and after that how I couldn’t get thoughts of New Jersey and New York out of my head. At the end of lunch, as we were saying good-bye, he told me that he was going home to “get his little gray cells” to grasp what had just happened. He told me he’d never talked to anyone before who described having a memory like mine and had also never read about a memory like mine in the scientific literature.
The next day, I received an e-mail from him thanking me for coming down and asking if I would come again in July. We set a date of July 8, and that day I met the two other scientists who would participate in the study of me. Dr. McGaugh had contacted them because they had areas of expertise in the study of memory that were complementary to his. He told me that he would like me to undergo a series of tests and explained they would be the beginning of what would likely expand into a longer-term study.
One of the scientists Dr. McGaugh chose to team up with was Dr. Larry Cahill, a neurobiologist, and the other was Dr. Elizabeth Parker, a neuropsychologist. I was quickly to learn that the study of memory is a vast area of science, spreading over many specialty fields, and that even many of the most basic questions, such as just how a memory is formed, how and where our memories are housed in our brains, and how the process of remembering works physically, have yet to be conclusively answered.
Dr. Cahill’s area of expertise, neurobiology, is the study of how our neurons form circuits in our brains and how those circuits help us to process information: to perceive, think, feel, and, key to working with me, form and recall memories. Dr. Cahill’s special interest has been in how our brains store information, and especially how they sort out which information is important to store and to be able to retrieve, and which is better discarded, or at least stored in a way that mitigates against retrieval. The notion is that all of our brains are cr
ammed full of information but that most people have neural circuits that allow the retrieval of only a selective sliver. One of the big open questions in the science of memory concerns whether our brains may in fact store a record of everything that has happened to us—of every day of our life—but that our memory retrieval circuits tap into only a tiny portion of that vast storehouse.
On his faculty profile Web page, Dr. Cahill features a fascinating quote from one of the founders of psychology, William James, that resonates powerfully for me: “Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in the case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.” Dr. Cahill found my memory interesting in part because he has worked on the question of whether it’s because memories are particularly emotional that we remember them, and my memory doesn’t seem to select for them in that way.
In investigating the processes of memory formation and retrieval, Dr. Cahill has incorporated the rapidly developing techniques of brain mapping into his work, through imaging of the brain with PET scans and fMRIs, which take pictures of the brain during the process of thinking. Eventually that avenue of research into how my memory works was to lead to some astonishing results. It’s only recently that I’ve learned what those scans revealed.
Dr. Parker’s area of expertise, neuropsychology, focuses largely on the study of symptoms that are associated with brain disorders or injuries. She has studied athletes who suffered brain injuries, for example, as well as people with amnesia and other cognitive disorders. The work she would do with me would be to administer a series of diagnostic tests to evaluate my memory functioning and my general cognitive abilities.
A great deal has been discovered about the functions of different regions of the brain from the study of people with cognitive impairments and about the interconnections among the brain’s regions. One of the most famous of such patients is the man known in the scientific literature as H.M., who has played an important role in the development of neuropsychology. He was epileptic, and in 1953, he elected to have radical brain surgery in an attempt to cure terrible seizures he was experiencing. The surgery divided a section in the middle of the brain that plays a vital role in memory, especially the recall for facts and events, which is called the medial temporal lobe. He has been studied ever since the operation due to its tragic side effect: he developed a severe form of amnesia. Although his memory of his life before the surgery was not impaired, except for the time just preceding the surgery and some of his memories for a decade or so before, he was unable to form certain kinds of new memories.
He is unable to create long-term memories for events, so does not have autobiographical memory for the long stretch of his life that has followed the surgery. This impairment has not stopped him from being able to learn new information, such as a range of tasks that scientists have taught him to test this ability. The complexity of the types of memories he has been able to learn, and of the ways in which his memory is impaired, have provided a treasure trove for study, making enormous contributions to the understanding of how the anatomy of the brain relates to memory functioning.
The field of neuropsychology has evolved rapidly in recent years, and it can provide invaluable clinical assistance for people who suffer brain damage or have a disorder. One of the things I’d like this book to do is to bring the field more into the public’s awareness because, as Dr. Parker explained to me, many people never get neuropsychological treatment because they don’t even know that they might be able to get help. I know what a comfort it was to me to have verification of the nature of my memory and all its quirky functions, and I can only imagine the difference it would make for so many others who don’t even know what they’re suffering from.
One of the stories Dr. Parker told me, of a patient who was referred to her, has especially stuck with me. The woman could barely talk; she had aphasia, a condition whereby people’s speech is badly impaired because their brains are unable to put words together appropriately. She might say a sentence such as, “I’m going to drink the straw now because I’m tired of the clock.” Dr. Parker believed she had damage to an area of a particular part of the brain, which such speech problems are symptomatic of, and it was so sad to me that this woman had been suffering for so long without any idea what was wrong with her.
One of the great challenges in the study of the brain is that it’s difficult to see inside it. We can see a broken bone, or a tumor, or that a wound is getting infected. But tucked away inside our skulls, the brain and its circuits are illusive. Even with brain scanning developing rapidly, so that ever more refined pictures of the brain are possible, those pictures are taken as if from 2,000 feet from the surface of earth. The specific neuronal circuits are so delicate and intricately woven that they don’t show up on the scans.
Neuropsychological testing is a vital way to get a more detailed mapping of what areas are damaged and to point to possible therapy or treatment. One of the most profound realizations I’ve come to through my work with the scientists is that even with all of the amazing developments in brain science over the past couple of decades, the understanding of the brain is still in its infancy. The study of superior memory is an area that’s particularly undeveloped.
As Dr. McGaugh explained to me later, the battery of tests to evaluate memory functioning have been designed with the purpose of measuring degrees of impairment, not to measure how much above the norm a person’s memory abilities might be. As it would turn out, I would get perfect scores on a number of the tests I took, but those scores weren’t able to tell them just how much higher I might have scored if the tests were designed to measure abilities well above the average. The team would therefore not only administer a selection of the standard memory and general cognition tests, but would tailor some additional tests specifically to measure my abilities, for example, tests of my ability to recall the days of the week for dates they randomly selected, as well as of my ability to recall current facts about events, and my recall of autobiographical events. They would also interview me to get a life history.
I had several sessions with Dr. Parker, starting on July 15, in which she conducted the life history interview. It was like another round of talk therapy. Then she administered a battery of standardized neurological tests. These are used to evaluate strengths and weaknesses in people’s brain functioning, including a group of memory tests known as the Wechsler Memory Scale–Revised (WMS–R), an updated version of a set of tests for memory devised in 1945 by pioneering American psychologist David Wechsler. The WMS–R measures memory abilities in areas such as auditory recall, visual memory, immediate recall, and working memory, as well as what is referred to as general memory. My test results were to reveal an atypical pattern: Generally people score at about the same level on most of the tests. But my results showed that my memory was extremely strong—very far above the norm—in some areas and yet relatively weak in other areas, which, as Dr. Parker was to explain to me later, was verification of what I had told them about how much difficulty I had with memorizing generally and especially when I was in school.
Dr. Parker was warm and clearly sensitive; she came across as a deeply caring person, and I felt comfortable with her right away. She could not inform me, at that point, about what each of the tests was designed to measure, as that might affect my performance. Some of them were strange to take; some were a breeze and fun, whereas others boggled my mind. I was asked to recall lists of words I’d read, and also to recite back to her, in reverse order, strings of numbers that she read out to me. A frustrating one was the Stroop Color and Word Test, in which the word for a color appears on a computer screen but in a different color from the word. So the word blue might appear in yellow and the word green might appear in red. I had to choose from the four color words at the bottom of the screen which one was shown above. The test measures how fast a person’s brain gets past the fact that the color and the word don’t match
and allows the person to choose the correct color name.
A much more enjoyable test for me was the Proverbs Test, in which the assignment is to write the meanings of a set of twelve widely known sayings, such as “A tree is known by the fruit it bears,” “Don’t cross bridges until you get to them,” and “The harder the storm, the sooner it’s over.”
Although the purposes of these tests were mystifying to me, I was hopeful that all of the testing would produce some answers, and I felt relieved to be involved in a truly scientific process of discovery about my memory.
Over time as I met with the scientists, they would spontaneously quiz me about dates, and later each of them would tell me that there was a special “blown-away” moment when he or she suddenly understood just how different my recall abilities are. For Dr. McGaugh that moment was on the first day I met him, when I corrected the date for the taking of the hostages in the U.S. embassy in Iran from November 5 to November 4. For Dr. Parker that moment was when I got a perfect score on the facial perception test. She told me later that was when she knew she was dealing with a mind that was substantially different from any other one she’d studied.
For Dr. Cahill, the aha! moment was when he brought in an article about the Murphy BrownTV show’s Christmas episode in 1988, the first year of the show, and quizzed me about the date it was broadcast. I immediately told him the date was December 11, and he shook his head, disappointed, and told me it had aired on December 18. I shot right back that I was sure that was wrong, because on that day, I was watching The Brady Bunch Christmas movie at home, which was on the same network in the same time slot. He looked stunned that I would remember that. To prove to him that I remembered right, when I got home, I dug out my TV episode guide book and confirmed that in fact the episode had aired on December 11 and I faxed him a copy of the page. Over the years I would report to him about lots of dates I had found in books or magazines that were wrong, faxing them to him that way.