Unthinkable

by Helen Thomson

  I ask Bob what his most vivid memory is; his answer surprises me. It isn’t a wedding, or a birth or a traumatic experience—it is just a nice, normal day. It’s May 7, 1970, to be precise.

  “This day really sticks out,” says Bob. “I remember it very clearly. I was twenty, I was in college full time and I was also working in a mental health center as an orderly. On March thirteenth that year I had done some impressions in class and people loved it, so I was being taken up to the main campus to do a speech course. It was a beautiful spring-weather day. I went to six o’clock mass because I had to work seven till three and I remember walking to church up these steps and being very aware of how happy I was. Then I worked and went to a bowling class. I went home and drove my car up to the branch campus and we met the professor and two other students. I’d never been up to the main campus and it was hustle and bustle and beautiful and I was very aware of that. I remember the whole day and all my feelings, as well as the cool breeze against my face. It was just a really nice day.”

  It made me wonder why the rest of us don’t remember more of this mundane stuff. Is there any benefit to forgetting?

  * * *

  The American psychologist William James said in the late nineteenth century that if we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as badly off as if we remembered nothing.

  Most of our autobiographical memories, he said, go through a process of foreshortening—we omit facts and emotions associated with our past and generalize things that have happened to us. This explains why I can’t remember whether or not I’ve turned off the gas under the kettle: if you do a task regularly, your memories of that task merge together. Because of this, most of the fine details are lost amid an ocean of generalizations, meaning we find it hard to pick out the more mundane experiences of our past. A little trick I have subsequently learned is to make a different animal noise (out loud) when switching off the gas under my kettle. It feels silly at the time, but it makes the action of turning the gas off much more memorable when trying to recollect whether you’ve done it later in the day. The animal noise prevents the memory from being grouped within the sea of similar experiences.

  You wouldn’t want to do this all the time. We use memories of our past experiences to help guide our decisions about the future. If we were able to recollect our past in any great detail, it could take us forever to sort through it all. “Oblivion,” said James, “except in certain cases, is thus no malady of memory, but a condition of its health and its life.”12

  Having learned this, I wasn’t surprised to hear that Jill struggles with her daily bombardment of memories. It has led to several bouts of depression. She often feels desperately sad, said McGaugh, constantly remembering the worst times in her life.

  Normally, people don’t tend to dwell on the past, but Jill’s constant recollections seem to link one event to another in an unstoppable manner. McGaugh knows of no other person who is “both warden and prisoner of their memories.”

  I ask Bob whether he’s ever met Jill. “No,” he says, “but from what I’ve heard, her memories seem to consume her life. She’s written that she feels haunted by the never-ending stream of memories that appear in her mind. Thankfully, it’s not the same for me, or for the other people with HSAM that I’ve met.”

  Indeed, most of McGaugh’s small tribe don’t tend to think of their minds as cluttered—they actually seem to enjoy organizing their memories. They appear to be able to pull out memories at appropriate times, flicking through the past either for enjoyment or out of necessity.

  “But what about the painful memories?” I ask Bob. “Isn’t it horrid to remember them so vividly?”

  “When you remember painful memories and they feel as if they happened yesterday, you can see why it could be awful if that’s all you think about. And sometimes when something bad has happened once, if you’re in a similar situation, you start reliving that past memory and it makes you anxious that it will repeat itself. But I think one of the benefits of remembering the bad stuff so vividly is that you can learn from your mistakes more easily than other people can.”

  “In what way?”

  “Just that being able to remember all the details and the way you felt when you made a mistake makes you think, ‘Okay wow, I won’t do that again,’ in a similar situation. And anyway, most of the time, the bad days aren’t really that bad, so I don’t dwell on any of that stuff—I like being in the present.”

  AS WE EAT, WE TALK about school and Bob’s early life.

  “I remember a lot of stuff from when I was young, but not the dates. I remember a few things from when I was really young. My earliest memory is of my mother holding me in her arms—I was drinking milk,” he says.

  My earliest memory is also of my mum. Except she was hanging me upside down over a sink in our downstairs toilet, trying to clear my airways during a particular nasty bout of whooping cough. I can clearly recall seeing the sink bounce in and out of view just inches from my nose, and the tight, cramped space of the room. I later asked my mum whether she remembered this event. She said that it could have been one of many times during the month I had the illness; she remembered several occasions having to pull thick phlegm out of my throat with her fingers—I was two and a half years old.

  “What were you, like two, three?” I ask Bob. I am assuming that that earliest memory refers to drinking milk as a toddler, but the smile on his face makes me pause.

  “I think I was drinking from the breast,” he says.

  “You are kidding me.”

  He laughs. “You know I always joke about this, but I think it’s true,” he says. “I remember she had this contented look on her face. I think that memory would have been around nine months or something, I was definitely a baby.”

  This intrigues me, a memory from nine months old—was that possible, even for a man who never forgets?

  * * *

  Our earliest memories are normally a blurry echo at best. Several theories have been proposed as to why we have this so-called infantile amnesia. Freud, of course, blamed it on adults suppressing sexual fantasies of early childhood that they were later too ashamed to remember—a theory that has since been discredited. The more likely explanation is that the neurons in the brain responsible for forming memories are growing, maturing and being pruned rapidly during the first few years of life. As new neurons are produced, particularly in the hippocampus, the brain must clear out older memories to make room. When Paul Frankland, a scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, accelerated the production of new brain cells in the hippocampus of baby mice, he discovered that they forgot more. When he did the reverse—slowing the growth of neurons using a chemotherapy drug—the pups remembered more than usual.13 Another theory is that as young infants we lack self-perception and language skills, which are perhaps necessary to embed our memories into contexts that we are later able to look back on in our adult lives.

  So does this mean that Bob’s nine-month-old memory was fake? I asked Patricia Bauer, professor of psychology at Emory University in Georgia, and an expert in infantile amnesia. She said there is a wide variation in the age of our earliest memories, from late in the first year to as old as nine. So yes, she said, it was possible to have a memory from nine months old, but that in a typical person we would suspect its accuracy. “It would be tough to say that the memory is of a single event rather than a reconstruction based on lots of similar events in which the person took part, not to mention the huge number of images of infant feeding we view over a lifetime.”

  So maybe Bob’s memory was correct, or maybe it was a culmination of several similar moments that happened early in his life. Regardless, it raised another question: Can we ever trust our own memory?

  * * *

  Mitt Romney once recalled a memory to a crowd of Tea Party supporters about his attendance at the Golden Jubilee, an event that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the American automobile and attracted 750,000 people. The jubilee was famou
s for including one of the last public appearances by Henry Ford. The problem was, it took place on June 1, 1946—nine months before Romney was born.

  Was he lying? The Republican Party leader said his memory was “hazy” and that he was four or five at the time. In fact, it was likely that he had heard the story from his dad and it had inserted itself within his own memory, forming what he later considered a true recollection of the event.

  It wasn’t until the 1990s that researchers really started scientifically testing the idea of false memories, when the cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, then at the University of Washington, wrote about an experiment her team had performed on a boy called Chris.14 The fourteen-year-old Chris described an experience of visiting a local shopping mall in Washington when he was five. He remembered the visit in incredible detail because he got lost after walking off to visit a toy store. Unable to find his family he thought, “Uh-oh. I’m in trouble now.” He remembered thinking he was never going to see them again. Eventually, an old man with a bald head and a flannel shirt helped reunite them all.

  The strange thing is, most of this story never actually happened. It was made up by Jim, Chris’s elder brother, in collaboration with Loftus. Jim had fed Chris some of the basic facts of the story—the old man, the mall—but Chris had filled in the rest of the details. Chris’s story showed that it is possible to plant completely false memories into a person’s mind. Since then, Loftus and others have repeated this experiment, implanting all sorts of fake memories, from choking and near-drowning to demonic possession.

  Even the most educated minds can be manipulated. When Loftus was just fourteen years old, her mother drowned in a swimming pool. On her forty-fourth birthday, Loftus attended a family gathering at which an uncle informed her that she had been the one to discover her mother’s dead body. Although she had previously remembered little about her mother’s death, suddenly memories of the incident came flooding back. A few days later, Loftus’s brother called her and told her that their uncle had made a mistake—it had actually been an aunt that had found their mother. The memories that had appeared so clear and vivid for the past few days were entirely false. Loftus’s own experiment had been inadvertently performed on herself.

  Fake memories can have some serious consequences. On November 15, 1989, fifteen-year-old Angela Correa went missing from school. A few days later her body was found, raped and strangled to death. Suspicious of seventeen-year-old Jeffrey Deskovic, a student who had been absent from school during the time Correa went missing, police brought him in for questioning. After being interrogated for six hours, he finally confessed to the murder. Although DNA testing did not match Deskovic to the crime, he was convicted on the basis of his confession and faced life in jail. Sixteen years later, new DNA evidence matched the crime to Steven Cunningham, a man who was serving time for another murder and who subsequently confessed. Deskovic was pardoned and released.

  You may find it inconceivable that a false confession could be extracted. But it happens on a surprisingly regular basis. A campaign group in the United States called the Innocence Project proposes that false confessions play a role in almost a quarter of U.S. convictions. Perhaps you think you’re impervious to this kind of manipulation, but you’d be surprised just how easily you could succumb. Recently, Loftus showed that a lack of sleep can cause people to make false confessions after getting students to admit to pressing the wrong button on a computer task, wiping out a week’s worth of data. In fact they hadn’t done any such thing, but half of the students who hadn’t slept the night before the task believed they had a memory of the event, and signed a confession—compared with less than a fifth of those who’d had a good night’s sleep. Tiredness, low IQ, leading questions, all of these things can help convince us to forge a memory of something that never happened.

  These examples reveal something quite extraordinary: Our memories, once formed, are not fixed. Each time we retrieve a memory, we strengthen the neural pathways that have created it, and in doing so, reinforce and consolidate that memory so that it becomes lodged more permanently in our minds. But for a short time during this retrieval process, our memory becomes malleable—we are able to reshape it and sometimes contaminate it.

  I wondered, Was this the secret behind Bob’s incredible memory? Was there something special about the way he retrieved memories that allowed him to strengthen and consolidate them more accurately, and more permanently, than the rest of us?

  * * *

  “It was Billy Mayer,” Bob was saying. “They thought he was involved with a girl called Katrina Young. His wife had left him at the time and they became friends and that’s where the scandal came from. But there’s never been any proof that it was true. People looked into it, but no one proved they were seeing each other. He wasn’t seeing her, but it was pretty bad for the town—”

  I must have looked puzzled because he stops mid-sentence.

  “I’m sorry, sometimes I have to think about what I’m saying.” He laughs.

  It turns out that Bob is talking about Holland College, a whole community based around a school basketball team called the Golden Knights—a powerhouse in collegiate sports that has played in several championships and boasts numerous high-profile sportsmen such as Otis Pooky and Isaac Moseley. Bob is the Knights’ biggest fan, because the team—in fact the whole community—exists only in his imagination.15

  It started when he was young. Bob decided to create his own imaginary basketball team. Each of the players lived in a place called Tiger Town, and he would play whole basketball games in his mind. The team would compete in championships, and they would win and lose. He thought he would stop, but as he aged, so too did the team. The players worked their way through college, then went off and married and had kids. Nowadays, most have full-time jobs, some have died in tragic accidents, others from old age. “It’s like a fifty-year-long book in my brain,” says Bob.

  If this sounds obsessive to you, it’s because it is. Bob has many obsessions—he’s a self-confessed germophobe, too. “If I drop my keys on the ground I’ll scrub them under hot water,” he admits.

  These obsessions were the vital clue that McGaugh had been searching for. It soon became apparent that other people with highly superior autobiographical memory (or HSAMers as they like to call themselves) had some kind of obsessive compulsive tendencies. For Jill it was her diaries—sometimes her writing was so small and packed so tightly on the page that she couldn’t read it back. For others it was remembering where and when they had first worn a pair of shoes, or cleaning, or watching certain television programs over and over again. Most of them also appeared to enjoy organizing and replaying their memories in some way or another. For instance, when Bob is stuck in traffic, he tries to recall his favorite memories of that particular date—say, every March 1 since he was five. Or he might try to remember what happened every day in June 1969.

  “This obsessiveness was a really intriguing part of the puzzle,” says McGaugh.

  To find out more, he got some of his growing tribe of HSAMers—who are now more than fifty strong—to take part in various tests that stretched other aspects of their minds, such as verbal fluency and ability to memorize faces and names. He wanted to see if they excelled at anything else.

  Unfortunately, the results were inconclusive. Just like Jill, the HSAMers weren’t much better than others their age at any of the tests—they certainly didn’t excel in any. So McGaugh tried another tack. He asked his participants to recall events that happened on each day of the preceding week, as well as a week that occurred one month, one year and ten years earlier. A month later, McGaugh surprised his participants by asking them to recall the same dates, allowing his team to check the consistency of their memories.

  As you might expect, those with HSAM had a far superior memory of days further in the past. What was surprising, though, was that both groups could remember the same quality and quantity of information from the preceding week.16

  That was
enough to convince McGaugh that Bob and the others are no better than you or me at acquiring memories; they are not superior learners—they are simply better at retaining them.

  McGAUGH WANTED MORE CLUES to the puzzle. So next he scanned their brains. There he found some subtle differences in the structure of nine regions, including an enlarged caudate nucleus and putamen. This was particularly intriguing, because both of these areas have also been implicated in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

  Was it a coincidence? The universe is rarely so lazy, said Sherlock Holmes. McGaugh too reckoned there had to be more to it.

  It seems, he says, that the initial process of translating an event into synaptic activity, what’s called “encoding” a memory, in HSAMers is no different from how it works for the rest of us. So too is the mechanism they use to retrieve a memory. The difference between people with HSAM and the rest of us seems to be happening between the encoding and the retrieval process—a point we call consolidation. Perhaps, says McGaugh, their extraordinary powers of memory are rooted in an unconscious rehearsal of their past. Not that Jill and Bob and the others actively try to memorize their past in order to remember it—that would take some considerable dedication. Instead, he believes that they accidentally strengthen their memories by habitually recalling and reflecting upon them.

  “It could be a unique form of OCD,” he says.

  At the time of this writing, McGaugh is eighty-five, and after more than fifty years of memory research is near to retirement. He is a man who is clearly passionate about finding out what gives a handful of people such an incredible memory. I was interested to know why he had dedicated so much time to such a niche talent.

  “These are not small effects,” he says. “Their brain must be working in a different way from those of others.” He wonders whether it was an ability that all humans had early on and then had lost because there was no pressure to retain these memories or whether it was perhaps an abnormal genetic condition that sprang up from nowhere. “Whatever it is, it is quite remarkable,” he says. “How the hell does it happen? That’s the question. And that has always been my quest—to understand this marvelous machinery that we call the brain.”