Patient AJ

I

There is a 41 year old California woman, administrative assistant, known in medical records as “AJ,” who remembers almost all days of her life since she was eleven. “My memory flows like a movie: it never stops and it's uncontrollable”, says AJ.

She remembers that at 12:34 p.m. of Sunday August 3, 1986, a boy she liked called her on the phone. She remembers what happened to Murphy Brown on December 12, 1988. And also that March 28, 1992, he had lunch with her father in The Beverly Hills Hotel.

She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store, her emotions and the weather. She practically keeps every day in her memory. She almost never is left without answer to any question about the past.

Throughout the years, there has been a handful of people with a memory out of the ordinary. It's said that Kim Peek, the 56 year old sage who inspired the film Rain Man, has memorized around 12 000 books (he takes between 8 and 10 seconds to read a page). “S,” a Russian journalist, studied for three decades by his compatriot neuropsicologist Alexander Luria, could remember incredibly long strings of words, numbers and meaningless syllables years after hearing them. However, AJ is unique. Her extraordinary memory isn't of data or ciphers, but about her own life.

Indeed, her endless memory about autobiographical details is unprecedented, and is so hard to understand that James McGaugh, Elizabeth Parker and Larry Cahill, neuroscientists from the University of California, Irvine, who have studied her for the last seven years, had to coin a new medical term to comprise and describe her attributes: hypermnesic syndrome.

II

AJ remembers when she first noticed that her memory wasn't like the others.

She was in seventh grade, and studied for final exams. “I wasn't happy because I hated school”, she says. Her mother helped with homework, but her mind digressed. “I started to think about last year, when I studied sixth grade and how I liked sixth grade. But I started to realize that I could remember the precise date and exactly what I was doing a year before”. At first she didn't pay much attention to it. But a few weeks later, when she was playing with a friend, she remembered that they had also spent the day together exactly a year before.

“Every year provokes a specific feeling; every season of the year too. Spring 1981 creates a completely different sensation than Winter 1981”, she points out. Dates are to AJ like the madeleines that threw the mind of Marcel Proust to the past in her work In Search of Lost Time. The mere mention of a date makes her remember involuntarily. “Have you noticed how a scent transports you to the past? I'm like 10 levels deeper and I remember with much more intensity than that”.

It would seem that having a memory like AJ's would make life characteristically different (and better). Our culture floods us with new information, and yet, very few of it is captured and organized in a way that it can be recovered later. What would it mean to know all that knowledge down pt, which would be lost otherwise? Would it make us more convincing, would we have more confidence in ourselves? Would it turn us, in some fundamental sense, smarter? If experience is mostly the sum of our memories, and wisdom is the sum of experience, having a better memory would imply knowing not only more about the world, but about ourselves. How many useful ideas have stopped being conceived and how many connections have not been established due to the limitations of our memory?

III

The dream that AJ incarnates, the perfection of memory, has been with us since at least the 5th century BC, as well as the invention of the technique known as the “art of memory” by the greek poet Simonides of Ceos.

Simonides was the only survivor in the catastrophic collapse of a ceiling during a feast celebrated in Thessaly. According to Cicero, who wrote an account of the incident four centuries later, the bodies were so destroyed that it was imposible to recognize them. But Simonides could close his eyes to the chaos and see in his mind every single one of the guests in their chairs around the table. He had discovered the effective technique known as the method of places. If we can convert whatever it is that we try to remember in vivid mental images, and then we order them in a sort of imaginary architectural space, known as memory palace, memories can become almost indelible.

It is said that Peter of Ravenna, noted Italian jurist and the author of a famous 15th century book about memory, had applied the method of places to memorize the Bible, all Italian law books existent until then, 200 of Cicero's speeches and 1000 of Ovid's verses. For pleasure, he reread books that he had stored in his memory palaces. He wrote the following: “I can say with truth that, when I abandoned my country to visit as a pilgrim the cities of Italy, I carried with me everything I possesed”.

IV

It is hard to imagine what it must have been to live in a culture before the advent of the printed book or before being able to carry a pen and paper to take notes. “In a world of few books, and in which they were found primarily in communal libraries, every person had to remember their information, since they couldn't depend on the continuous access to specific material”, points out Mary Carruthers, author of The Book of Memory, a study about the function of memory techniques in medieval culture.

“People in Antiquity and the Middle Ages felt great admiration for memory. They describe their greatest geniuses as people of superior memory”. The 13th century theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, was famous for having drafted his entire Summa Theologica in his head and having dictated it from memory relying on barely a few notes. A good memory was seen as the greatest of virtues, since it represented the internalization of an universe of external knowledge. In reality, a common theme in the lives of saints is that they had extraordinary memory.

After Simonides' discovery, the art of memory was codified with a broad set of rules and instructions by people like Cicero and Quintilian, as well as in countless medieval treatises about it. Students were taught not only what to remember, but techniques to do so. In fact, in many cultures there are old traditions to train memory. The Jewish Talmud, written based on mnemotechniques (techniques to retain memories) was transmitted orally for centuries. Quranic memorization is still considered a supreme achievement within Muslim devotees. The traditional griots of Western Africa and the Slavic bards of the south can narrate colossal epics completely from memory.

However, during the past millenium, many of us have suffered a deep change. Little by little we have replaced our internal memory with what psicologists call external memory, a technological auxiliaries superstructure that we have invented with the purpose of not having to save information in our brains. One could say that we went from remembering everything to remember very little. We have photographies to recall our experiences, calendars to stay on top of our schedules, books and now the internet to store our common knowledge. What have been the implications of these external sources of memory for ourselves and for our society? Have we lost something?

V

To complement the memories in her mind, AJ also stores a treasure of external memories. Besides the detailed journal she writes since she was a child, she possesses a video library of almost one thousand tapes copied from television, a trunk full of radio recordings and a “research library” consisting of 50 notebooks filled with data she has found in the Internet and is related with the events that she keeps in her memory. “I simply want to keep it all”, she claims.

Preserving the past has become in the central compulsion in AJ's life. “When I make my hair with the air dryer in the morning, I think about what day it is. And to entertain myself, I mentally go through that day during the past 20 years”.

AJ says that the oldest memories saved in her unique memory go back to the moving from New Jersey to California, when she barely was eight years old. Life in New Jersey had been comfortable and familiar; in California it was unfamiliar and strange. She understood for the first time that growing and moving forward meant, necessarily, to forget and leave things behind. “Since I hate change so much, after that it was like if I wanted to catch it all. Beacause I know that, in the long term, nothing will be the same”, she expresses.

K. Anders Ericsson, psicology professor from the Florida State University, believes that, after all, perhaps AJ isn't so different from the rest of us. After the official announcement of AJ's attributes in the Neurocase magazine, Ericsson proposed that what needs to be explained about AJ isn't an exceptional unprecedented innate memory, but her extraordinary obssesion for the past. People always remember what is important to him. Baseball fans have an enciclopedic knowledge of statistics, chessmasters often recite complex plays that happened years ago, actos can recall scripts a lot of time after having played them. Everyone has memory for something. Ericsson considers that if everyone cared about clinging to the past as much as AJ, the feat of memorizing our lives would be well into our reach.

I mention this theory to AJ, and her anger is visible. “The only thing I want is to call him over the phone and yell at him. If I spent so much time memorizing my life, then I would really be a boring person —she says—. I don't sit around memorizing it. I simply know it”.

VI

Remembering everything is to AJ an exasperating and solitary experience at once.

“I remember the good things, which is very recomforting. But also the bad things, as well as all the bad choices —she says—. And I really don't give myself a break. There are so many forks in the road, moments in which you have to decide, and years later I keep punishing myself because of it. I don't forgive many things to myself. Your memory is like in order to protect you. I simply feel that it has not protected me. I would love to be an ordinary person for five minutes and not have all these memories in my head. Most people say that what I have is a gift —remarks AJ—, but I call it a burden”.

VII

The crux of the nervous system consists in obtaining a meaning of what is happening and what is about to happen, in the hope that we can respond in the best possible way. Our brain is fundamentally a prediction machine, and to function it has to find order in the chaos of possible memories. It is not necessary for most things that go through our brain to be remembered beyond what is necessary to think on them.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has elaborated a taxonomy of forgetfulness to catalogue what he calls The Seven Sins of Memory. The sin of absent-mindedness: Yo-Yo Ma forgets his chelo valorated in 2.5 million dollars in the seat of a taxi. The politician that, during a speech, forgets a word that he was about to say, falls into the sin of blocking. The Vietnam veteran, still tormented by the battlefield, commits the sin of persistence.

Although according to Schacter we curse these failures of memory almost daily, it's only because we don't see the benefits they bring. Each sin is actually the other side of a virtue: “A price to pay for procedures and functions that serve us well in many ways. There are good evolutionary justifications of why our memories fail us in the ways they do. If everything we see, smell, hear or think was immediatly stored in the great database that is our long-term memory, we would drown in unimportant information”.

In his short story “Funes the Memorious”, Jorge Luis Borges describes a man traumatized for his inability to forget. He remembers all details of his life, but can't distinguish between the trivial and the relevant. He can't establish priorities, nor generalize. Funes “was almost incapable of general, platonic ideas”. Perhaps, as Borges concludes, it is to forget, not to remember, the essence of what makes us humans: “To think is to forget”.

VIII

To age, too, is to forget.

It's not surprising that people have searched since a long time ago substances that could stop the tide of forgetfulness that comes with age. The franciscan Bernard de Lavinheta wrote in the beginnings of the 16th century: “The artificial memory is double: the first part consists of medicines and cataplasmas”. The second, of course, is the art of memory, which Lavinheta considered at the same time the safest and most effective method —since medicines for memory sometimes have the unfortunate secondary effect of “drying the brain”. Currently, Ginkgo biloba is sold as a complement without a prescription, or it is added to fruit shakes and “healthy” drinks, even without conclusive data to show it reinforces memory.

In the last few decades, pharmaceutical companies have intensified the search to challenge new heights. Armed with an advanced understanding of the molecular foundations of memory, they have seeked to create new drugs that amplify the natural capacity of the brain to remember. In the last few years, at least three companies have been formed with the manifest goal of inventing drugs for memory. One of those companies tries to create a class of molecules known as ampakines, which ease the transmission of the glutamate neurotransmitter, which is one of the main excitatory substances transmitted through the synapses between neurones. By amplifying its effects, the company hopes to improve the basic capacity of the brain to form and recover memories. By administering to mature rats, an ampakine managed to completely revert the damage of the cellular mechanism of memory related to age.

All of this poses disturbing ethical questions. Would we choose to live in a society in which people had infinitely better memories? Actually, what would it mean to have a superior memory? Would it mean to remember things only as they happened, free from the modifications and exagerations created naturally by our minds? Would it mean to have a memory que olvida los traumas? Would it mean to have a memory that only remembers that which we wish to rmember? Would it mean, perhaps, to become AJ? ▯