The lessons of Neurological Wonder Cases:

This excellent hour long 'Radiolab' show about Memory and Forgetting begins with a piece about new research into the formation and recollection of memories, revealing them to be fluid, artistic creations of the mind, reinforced but also irrevocably altered on every remembering.  Memories, it seems, are precarious and unstable things which if left undisturbed are less likely to change, or so the theory goes.  That a mind should eventually give way seems like a horrific waste of accumulated precious experience.

The show ends with a piece about  Clive Wearing “the most severe case of amnesia ever documented.”  Oliver Sacks explains how Clive lost his entire memory after an unusual illness damaged his brain, leaving him unable to remember beyond the past seven seconds.  In the New Yorker article Sacks wrote about the case, he explains how only through playing and conducting music does Clive manage to transcend the terrifying abyss that confronts him at almost every other waking moment.

Clive's wife Deborah writes in her book: 

"The momentum of the music carried Clive from bar to bar. Within the structure of the piece, he was held, as if the staves were tramlines and there was only one way to go. He knew exactly where he was because in every phrase there is context implied, by rhythm, key, melody. It was marvellous to be free. When the music stopped Clive fell through to the lost place."

Although my sister J's episodic memory is not as bad as Clive's, it is clear that her patchwork quilt-making provides the same binding structure for her experience of time as music does for Clive. The  hexagonal pieces of cloth she carefully stitches together combine to form an ever expanding, yet completely stable map of time.  The sight of the patchwork itself, the beauty of the combination of colours and pattern, provide J with a continual affirmation of her own creative agency, normally the thing most decimated by dementia. She is now working on a huge quilt. It grows incredibly slowly, but J is in no hurry.  It is a perfect visual metaphor for Bergon's idea of time as Duration as opposed to the extensional time of episodic events made possible by our short term memory.


Another of Oliver Sacks's cases, Jimmie 'The Lost Mariner', featured in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" also suffers from continual total amnesia.  When he is admitted to the Home where Sacks works he seems to be completely lost to the present, stuck in 1945, the moment his memory cuts out, unable to exist in the present. Yet during the 9 years Sacks observed him in the care home, during which time he learnt to garden among other things, he seemed to undergo an unlikely transformation which ran counter to his hopeless clinical diagnosis. 


"...neuropsychologically, he has not changed in the least... But humanly, spiritually, he is at times a different man altogether- no longer fluttering, restless, bored, and lost, but deeply attentive to the beauty and soul of the world, rich in all the Kierkegaardian categories - the aesthetic the moral, the religious, the dramatic...  Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov's or dementia...however great the organic damage... there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirt; and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation."  (p.37)