Memory and Forgetting

Latif Nasser

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Hey, it's Latif. I have now worked here so long that I sometimes forget about entire episodes, and it feels especially ironic that I forgot about this one. Memory and forgetting from 2007 on. Relistening. It was so good that I'm kind of shocked that I did forget it.

The reason it came up recently is that one of our producers is working on a story about something extraordinary and surprising. She found out about her own brain and memory. I want to say more, but I can't. The episode will come out soon. It's super fascinating.

I cannot wait to share it with you. Anyway, as she was reporting, she dug up this episode, which we're going to play for you now. It is as classic radio lab as it gets. It has cow brains, Oliver Sacks, a 1967 Chevy Nova, everything you could possibly want in a podcast episode, obviously. Okay, so listen to this.

Dig it. And when the new episode comes out, don't forget that you remembered it here first. Wait, you're listening. Okay, all right. Okay.

All right. You're listening. You're listening to Radio lab. Radio lab WNY.

Rewind.

This is Radio lab. I'm Jad Abu Murad. And I'm Robert Krillwich. And today our program is about memory. Oh, my God.

Hey, we're the radio people. Yeah. Please. Do you want to see the furniture? I think most people think about memory.

Kind of like what we're interested in is a filing cabinet. A file cabinet in your brain. I'm looking for a fairly large capacity. This is traditional style. Something happens in your life.

This is real wood. Yeah. This is real wooden files. You file it away. Oh, this is pretty good.

Yeah. Then later, when you want to remember something, you flip back through the files and you file. There's the one. Yeah. You pick it up.

Oh, yes, I recall. And there it is. That's the memory. Can you lock it? Yes.

May I have the key? Sure. Sometimes you forget where you filed it. Let me see if I can. But it's there.

I can't. Somewhere, however, when we asked scientists about this analogy, they pretty much all said, no, no, the filing cabinet analogy was just completely wrong, period. Well, maybe that's because your metaphor is a little outdated. Frankly, I think of memory as more like a. More like a hard drive.

Here we are about to go into b and h. You might find at a tech store.

So much gear. Can you show me your hard drives? Sure. Like your brain is basically a biological disk drive. This little one is 320gb.

How big is big these days for a hard drive? In everything you do, up to two terabytes, everything you see. Could I put all the images I've ever seen in my life? Could it go onto this hard drive? Somehow all that experience gets stored in your head in some kind of neural code.

Digital information is stored in zeros and ones. Then later, when you want to go back to it, you just find. Find the right file read now, call it right up, and there it is on your computer screen. Your memory just as you left it. The way you put it in, the way you take it out, it's all the same.

Never changes. Never changes. Zeros and ones. But again, if you ask scientists about this analogy, they'll tell you, nope, no, wrong. Memory isn't like that.

Memory is not an inert stack of, you know, zeros and ones. Malfunction system is shutting down. Well, if neither of those metaphors are an apt description of memory, then how should we think about memory? Well, maybe memory is more creative than that. Creative, yes.

Yep. On a literal level, it's an act of creation. Yeah, exactly. We're reconstructing those memories. Construction.

Construction. Maybe it's more like painting or sculpture. Everyone's constantly their own artist. We take bits and pieces of experience. Some things get sharpened, other things leveled and infused with imagination.

And out of that, construct, construction, construct what feels like a recollection. It's a beautiful process. It's unbelievable.

Let's begin as simply as we can. What is a memory? Where do you find a memory? Where do you go to find it? There's a scientist we met, Joe Ledoux, who works at NYU, who started looking when he was very young in the most obvious place.

As a child, I worked in my father's meat market. And the way the cows were slaughtered in those primitive days was with a. 22 rifle. They'd shoot him in the head. Shoot him in the head?

Yeah. My job was to clean out the. Clean the brains. This makes a convenient beginning to the story because perhaps the texture of the brain is very fun to play with. While the young Madou had his fingers in the cow's brain.

You stick your fingers in there and had the sense that I was reaching into the cow's soul. Maybe he was also thinking, where in that mess are the cow's memories, these rough membranes over it, and just strip it. Can I touch a memory? Can I pinch it between my fingers? One bullet.

One bullet. One tiny little bullet. And my job was to go in and find it and remove it, because if you were eating rains, you didn't want to chomp down on lead. In any case, Ledoux developed a thing for brains, and many years later, in college, he'd get another chance taking courses in psychology. A professor of his asked him to come into the lab studying the brain mechanism and work on rat brains and no bullets involved.

This time, he really would be searching for memories. And I got hooked on it.

You with me? Yep. All right, so it was the sixties, right? Ledoux was in school, and it was an interesting time for the field he was about to enter. Scientists had just discovered this drug.

They found that if you give this particular drug to. I think it was probably done in goldfish first. Yeah. Give it to a goldfish, squirt a little in the tank into the water. Suddenly the goldfish can't make a memory.

After a goldfish has learned something, they'll swim around, have all kinds of experiences, but later remember nothing. They won't form a long term memory for it. What does a goldfish learn? I actually have no idea, but apparently they do learn stuff, except when they have this drug in their system, in which case they'll learn stuff and forget it immediately. And the implications of this were huge.

Oh, yeah. According to science writer Joan Allaire, absolutely. Because now, for the first time, scientists could say that a memory, well, it's a real thing. It's a physical thing. It's not simply an idea.

It's a physical trace left in your brain, a trace made largely of proteins. You know, proteins are the building blocks of memory. Well, how do they know that? No, because of that drug called anisomycin, the amnesia inducing one. What it does is target proteins.

It prevents new proteins from being formed. It busts them up. And that means what exactly? Well, no proteins, no memory. Well, let me give you an example of how all this works.

And this is something Ledoux ended up doing after college. The methodology. Can we start there? Sure. He would take a rat, put it in a box, then play it at tone, just a 5 khz, pure tone, sort of like, boop.

Stuff like that? Yeah. Now, imagine you're this rat. Your entire world is in this box, and suddenly, a sound, as if from God. And then the sound stops, and you're like, what was that?

Ow. Hey. He shocked me on my feet. The shock is, you know, a mild electric shock. I mean, it's less than getting static electricity.

This guy who works in Ledoux's lab. Hi, I'm David Bush. He actually demonstrated it for me. All right, so what? Or on me.

What I'm gonna do is have you put your fingers on there. Okay. He made me touch the bottom of the cage. I'm putting my fingers on the bottom of the cage. I'm a little scared.

Yeah, yeah. It's really not that bad. It's like static electricity, really? How? If you're you, if you're a rat, it might be a whole other thing, even for a rat.

But what's the point? Why are we doing this? Oh, well, they're trying to make the rat form a memory. Oh. And here's how we now know that that works from the rat's perspective.

The moment it hears the tone and then feels the shock inside its head, a bunch of neurons start to build a connection. Whenever you create a memory, it's an act of cellular construction. What we're talking about now, associative memories, associations between two things in the outside world, between. And those two events have to somehow be connected. It's as if you're building a bridge over a chasm.

And that connection, well, that's basically a memory. A memory is a structure that connects one brain cell to another. So the next time that the rat hears that damn tone, since inside its brain tone brain cells are physically connected to shock brain cells, it's gonna know that after this comes this. And so instead of just listening passively, it's gonna freeze. The back is hunched, and they're just frozen solid, bracing itself for what is about to happen exactly.

When Ledoux and his team see the rat freeze like that, they know it is in the midst of remembering. They'll do that the rest of their life. However, if you inject a chemical into the brain that prevents these neurons from building this new architecture that a new member requires, the rat will never form a memory because its neurons are prevented from forming all these new proteins, which a new memory requires. And so, whatever the rat was doing during the injection, it'll never remember. Play at the noise, and then shock it, and then play at the noise, and then shock it, and then play at the noise, and then shock it.

And the rat never learned. It'd be like, hey, what's that, chow? Ooh. What's that, chow? Ooh, cool.

What's that, chow? Perpetually surprised by the shock. So the basic rule is that if you get to the memory while it's being made, you can bust it up by inserting this drug. So the memory never is actually formed, right? Never committed to memory.

But if the memory gets made and the protein bridge is there in your mind, it's built and built for all time. So if you have the memory in there, then you cannot erase it. Yes. It's about timing. If you get there first, you can erase it.

But if you get there after, no. Okay. And that's what everyone thought until 2001. Day Ledoux was in his office and a guy walks in the door. The person who walked through the door that day is Kareem Nader.

Kareem Nader. I would often go into Joe's lab and just tell him ideas and stuff. This is Kareem. He's a postdoc in the lab. I went into Joe's office and said, joe, like, what do you think would happen if.

What do you think would happen if instead of giving the drug while the rat was making the memory, what if way after the fact, we gave it the drug while it was remembering the memory? You remembered something. Could we mess with the memory then? I just thought, wouldn't it be cool if that happened? I said, well, that'll never work.

He said, that's never gonna work. Don't waste our money. It was just a very naive question. Yeah. I mean, because the memory's already there, right?

You can't erase a memory that is already there. I mean, have you ever seen that movie eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind? No. No. Well, that's essentially what it was proposing.

Yeah. I mean, it was crazy. Here at Lacuna, we have perfected a safe, effective technique for the focused erasure of troubling memories. In this movie, Jim Carrey has all these memories he wants to get rid of. I'm here to erase Clementine Christians.

So he goes to this company that. Good morning, Lacuna performs the service. How are you today, Mister Baines? And so they have him in this room, comfortable. Please try to focus on the memories.

And he's retrieving all these memories. This is the day we met. Hi there. Hi, I'm Clementine. And each time he retrieves one, I'm Joel.

They zap his brain. Got it. I love you. Got it. Could we zap a memory that was already there?

Could we go in and erase old memories. That was Kareem's question. I was just looking to do something conceptually challenging, just kind of fun. Right. And just out there.

Joe thought he was crazy. I didn't think the experiment was gonna work. And he said, okay. So he went away and he did the experiment without telling me. A couple months later, nadir walks back in the door.

Walked in the door. He said, joe, like, this is really crazy. But it actually worked. It worked. Cream said he took a rap, played it tone, give him a tone.

And give him the mild chalk to the feet so it could form a memory, tested it just to make sure. And sure enough, when it heard the tone, it froze. Yeah. Which means it had the memory. Good.

Then he waited a long time. 60 days. 60 days, yeah. Two months later, he played the rat the tone. And as its frozen, thinking, oh, no.

Oh, no, no. I know what's about to happen. Right at that moment, while it was remembering, he gave it the drug. And then the next day, we just put them back into the box, and we just gave them some tones to see how afraid they were of the tones and the ones that got the drug. They behave as if the tones.

Doesn't mean that they're going to get zapped anymore. All of a sudden, the rat had been sent back to square one. Now it was like, ooh, what's that? Ow. Memory was gone.

There's no memory. No memory at all? No. That was the shocking result of the Ladun Adair experiment. That's Jonah again.

The rat is already terrified of the shock, but if you inject the chemical, as the rat is remembering what the sound means, the memory disappears. It's as if the memory had never been there in the first place. Really? Yeah. Joe looked at me and he just looked very surprised.

What exactly did you say to him? You know, holy bleep. Take a look at this, because it's so bleep crazy. It took me a while to really kind of believe that it was all true. Plus, Joe and others had a concern.

Maybe this drug isn't erasing a memory. Maybe it's just giving the rat brain damage and erasing everything. So we designed an experiment that would test the specificity of these effects. He wondered, could he pinpoint and extract one single memory of many? So in his latest study, what he did was he taught the rat to be scared of two tones, not just one.

So one's like a. And the other one's pips, like repeating sounds of a pure tone. And he teaches the rat to be afraid of both of these tones. Each one results in a shape. Only this time, when he plays the tones 45 days later, he picks just one of them.

Maybe, for instance, this one to pair with the drug. And then the next day, you test both, and only the one that was paired with the drug is affected. So you erase tone one but not tone two. Exactly. So do re mi.

You can just erase re. That would be the idea. Wow. That really is eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. Well, that movie came out about two years after we published the study that really got all this going.

Do you think they stole from you? I don't think they stole, but maybe they were thinking along these lines, and they. They must have read it and been like, oh, my God.

There was a write up in the science Times, and we proposed this would be a treatment for PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. People who go to war or have been through trauma, people haunted by really bad memories, they just can't escape the thoughts and memories they keep reliving. How would that work in a therapy situation, though? Suppose you have a Holocaust victim who's lived for 50 years with these memories, and, you know, you would say, well, let's talk about what went on in the camp and the day you saw Mary in the line to go to the chambers. You say, close your eyes and just imagine.

Relive it. And right as you're talking about it, you swallow a pill. Yeah, more or less. And so, in fact, we've done that. They've done that.

They have. Kareem Nader now works at McGill University in Montreal, and he has teamed up with a clinical psychologist to try this on people. And it seems that when you give this drug as a person is remembering or reliving a traumatic event, the memory is eroded somewhat. The next time they think about it, it's not quite as painful. One woman, she had been raped as a child by a doctor.

And then when she told her mother, her mother said she was making up stories. Wow. Apparently, she never spoke to anyone about this when she used to get undressed in a jar in front of her husband. Wow. And so she came in to the clinic.

He says she took the drug while thinking about the trauma. And then a week later, she told the story again, and this time, it wasn't nearly as hard. She improved dramatically to the point where she was telling the story on tv. On tv. Wow.

So she went from telling no one about this, including herself, to being so open that she could tell thousands of people. Yeah. She just felt that the emotional part was no longer overwhelming her. Some ethicists say that it's wrong to mess with memory, but, you know, that's what therapy is, too. It's a process of changing your evaluation of situation, learning new things, storing new things.

At one point, she said, you know, we've given her back herself. Hmm. I know that she feels better, but there's something slightly creepy about this, that she feels better because something is now missing in her, something that troubled her. But she's been, in a way, a part of her has been deleted. I mean, look, I think of myself, really.

I'm Robert Crowitch, and I'm a certain age, but really what I am is I'm a string of memories. Yeah. I mean, that is as close to a way of describing the real me as I can find. I own those memories and they define me. But you're saying that you can come to me when I'm already formed, when I'm already there.

You can give me a shot, and you can fundamentally change me. There's an assumption in what you're saying which is actually kind of wrong. There really is anything like a real memory. I mean, think about it. If you can erase a memory while it's being created, that's how we started.

And now we learn you can erase a memory while it's being remembered using the same drug. What that really means is that every time you are remembering something, you're actually recreating it. That's the only reason the drug works. And so if you're recreating it each time, then each time you're remembering something, it's a brand new memory. Well, no, but I've always kind of assumed that underneath all this remembering, there's some kind of special, absolutely original memory locked in a vault somehow.

No, that is the crazy implication of this experiment. The act of remembering. On a literal level, it's an act of creation. Every memory is rebuilt anew every time you remember it. And not only is it an act of creation, as Jonah says, Karim would say, it's an act of imagination.

Every time you remember something, you're changing the memory a little bit. We're always changing the memory slightly. You think you're remembering something that took place 30 years ago. Actually, what you're remembering is that memory reinterpreted in the light of today, in the light of now. So does that mean that there's no such thing as a memory for all time that hides in a secret vault somewhere?

That all you've got is the most recent recollection of the experience yes. Well, then how do I know that any memory is verifiably true? You don't. You don't. And one of the ironies of this research is that the more you remember something, in a sense, the less accurate it becomes, the more it becomes about you, and the less it becomes about what actually happened.

So let's do something. Imagine a couple in love, and it's their first kiss. He kisses her, and she kisses him back. She remembers the kiss, of course, and he remembers the kiss, of course, as they go through the rest of their romance and the next 36 years together, the kiss will essentially become replaced by two independently re embroidered and increasingly dishonest kisses. Assuming they think about the kiss enough.

That's kind of what the theory implies. But certainly there's gotta be somewhere between the man and the woman. There's gotta be some true kiss. Or is that kiss just gone? That true kiss vanished the minute their lips separated.

As soon as reality happens, it begins diverging in all our different brains on a very synaptic level. Here's where you cue the really sad music.

They just grow slowly farther and farther apart.

Let me do it a different way. Let's suppose that Joan and Bob kiss, and then they part. It's a great kiss, and then they never think about it again. I mean, it was a great kiss in the moment, but they never think about it. Yeah.

30 years later, Bob is in a railroad station. Joan comes out of a train. Their eyes meet. Bob sees. Joan sees her eyes, and remembers suddenly that kiss.

That memory is more honest than if he'd been thinking about the kiss every day of his life since. Oh, you know, that's even sadder, you know, but it's true. That's what scientists say. Absolutely. We had a conference last week, and Yadin Dudai was here, and he proposed that the safest memory, a memory that's uncontaminable, is one that exists in a patient with amnesia.

What I meant is that there is a sort of a paradox. This is Yadin. This is Yadin. I'm a professor in Israel. Reporter Ann Hepperman tracked him down for us.

Intuitively, you think if you use a memory, you know, you know better because you remember it better. You recall it better, you know the details better, and so on and so on. But this is not what science shows. If you have a memory, the more you use it, the more you are likely to change it. So if you never use your memory, it's secure.

So taking it a bit farther, the safest memories are the memories which are in the brain of people who cannot remember.

Okay, well, I guess we should go to break now. Oh, yes. And if you need more information or you want to hear anything again, one word. Radiolab.org dot Radiolab will continue in a moment. Radiolab is supported by Babbel.

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This is Radio lab. I'm Jad Abunran. And I'm Robert Krillwich. And today on Radiolab, we're looking at memory and forgetting. Forgetting, right, forgetting.

And we're looking at how these two processes, remembering and forgetting, are intertwined. And writer Andre Kudrescu has an idea about this. The other day, a friend of mine was explaining how she had to move these pixels around her computer and had to add 20 megabytes of memory to handle the operation. I had the disquieting thought that all this memory she was adding had to come from somewhere. Maybe it was coming from me because I couldn't remember a thing that day.

And then it became blindingly obvious. All the memory that everybody keeps adding to their computers comes from people. Nobody can remember a damn thing. Every time somebody adds memory to their machine, thousands of people forget everything they knew. Americans are singularly devoid of memory these days.

We don't remember where we came from, who raised us when our wars used to be, what happened last year, last month, or even last week. Schoolchildren remember practically nothing. I take the greyhound bus every week, and I swear half the people on there don't know where they got on or where they're supposed to get off. The explanation is computer companies are stealing human memory to stuff their hard drives. Greyhound, I believe, has some kind of contract at IBM to steal the memory of everyone riding the bus.

They are probably connected by a cable or something. Every hundred miles, poof, another 500 megabytes gets sucked out of the passengers brains. The computers thirst for memory is bottomless. The more they suck, the more they need. Eventually, we'll all be walking around with a glazed look in our eyes, trying to figure out who it is we live with.

And then we'll forget our names and addresses, and we'll just be milling around trying to remember them. The only thing visible about us will be these cables sticking out of our behind, feeding the scraps of our memory to computer central somewhere in oblivion, USA. I think it's time for all these memory sucking companies to start some kind of system to feed and shelter us when we forget how to eat, walk, and sleep.

Andrei Kudrescu with an essay from the book 101 damnations. Anyways. ROBERT yes, mon amour. Andre he's trying to make a point about, you know, historical amnesia in America and whatever. But what if we were to take what he's saying literally like we were, and explore it like we know you can subtract a memory, but what if you could add a memory, like actually add a memory in back into a brain?

What do you mean by add memory? Implant a false memory count. Okay. Ten 987-65-4321 my name is Elizabeth Loftus. I'm on the faculty at the University of California, Irvine.

Depending on who you talk to, Elizabeth Loftus is either a hero or doctor evil. Her research, which goes back more than two decades, has completely changed how we think about memory. Well, for many I spoke with her recently about it. For many years, I and other psychologists were doing experiments in which we distorted the memories of events that people had actually experienced. So we would take somebody who'd seen a simulated auto accident or a simulated crime, and we would alter the details in their memory report.

We'd make people believe that they saw a car go through a stop sign instead of a yield sign. And we found it was not that hard to alter people's memories of these previously experienced events. But more recently, we've gone even further and shown that you can plant entirely false memories into the minds of people, memories for things that didn't happen. Like what? Well, we planted a memory that when you were about five or six years old, you were lost for an extended period of time in a shopping mall.

You were frightened, you were crying, and ultimately you were rescued. Are you lost by an elderly person. We find your mother and reunited with family. Mommy. There you are.

And how did you implant that memory? We told them that we had talked to their parents and that we'd learned some things that happened to them when they were a child. They basically interview the subjects about their past. They'd say, hey, do you remember that time when you were on the bike and you fell? I wish they were making up.

No, no, no. They would start with a true story. They'd start with true story, and then they'd say, hey, do you remember that time which was true? Remember that other time which was true, and that other time which was true? And somewhere in the middle of all of those true stories, they would slip in the lie, the false made up story about being lost and frightened and crying.

And in that particular study, we found that about a quarter of our subjects fell sway to the suggestion, and they adopted it as their own memory. A quarter of her subjects, when she checked with them later, now had in their head a memory of being lost and then found in the mall that never happened. I would have been the number one guy in that quarter. What is happening in this situation is people take their image of an actual shopping center, actual family members, and they construct an experience out of these bits and pieces. Investigators in this field have made people believe that they had accidents at family weddings, or that they were a victim of a vicious animal attack, or that they nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a lifeguard.

Even with these pretty traumatic ideas, you can make people believe that it happened to them. Actually, we had this very same experience when I was in law school. We had this professor who was a professor of property, and he was doing a lecture, and in the middle of the lecture, and this was not, you know, in any way, we were not prepared for this. All of a sudden, the guy zips into the class, and the very front of the class grabs something from the professor and then runs out. They stole it.

Stole it. I don't even remember what it was, but it happened so suddenly. And Professor Berger said, oh, my God. Did any of you see the curly haired guy? You just sort of threw it in the curly haired guy.

But it turned out that what he called the curly haired guy, when the man came back later to present himself, was not a curly haired guy at all. He was a straight haired guy. So the whole thing was staged. Yeah. We were all eyewitnesses, and we all had been coached inadvertently to see something that wasn't true, and we all saw it.

What I find interesting, though, is why that kind of suggestion works so well on memory. And Kareem Nader, the guy we heard from earlier, scientists, he puts it this way. Suppose you witness a crime and the police ask you some questions later and they say, did you see a red Camaro leave the scene? And you're thinking about. You're thinking about it going, yeah, not, you know, no red Camaro.

No. Didn't see one. But then maybe the policeman asks you again, are you sure you didn't see one? And suddenly you're like. They think, well, maybe there was, maybe I forgot.

You start to question it, because, as he puts it, when you are remembering something, the memory is unstable. The memory comes back up to this unstable state. It's being rebuilt, recreated. And in that moment, someone, without even meaning to, can slide something new in. And so as the memory gets, like, restored with the image of the red Camaro, the next day when the judge asks you, was there a red Camaro there?

From your perspective, it's a real memory. Yeah. But what's so fascinating to me about that phenomenon, assuming it's true, is that the red Camaro that is now in your head is a vivid, Technicolor red Camaro. You can see the light bounce off the hood. It just feels real.

You can taste the air. It's amazing how detailed these things can be. Which is why, when someone contradicts your memory, he says, it didn't happen that way. You're like, yeah, dude, screw you. Well, it feels like a robbery, right?

They're taking it from you. And in fact, this got Elizabeth Loftus in a lot of trouble. Back in the mid eighties. There were a lot of people. I don't know if you remember this, coming forward with repressed memories, like, I was abused by a shaken ishtic cult and perform rituals and whatever, all that stuff.

I remember that. We now know a lot of those memories were imagined. And she says, at the time, she was one of the only people to raise her hand and say, excuse me. And he got her in a lot of trouble. I've never really seen anything like the wrath of hostility.

When I began to write articles and publish on this subject again, it was pretty amazing. The vitriol. What kind of things would they do or say? Oh, that, you know, my life was threatened. Armed guards would have to be hired at universities where I was being asked to speak.

I had the bomb squad at my house on one occasion. One day I was taking an airplane flight, and when the woman sitting in the seat next to me learned who I was, she started to swap me with her newspaper.

And it was kind of hard to extract myself from her because, you know, airplanes are crowded places. You know, the fact of the matter is, memory is malleable, and we might as well face the truth. Well, now, this isn't to say that you could have a repressed memory, and it might. It just might be true. Not all repressed memories are false.

Sure, sure. And in that regard, this next story you're gonna hear, I don't tell you much about it. I'll just tell you that it's about a painter, and it's produced by Nada Perrine.

The first thing you notice in Joe Ando's studio is horses. A big milky one straight ahead, sepia once to the left and right, staring at you like they don't care about you, but they don't mind you. They're really like dreams of horses. I never paint, paint horses that are being manipulated with a bridle or anything. They're mostly just hanging out.

It comforts me to have paintings of horses around. Over the past ten years, the horses have multiplied, and Joe doesn't even know why he keeps painting them. I guess it's kind of like I just kind of tune it in or something. Like you're tuning your guitar, you know, ding ding ding ding ding ding ding into, you know, two strings. Ding.

Resonate, you know? And, you know, ding. It's in tune. In a Manhattan studio surrounded by stacks of these animals, you start forgetting you're in Chelsea. Maybe you're in a stable instead.

Sometimes even the gesso starts to smell like mulch and hay. When Joe got here in the mid eighties, no galleries were offering solo or group shows. And like all the other hundreds of artists in New York, he was struggling. I'd been in New York for about six years, and nothing was happening. And I was beginning to think nothing was going to happen.

And I was, you know, I had a kid and I was married, and so I stopped painting for a few months, which is a long time for me, and I missed it. So I started painting again for myself, you know, after, you know, the dishes were done, all my domestic chores were fulfilled. I'd sit down at the dining table and paint. And what showed up on these canvases were pastures, lush and open. The kind of pastures you'd see on a postcard from somewhere in Wyoming, or in this case, Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Joe grew up.

Well, I can show you some of my paintings.

Me and my buddies, we'd park out here and we'd get high in the evening like this is summer evening, you know. Joe runs his hand through the air in front of a massive painting leaning against the wall. It's of a field at dusk. It's like he's showing me property. And we would trip, and we would contemplate the universe, you know, like, what.

What do you think's those stars? What's back? What's behind them? It's one of those fields with thick grass that's matted, where people might have laid down. There's some trees to lean against, separating the grass and the road.

Our high school sat on Route 66, right on the edge of Tulsa. And, you know, you pull out of school at lunchtime and you take a left, and you could drive right down Route 66 into the heart of Tulsa. And you could take a right, and you could go out to the. There's farmland. You know, this was in the early seventies, and we would, of course, take a ride.

So when Joe stopped trying to paint for anyone else, he drifted backwards into his adolescence. All those breezy, right turns out of the school parking lot. And ultimately, this is what people lined up for. Joe had one show and then another one. Studio visits from private collectors, then calls from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, even sitcom art directors.

All the while, he kept on painting his deserted landscapes. Then, as he describes it, about ten years ago, horses started showing up in my repertoire, so to speak. The pastures weren't empty anymore. They started to draw mares and foals to themselves. Some in the far distance, some so close that they're out of focus.

And then about a year ago, I started painting girls. Joe's first attempt at the human form. The girls are all on their own canvases. They're undressed, stepping out of a darkened space. Some of them look like they're about to say something.

And I'm just following my gut. I'm painting these pictures, and I don't really know why. You know, after a few months, I was sitting back and I was sort of reflecting. I was looking at all these things, and I noticed that they all looked the same. They all look like the same girl.

Looking over all the paintings in the studio. They clearly are the same girl, but in a dozen different angles. She has the look of a 16 year old in 1972. Like my first love kind of thing. Her name was Kay.

It was like my first soulmate. The first. You know, how the first time you feel like you're not alone? She's beautiful. Oval face, almond eyes that look right into you.

And then I remember this moment with her and me and the horse in the car. Joe realized he'd been painting a memory. The fragments of one afternoon 30 years earlier, each ingredient emerging slowly. We were parked in the backseat of my Nova 67 Nova in this pasture. And we were in the back seat, and a horse looked in the window.

It was just like this moment. It was just like, you know, the horse is there, and she's there. And I was in love. I had a beautiful, naked girl with me in the backseat of my car. You know, it just didn't get any better.

I was skipping out of school so I wouldn't have to speak. I wouldn't have to be in class. You know, I was on Easy Street. I probably had $5 in my pocket. You know, enough gas to get home.

I had some cigarettes. I don't know. Why did you break up? What?

I think I cheated on her. I think that's why. No, I think that's what happened. I went to the lake and I did something I shouldn't have, right? You know, in front of somebody she knew.

She moved away to Minnesota for some reason. And she called me one day, and we went out dancing. And we drank beer and danced. And I took her home to the place she was staying. She was staying with some friends in this old house behind an appliance store.

And I dropped her off. And she looked at me like this. Says, aren't you coming in? And I says, no, I have to go see somebody else. I forget her name.

New girlfriend. And she lit a cigarette. Slam the door. And she died in a fire that night. I got a call the next morning.

A car door slams. A girl turns and looks over her shoulder at a guy she won't be seducing that night.

A fragment of a moment frozen in time. I mean, the funny thing is, she was so spirited. If anybody was gonna come back and haunt me, she would. How old were you? Only 21.

How old was she? She was probably 19. That day in the car with this girl and the horse looking in. Joe thinks the memory of that one afternoon in Tulsa might be some sort of post traumatic pleasure syndrome. An echo bounced off Jupiter and caught up with him again.

And then again. They're just paintings, too. They're just color. And these are just excuses for me to make another painting. There's something alluring about Joe Ando's paintings.

They draw you in. Maybe that's why people pay big money for them. But the only thing that anyone who wasn't there in the field with Joe Kay and the horse can do is look from the outside into an impenetrable past that's finished, that memory, that story is self sustaining and whole, looping endlessly in an alternate universe. That's because I don't title these. I don't put it, you know, there's no, there's no, there's no ending, there's no beginning.

Just every day and stir it up again.

Joe Ando has as a new memoir. It's called Jubilee City and it is published by William Morrow. We will continue in a moment. Radiolab is supported by babbel sometimes self improvement can feel like a pretty overwhelming journey. So what if this year you just got a tiny bit better?

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Ready? Mm hmm. This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Aboumrod. And I'm Robert Quilwich.

And on this show we've been talking about memory, remembering and forgetting. Yeah. Yes. And this next story is about the most drastic version of this particular back and forth that I can think of. It just can't get any worse than this.

This is a story of a man named Clive Waring. It was told to me by the famous neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks.

First of all, who was Clive waring when he was. Well, he was a gifted musician and musicologist who was really a pioneer in Renaissance music, especially the music of Orlandus Lassus.

He had a group called the London Lattice Ensemble. This is Deborah, Clive's wife, and in every concert, his signature tune was musica dei Donam. Music the gift of God, boy music the gift of God. That's sort of interesting. Exactly.

And then what happened? Then rather suddenly in March of 85, he became ill. It began, she says, with just a headache. And he often had headaches because he often overworked. So it was nothing out of the ordinary, but it didn't go away.

We called the doctor, and the local doctors pronounced that it was a very bad flu bug. The nature of the illness was not clear, nor its gravity. Yes, on the fifth day of the headache, he was suddenly out of it. Suddenly he couldn't remember things. He didn't know my name, didn't know his home address.

When the diagnosis was made of a herpes encephalitis, the damage had been done. He was left, says Oliver. But the most severe amnesia ever documented.

This is a man who, at least when things were very severe, would forget something in the blink of an eyelid. It's very hard to imagine what this must have been like. His wife, Deborah, wrote about it, though, in a book of her own. And she says his ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired. But he didn't seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink.

The view before the blink, utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back, brought him an entirely new view. Well, every moment is his first waking moment. It's a long time since I've seen anything. My eyes open.

Today for the first time. There is no other moment for Clive except this one. In fact, I can't remember now what was going on this morning or why I was here. I've never seen a thing. This is Clive from a documentary filmed a year after he got sick.

That has no memory for me at all. Anything at all. What the hell's going on? What's wrong with you? You can hear his wife, Deborah, trying for the umpteenth time to explain to him what happened.

I've never seen anyone at all. This is one of the things that's wrong with you. All he can feel is that he's not there, that he's been nowhere. I've been blind the whole time. I've been deaf the whole time.

No sense of touch. You've been conscious, but then the brain hasn't been able to. Not as far as I'm concerned. I mean, conscious actually means the person involved is actually connected with it, isn't it? That hasn't happened.

Not being able to store or everything that you experience is being lost. It's fading away. It's not registering. That's right. It's not making any impact.

It's not leaving a trace or an imprint on the brain. So it happens and then it fades. Proust has a wonderful description of waking up from deep sleep in a hotel room. A strange room. And perhaps feeling confused.

And not. Not knowing where you are, what's around you. Or not even knowing who you are. He says that memory comes like a rope let down from heaven. To draw one out of the abyss of unbeing.

No such rope is available for Clive, but the staff at the hospital tried to help. We put a diary by his bed and we initially wrote in it, you are in St Mary's Hospital, Paddington. It is et cetera, et cetera. And then we encourage Clive to write things down. So he starts to keep a journal.

He is extremely intent on trying to document his state. He is very, very precise. He would look at his watch to see what time was this momentous event occurring of first consciousness. And so he would write down 1006 awake, first time, and then have the same sensation and put 1007 awake, first time. Truly awake, first time.

Ignore the last entry. Now I'm awake. This is the first real awakeness. And so the diaries are, line by line. A succession of astonished awakenings.

People's entries in the diary are rubbish. What does that mean? I have no idea. Did you write that? I've never conscious consciousness at all?

No. They're shame at me now for the first time. But it's. Is it your handwriting? Yes, it is.

But I know nothing about it at all. So how do you think it got there? Kinda. I presume the doctors don't know, but you must. No, I haven't.

I haven't seen the book at all till now. No, I'm. All I've said. No, that's mean. That means I haven't seen it.

I have no knowledge of it at all. That's all. There's no knowledge of that book at all. It's entirely new to me. But you put.

Who would put that, if. I don't know. But no, no. Oh, I haven't. Say.

Use intelligence for mistake. I've read the bloody thing. It seems as about as horrible as anything I could imagine. Yes. Clive gets a sense of deep horror many, many times a day.

Same as death. No difference between day and night. No thoughts at all. No one quite knows what to do with someone with amnesia. I've never seen any human being since I've been ill.

I don't remember sitting down on this chair, for example. They're not mad, they're not retarded. This is precisely like death. Clive has now suffered with this total amnesia for more than 20 years. Can you imagine?

Have one night, 20 years long, with no dream. That's what it's been like. Just like death, in this sense, been totally painless.

And yet somehow, some things have sustained. The love he has for his wife, Deborah remained part of him. But even though he doesn't remember, for example, his children's names, he doesn't remember anything about his immediate past or even his relatively distant past. When Deborah walks into the hospital room and he sees her. What happened?

He gasps, darling. With relief and excitement. And they hug and he kisses her with enormous passion. He has suddenly been rescued from the abyss. There's suddenly something and someone familiar.

I've not seen you at all till now. I've never seen anyone at all till now.

She goes home and the phone is ringing. She's just visited him. Yeah. And she may find. She might find 20 calls on the message machine from a man who doesn't know she's been there.

No, darling, it's live here. It's ten to seven. I haven't spoken to anybody in this place. I know nothing about this case at all. I just want to speak to you.

Please can you come and see me, please, as soon as you possibly can. I don't care if anybody else in the world, just you, please. Please come. 14 minutes later this is Clyde here. I don't want to speak to anyone else.

I want to speak to you, darling. Can you come and see me, please? I haven't seen you yet and I want to. Please come, darling. Bye bye.

Eleven minutes later MisseS Clyde here. I have no idea what's going to go anywhere. You can get to me tonight. Please do come. I just want to see you.

Please come. Please come, darling. It's Clive here. I don't care about anyone else. This is Clive here now, in case you don't recognize my voice.

He does not remember her in every way. He may fail to recognize her. If she just passes, he cannot describe her. He may forget her name, but he does not forget her embrace, her warmth, her love, her kisses, her caring for him.

So the question is, what happened here that he could forget? Everything, it seems, but not her. When I asked Oliver, he referred to an experiment, a particular experiment. Well, this was a famous or infamous experiment done by clappared, who was a french neurologist at the beginning. And this was done at the beginning of the 20th century.

And there was this famous patient who basically had a version of the memory problem that was in the film memento. That's science writer Steven Johnson. Basically, she couldn't remember anything longer than five or ten minutes. It would just disappear. And every day she would go see her doctor and he would greet her and she would say hello and introduce herself and he would say, well, we see each other every day, but she wouldn't remember.

And then one day. This is kind of a funny story, because it's not exactly what you want your doctor doing. One day what he did was he concealed. As he was shaking her hand, he concealed a little thumbtack in his palm and reached and shook her hand and pricked her hand and she recoiled and said, well, you're a terrible doctor. And then the next day, when she came back again and didn't know who he was, didn't recognize him at all, as usual, and said hello, and introduced herself.

And then he reached out to shake her hand and she paused. And she had this instinctive kind of feeling, like there's some kind of threat here. If she had no memory, if she could remember who this guy was, how could she somehow remember this threat? The threat posed by the pinprick in the palm? Well, this is Oliver's notion.

I think memories of pain and joy, I think are sort of primordial. Deep down in the oldest parts of our brains, Oliver thinks there may be a place for the memories that matter the most. And I like the idea of a sort of subcortical safe vault for Clive. Protected in the vault, out of reach from his amnesia, was love for his wife. And one thing more.

Yeah? I'd taken him off the ward to get some peace because he was hypersensitive to noise. And the most peaceful place happened to be the chapel. And we picked up an old hymn book. And for want of anything better to do and because Clive talked jumble most of the time at that stage, I began to sing.

And all of a sudden, like it was the most natural thing in the world, he joined in sing.

I was amazed that he could still read music and sing. Was it a tentative sort of stumbling or just like falling off a log? Full voice, strong, everything? Yep.

And I was so thrilled. Did you want to sing another? Oh, you bet. And another? Yeah, absolutely.

And if he could do that, she wondered, well, what else could he do? We even brought his choir in, the one he used to conduct in London to the hospital chapel. I had a hunch that if we stood clive in front of them with a piece of music, he would be able to conduct. And it happened just as I'd hoped. His singers were flabbergasted.

There was their old conductor bringing them in completely and utterly himself. And almost the instant it was over, it was over. He had no memory of what he'd just done. In fact, later on she showed him a tape of that very performance. What would you say if I told you you conducted the lassos ensemble last week?

That's hilarious. I thought you'd say that. That's absolutely hysterical. I know. Not at all.

Do you want me to prove it to you?

This is the strangest thing I've ever seen. On the screen right in front of him, there he is on the pedestal, baton in hand, and he's conducting. He is fully in the music, fully himself. So music, in a way, becomes this proustian rope from heaven which will recall him to himself. And no one knows, no one really knows what.

I remember that now, what music does that makes this possible, not just in Clive, but in many others. Maybe it's something about music itself that it's so richly organized that every time you're in a song, you can feel what has been and what's about to be. Maybe Clive was just carried along in the architecture of music.

But when the music stops, he falls out of time. Music gives him a piece of time in which to exist. Out of time, out of memory, out of himself. There's two things left. There's love and there's the joy of music.

Everything else is gone. But for some reason, those stay thanks to Deborah Waring. She's written a book about Clive called Forever a memoir of love and amnesia. Thanks also once again to Oliver Sacks, who's included a piece about Clive in his new book on music in memory called Musicophilia. And thanks to Oudin associates, producers of the 1986 Jonathan Miller documentary Equinox, prisoner of consciousness.

That's our show for today. And never fear if you didn't absorb everything you just said, because you can always go to our website, radiolab.org dot. We will give you links there to any of the books you just mentioned. And, oh, so no, you gotta subscribe to the podcast, right? Yes, radiolab.org dot.

Or go to iTunes. Oh, one more thing home. You can send us an email too, please, radiolabnyc.org. That's the email address. Awesome.

I'm Chad Aboumrad. And I'm Robert Quillwich. And this was Radiolab.

Hey, I'm Liz Landau. I'm calling you from Washington, DC. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abimrod and edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co hosts.

Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, Aketti Foster Keys W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Janasamadam, Matt Keelty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sara Cari, Sarah Sandbach, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hello.

This is your computer hard drive. Thanks also to Trent Walbee, Miyuki ja karanta, Carla Cetaho Murphy. Special thanks to Greg Gasparino, Andy Lancet, Eric John, Vince Gardino, Roderick Bowe, Alan Smith, Sam Damon, Lorraine Madox. Thank you also for Justin Paul, Caroline Moses, Indira Etwarro, Luis Kaftal, Tim Colle, and Crystal Duham. Special thanks to Mandy Shapira at BNB photo video superstore.

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Memory and Forgetting

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Episode Summary

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Episode Chapters

1: Understanding Memory

2: The Malleability of Memory

3: Clive Wearing’s Story

4: The Persistence of Emotional Memory

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