remember [that] a lot—I would say a majority—of our communication became nonverbal, gesture-based,” Jim recalls. “That said, I also recall a ‘word book,’ a spiral notebook one of your therapists helped you develop. She would drill you on the words and add a new word or two every day. I remember your excitement at recognizing a new word as new, and then writing it down. I remember it was an almost terrifyingly small list in the beginning, and being reassured by the therapist that it would get better, so much so that your learning and vocabulary would hit a critical mass, and your vocabulary growth would take off. It did. But I also remember you writing simple letters to family and asking for your word book to help you.”
Here is a passage from a letter I wrote to my mother, shortly after the injury:
I hav to go to mor doctors be case fall lots to hitig head bad head ackes.
Like many other amnesiacs, I was lucky enough to retain some procedural memory. I didn’t completely lose the ability to speak,although my vocabulary was severely limited. I didn’t entirely forget how to sit, stand, or walk, although the partial paralysis on my left side made all those tasks much more difficult. Based on the story about my riding a bicycle on the hospital roof—albeit with help from two burly orderlies—it’s clear that I must have been relatively strong and in good physical condition, which in turn may have helped with my overall recovery.
This is one example of a letter I wrote to my grandparents about six months after my head injury.
Other physical skills were lost. For instance, one nurse noted that I was unable to brush my hair, I was unable to drink from a cup, and I had to relearn how to eat. But I proved particularly adept at mimicking the actions of others. A physical therapist discovered that I could accomplish some physical tasks while watching myself in a mirror (tasks that were beyond me without it), apparently tapping some deep muscle memory.
Like many amnesiacs, I am told I had trouble remembering that I even had a damaged memory. In the early days of my recovery, “you didn’t seem to know that memory was an issue,” Jim recalls, and I had to be frequently reminded of my deficits. “There were times when I had the sense that you knew something was terribly wrong, but that was generally, and perhaps exclusively, when you were being asked to do something that you couldn’t do, or didn’t understand what was being asked of you because you didn’t understand the words being used.”
I have been told that my case is puzzling to scientists. The scope of my memory loss places me among the most severe cases of retrograde amnesia on record. Very few amnesiacs have lost all trace of episodic memory; very few are unable to recall a single life experience. I am unusual, too, in the extent of my recovery. But the mostconfounding part of my story, for scientists, is the lack of visible damage to my brain. I sustained a head injury; of that there is no doubt. But the doctors who examined me after the accident found only faint evidence of palpable injury to my brain itself: on the CT scan I had in the hospital, and on an MRI of my spine that showed a sharply diminished flow of blood in the right vertebral artery, consistent with the partial paralysis on my left side. Those findings are, to this day, the sole direct evidence of physical damage to my brain.
“We always try to relate these conditions to neuroanatomy”: in other words, to trace memory loss to damage in specific areas of the brain, says Larry Squire, a memory scientist at the University of California, San Diego. “And we know what kinds of damage cause what types of conditions. But the cases that are particularly hard to relate to anatomy are head injuries,” because those injuries are random and unpredictable, and the exact location of damage can be hard to pinpoint.
According to Daniel Schacter, the Harvard scientist who studied the
Here is a passage from a letter I wrote to my mother, shortly after the injury:
I hav to go to mor doctors be case fall lots to hitig head bad head ackes.
Like many other amnesiacs, I was lucky enough to retain some procedural memory. I didn’t completely lose the ability to speak,although my vocabulary was severely limited. I didn’t entirely forget how to sit, stand, or walk, although the partial paralysis on my left side made all those tasks much more difficult. Based on the story about my riding a bicycle on the hospital roof—albeit with help from two burly orderlies—it’s clear that I must have been relatively strong and in good physical condition, which in turn may have helped with my overall recovery.
This is one example of a letter I wrote to my grandparents about six months after my head injury.
Other physical skills were lost. For instance, one nurse noted that I was unable to brush my hair, I was unable to drink from a cup, and I had to relearn how to eat. But I proved particularly adept at mimicking the actions of others. A physical therapist discovered that I could accomplish some physical tasks while watching myself in a mirror (tasks that were beyond me without it), apparently tapping some deep muscle memory.
Like many amnesiacs, I am told I had trouble remembering that I even had a damaged memory. In the early days of my recovery, “you didn’t seem to know that memory was an issue,” Jim recalls, and I had to be frequently reminded of my deficits. “There were times when I had the sense that you knew something was terribly wrong, but that was generally, and perhaps exclusively, when you were being asked to do something that you couldn’t do, or didn’t understand what was being asked of you because you didn’t understand the words being used.”
I have been told that my case is puzzling to scientists. The scope of my memory loss places me among the most severe cases of retrograde amnesia on record. Very few amnesiacs have lost all trace of episodic memory; very few are unable to recall a single life experience. I am unusual, too, in the extent of my recovery. But the mostconfounding part of my story, for scientists, is the lack of visible damage to my brain. I sustained a head injury; of that there is no doubt. But the doctors who examined me after the accident found only faint evidence of palpable injury to my brain itself: on the CT scan I had in the hospital, and on an MRI of my spine that showed a sharply diminished flow of blood in the right vertebral artery, consistent with the partial paralysis on my left side. Those findings are, to this day, the sole direct evidence of physical damage to my brain.
“We always try to relate these conditions to neuroanatomy”: in other words, to trace memory loss to damage in specific areas of the brain, says Larry Squire, a memory scientist at the University of California, San Diego. “And we know what kinds of damage cause what types of conditions. But the cases that are particularly hard to relate to anatomy are head injuries,” because those injuries are random and unpredictable, and the exact location of damage can be hard to pinpoint.
According to Daniel Schacter, the Harvard scientist who studied the
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