The Woman Who Can't Forget (4 page)

Perhaps one reason that I remember days so well is that my brain seems to love to organize time. One of the unusual ways it does so, which intrigued the scientists because again it was so unprecedented, is with visuals that I just “see” in my mind. The first of these is a time line of history, which covers not just my lifetime but goes back to the year 1900. I have no idea why this is the case, nor do the scientists. The way I drew this time line for them is as follows:

When they asked me to describe how I saw the time line on several different occasions, I always drew it exactly the same way, with the same set of years and with all of the lines the same range of lengths. I can't think of any reason that it's this particular set of years I see or why I draw some of the lines longer and some shorter. I also have no idea why 1970 is the pivot point at the top left, where the time line switches from horizontal to vertical.

The scientists remarked how counterintuitive it is that the dates start at the right and proceed to the left, like reading Hebrew, and then down rather than up. But to me that's not counterintuitive at all; it's simply the way I see them. They don't know what the significance of this time line is in the way my memory works or why I see history in this fashion. As far as I'm concerned, I can't imagine not seeing the time line in my mind.

That isn't the only visual that took shape in my mind as I grew up. I see single years as circles, as in the diagram below. June is always at the bottom and December always at the top, and the months progress counterclockwise.

Because my memory became so complete, I began to act as the historian in my family and among my friends, regularly reminding people of the dates of events in their lives and “refereeing” disputes about when something happened. “No, it wasn't in July of 1998 that you two went to Italy, that was August of 1996.” “You're both wrong. The date you had that huge fight was Saturday, November 16, 2002, and you patched it up on December 11.” “Grandma didn't come to visit us in January that year; she came on March 14.” I like dating events that way and don't mind at all when people ask me to do so. That's probably the most clarifying way in which people start to understand just how different my memory is. I even used to joke that I should open a “Stump the Human Calendar” booth on Venice Beach, near where I grew up in Los Angeles.

The truth is, though, that as much as I like that my memory is so complete, it's been terribly difficult to live with. My lack of talent for memorizing is only one of the many features of my memory that have influenced my life in ways that have been seriously challenging, often excruciating. One of the most troubling features of my memory is that it is so automatic and can spin wildly out of control. Though I can direct my memory back to particular events I want to remember—and when asked to, I can recall memories in a systematic way, such as when I'm given a date or an event—when my memory is left to its own devices, it roams through the course of my life at will. Memories are popping into my head randomly all the time, as though there is a screen in my head playing scenes from movies of years of my life that have been spliced into one another, hopping around from day to day, year to year, the good, the bad, the joyful, and the devastating, without my conscious control.

Perhaps they're not actually random. They do seem to be sparked by what scientists of memory call retrieval cues, such as a date being mentioned, a song on the radio, or a name coming up. The other day, for example, the song “Jessie's Girl” came on the radio, and instantly my memory went to the first day I heard the song, March 7, 1981. I had just gotten my driver's permit and I was driving my friend Ronni home after she spent the night at my house. Often it's a smell that will take me back. For example, when I walked into the house the other night, the first thing I smelled was a baked potato in the oven, and it brought me right back to when I was two years old, sitting in the living room in our apartment in New York City and watching Walter Cronkite on the
CBS Evening News
. For forty years that is exactly the moment that the smell of a baked potato always takes me back to. It's not the same if a potato is microwaved; the memory isn't triggered. It has to be baked in the oven.

Sometimes I'm aware of what the cue was, as in those cases, but many times I'm not. My recall is so automatic that I'm not truly conscious most times about why I have started remembering something.

According to one of the leading theories, normal human memory makes use of retrieval cues in this way too, probably because those words or sounds or smells were stored in the long-term memory at the same time the memory was. The more specific the cue is, the more effectively it tends to call up a memory. For example, if you went on a great trip to Yosemite Park, you might not find yourself remembering that trip if a friend just said the word
park
, but if she said
Yosemite
, the chances that your mind would flash onto that trip increase. I'm sure you can remember instances of a memory popping into your head that way when you heard a song or a place name. They're called involuntary memories, and one study showed that most people have about three to five of them a day. Ironically the memory of having these memories fades quickly for most people, so you may be able to recount only a couple of particular instances.

One of the things that seems to be different about my memory is that many things act powerfully and automatically as retrieval cues for me, filling my head with involuntary memories almost all the time. When I'm watching TV, I may hear a product name that will set off a rush of memories; or driving to work, I may notice a place name on a road sign, and my mind will take off. I have many, many more than three to five memories a day; they pop into my mind continually. Another key difference in my involuntary memories seems to be that normally, most such memories are of positive experiences, but mine are all over the map, from great times to horrible ones.

A key question about my memory, in fact, is whether I remember so much because so many of my long-term memories get stored with such a richness of cues. It may be that we all encode into our long-term memories as much information about our lives as I do, but that my mind has a much greater ability to pull those memories out of storage. The problem with how many cues set my memory off is that the process is constant, and my mind doesn't just flash on to those memories and then quickly get back to the present moment.

In many ways, my memory has been both a blessing and a curse. When I'm feeling down, I often revisit favorite memories, which I call “traveling,” going back especially to the happiest years of my life as a young child in New York City and suburban New Jersey. I wouldn't give my memories of those years up for anything in the world; they give me great comfort during my most difficult times. But my memory has also caused me quite a bit of pain through the years. Remembering so many of the moments of my life means I recall not only the joyful, fun times: the times of wonderful family closeness and friendship and sharing, and the esteem-building moments of achievement. I also constantly recall the fights and the insults, the excruciating embarrassments, the moments of heated anger and devastating disappointment.

One of the features of my memories that is most difficult to cope with is that the emotion of them isn't dialed down; my memories are apparently exceptionally emotional and sensually vivid. Some fascinating research has been done on the question of how much emotion is recalled in normal human remembering. Most people—82 percent according to one study—report that they vividly recall emotions along with their memories. But research has shown that that is probably true for only a small set of particularly momentous memories in their lives, which are called personal event memories, and are experienced as being relived when they are remembered.

Some studies have even indicated that for many memories that people report as being highly emotional, the degree of emotion they experience while remembering them is in fact quite faint. For example, when people were asked to remember while their brains were being scanned in real time, no activity in the emotional center of the brain, the amygdala, was detected. An interesting exercise to try in order to figure out what is true of your own emotional recall, suggested to me by one researcher who has worked on this question, is to quickly describe twenty highly emotional memories. Apparently in the studies she has done, this exercise is quite difficult for most people after the first few items. But I could list hundreds of them without stopping to think.

When I remember, the effect for all of my memories is like that described for personal event memories. It's not as though I'm looking back on the events with the distance of time and of adult perspective; it's as though I'm actually living through them again. Though it's difficult to describe this, when I remember, I see and feel with the fullness of watching a scene in a movie, and that can be emotionally overwhelming. For me, the emotion that comes along with every memory is every bit as potent as it was the day I first had it.

I feel the same fear, no matter how irrational that fear might have been. When we moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1974, my parents were young and had a lot of friends and they would go out every weekend. Depending on what night of the weekend it was, we had either our housekeeper or a babysitter stay with my brother and me. The Friday night TV lineup on NBC that fall was
The

Rockford Files
at 9
P.M.
and
PoliceWoman
at 10
P.M.
I always hoped my parents would be home when
The Rockford Files
ended at 10:00, even though I knew it would be hours before they would actually get back. As the closing credits ran and the theme song played, I would begin feeling anxious. I would have trouble getting to sleep afterward and would wake up in the middle of the night, usually around 2
A. M.
If I saw that my parents' car was not in the carport, I would start to feel really sick inside. I would go and get their pictures and lie in bed holding them, so when they came home they always found me sleeping with a bunch of pictures clenched tightly. Until now they never knew the reason for finding me like that. I loved the show but, even now that I'm forty-two years old,
The Rockford Files
theme song gives me a knot in my stomach every time I hear it, bringing me right back to being eight years old.

At any given moment, anything at all that someone said to me, or some hurtful or ridiculous thing that I said to someone that I desperately wish I could take back, may pop into my mind and yank me back to that difficult day and exactly how I was feeling about myself. Often it's excruciating to relive the past this way. I know that people generally forget—eventually, anyway—most of the details of arguments they've had, or of hurtful things friends and family have said or done to them, and that they've said and done to others. Those memories might be called to mind if they have a similar experience that brings them forth, but generally, they are not floating constantly in and out of people's consciousness. Unfortunately, I regularly remember a vast storehouse of them, and vividly, from the time I was fourteen.

The emotional intensity of my memories, combined with the random nature in which they're always flashing through my mind, has, on and off through the course of my life, nearly driven me mad. As I grew older and more and more memories accumulated in my mind, my memory became not only a horrible distraction in trying to live my life today, but also the cause of my terrible struggle to come to terms with my feelings about my past. The more memories were stored, the harder and harder it became to cope with the rush of recalled events. So many painful memories kept asserting themselves. The thousands of things my parents said to discipline me, for example, or blurted out when they were having a bad day or when I provoked them have never faded.