What would your life be like without memory?

What would your life be like without memory?

You may have pricked up your ears and wanted to hear a story about Alzheimer's disease: a slowly dissolving marriage, a sad unrequited love and self-loss are beginning. But I assure you, this may not be about loss, but about amnesia. What is the truth? Please look at the classification below.

For decades, scientists have been looking for people like her. She may be a member of all sentient beings, living an ordinary life, no different from ordinary people who buy food in grocery stores in daily life, but not the same. Sure enough, in 2006, they found her (or she found them).

? No matter the small fortunes and turning points people have experienced so far, or the memories of childhood, they all disappear in my memory like a dodo. .

Mckinnon is the first person we know who has a serious lack of self-memory. With her skillful life skills, she is comfortable in daily life, but forgets the past that promoted the status quo, a special afternoon that you and I can relive several times in our minds. She has no memory of the plot: the films made from her own perspective. In other words, compare memory to a book you like to read a thousand times, but you can only associate it with a lonely directory or Wikipedia entry.

? I only remember a few fragments about my childhood? . Mckinnon said, but they are not vivid at all, as cold as their own memories. ? I don't remember the little luck and turning point in my life. I don't even have childhood memories. ? She can accurately guess that the Cayman Islands is located in a hot zone, probably because she and Green have been there many times. ? About 2000 to 20 10 (Cayman Islands travel time). ? She said.

Her experience has subverted many things we call human nature. The philosopher John? According to John Locke, memory is a symbol of personal identity. It's hard to imagine what life would be like without memory. It is speculated that this will be a disaster. Take last year's blockbuster Pixar movie as an example. If the protagonist loses her core memory, does she? Island character? Will fall into nothingness.

Mckinnon doesn't have any core memories, those memories that undoubtedly make up his personality. Despite her father's objection, as an enlightened white woman, she married a black man without hesitation. As a Catholic, she decided to control the future that religion could not guide. She is shy, sensitive, intuitive, curious and interesting. As a retired expert in Washington state, I have my own hobbies, values, beliefs and opinions, and a close friend, which is enough. She doesn't remember all the anecdotes that made her successful, but she knows exactly who she is. This leads to a question: should memory be an indispensable part of human beings?

Should memory be an indispensable part of human beings?

Music has a powerful ability to awaken memories. Especially for McKinnon's husband, this is especially true when listening to the songs written by Motown with attractive and miraculous effects. The beautiful melody seems to have brought him back to his youth. People call it a $25 party, and he can spend a weekend night with a girl in a dark basement in Chicago with music for only $25. Motown's songs always remind him of the Saturday he and his cousin spent in Regal, a $3 imitation show in Marvin Gaye. It's crowded and stuffy there, and the air is filled with the strange smell of moldy popcorn. They are wearing $65,438+00 Ban-Lon shirts, and the girls are wearing ankle-length long skirts. Most people have colorful hairstyles, but only Green dresses up as if he had just escaped from Africa.

He grinned and described the scene decades ago. This is a story, long before he and McKinnon met as colleagues in an Illinois hospital, and then moved to the west to start a cruise. His first impression of her was:? She is friendly and sexy. Green said. However, for McKinnon, all these spiritual journeys are like magic. ? I find it hard to believe. She said.

All we can do is to be part of what psychologists call self-awareness? The protagonist in self-memory, let the past memories repeat themselves in my mind.

Various forms of memory

Memory researchers once thought that there was only one type of long-term memory. However, in 1972, Endel Tulving, a Canadian psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist, put forward a new viewpoint: Long-term memory has many forms. One is semantic memory, which teaches us how to remember spelling words, in other words, learn self-awareness. You may remember how to spell a word, but it's not the way and definition you remember when you first met it at a certain time and place (maybe on WIRD).

Tulving thinks that autonomous consciousness is another kind of long-term memory? The elements of episodic memory seamlessly integrate time and sensory details like movies. Remember, when you learn to be self-conscious, you form a plot memory.

Coincidentally, semantic memory came into play, and McKinnon showed Green her love for music. Like a concert, lyrics and melody surround her, thanks to her complete semantic memory. Similarly, she remembers her solo singing an old English folk song on the stage three months ago, but only Green can recall that moment: about how she walked on the stage and sat in front of the piano, the performance made Green almost cry. She thought she must have been full of confidence and fear, but she knew nothing about the truth.

Luckily, she left a recording and we decided to let her listen to it. She went to the living room and turned on the music player. ? Are you ready? She asked herself nervously, and unconsciously slowly retreated from the sofa and dining chair to the kitchen counter.

The soprano in the living room seems to come from another time and space. ? Smoke and water are huge. The voice sang. ? I can't pass. ? Mckinnon noticed a trembling voice and a surprised laugh, as if she were attending a performance for the first time.

Mckinnon first realized that she was different from others in 1977, when a friend in her high school who was learning how to be a doctoral assistant invited her to take part in one of his academic assignments? Memory test. Whenever asked about her childhood, McKinnon always said:? Why do you ask such a question? No one can remember! ? She knows that others have complete memories, but she always feels that they are making up memories, just like her.

Mckinnon's reaction made her friend very uneasy. She suggested that Mckinnon consult an expert. For nearly 30 years, this proposal has been ignored by McKinnon. Until one day in 2004, she saw a study on the differences between situational memory and semantic memory written by Endel Tulving.

She learned that Tulving was studying an amnesiac named K.C. at the University of Toronto. At the age of 30, the patient had a terrible motorcycle accident. The brain injury caused by the accident affected his plot memory, and he remembered nothing except the last minute or two. Despite this defect, his knowledge of mathematics and history before the accident is still fresh in his memory. In addition, when talking about the new information in the experiment, even if he had no memory at that time, he could still recall the lessons he learned afterwards. This case is the key to Tulving's memory theory.

Mckinnon's brain and life, as far as she knows, seem to be healthy and complete.

Like McKinnon, amnesiacs usually lose episodic memory and retain semantic memory. However, amnesiacs often lose their memory due to brain injury, developmental disorders or degenerative diseases, so they cannot live a normal life. Tulving's research case is very similar to McKinnon's experience. Apart from brain injury, injury or debilitating side effects, her brain and life, as far as she knows, seem to be healthy and complete.

One of Tulving's arguments made her scream. Psychologists think? Some extremely smart and healthy people also lack the ability to remember personal experiences. These people have no memory of the plot. They know what to do, but they don't remember the time. Although such people haven't appeared yet, according to Tulving's prediction, they will appear soon. ?

Tulving is so famous that McKinnon is afraid of losing contact. Therefore, she fixed her eyes on Brian Levin, a senior scientist at the rotman Institute of the University of Toronto, who worked closely with Turwin. His professional skills in plot and autobiographical memory caught her attention.

On August 25th, 2006, McKinnon sent an email to Levin, in which he quoted Turwin's theory that healthy people have no episodic memory and said:? I think I'm probably the kind of person he described. ?

? I am 52 years old, have a very satisfactory and stable life, and have a good sense of humor. Trying to contact you is a very big (frankly, terrible) leap for me. I would appreciate it if you could give me some advice. ?

? Many people who have the same problem as you have sent me emails. Levin said. ? Susie, I think this is worth further discussion. ? He invited McKinnon to his laboratory in Toronto. His first action with researcher Daniela Palombo was to start looking for some potential physiological or psychological answers about McKinnon's inconspicuous situational memory loss: some trauma caused by hypoxia at birth or nervous system diseases caused by brain injury. However, they did not find such a situation in McKinnon.

Then, through the so-called autobiographical interview, Levin consulted McKinnon's report and found that she really lacked plot memory. Before the interview, his lab team looked up every story of McKinnon's close friend, McKinnon's brother and mother Green, and then tried to prove it to her.

When Levine and his colleagues asked questions based on the collected stories, when they asked her about her participation in The Sound of Music in high school, she always said that she didn't remember, even though she kept asking? Do you remember anything from the scene? This interview seems to confirm that McKinnon has no recognizable plot memory.

? If people can live well without situational memory, why should we put it in the first place in human evolution?

Is situational memory really important?

Soon, Levin found that two healthy people also lacked plot memory. Both of them are middle-aged men with successful careers. One of them has a doctorate and the other has a long-term relationship. He gave them a series of the same experiments and treated his three patients with magnetic resonance vibrators. The results show that there are few activities in the key part of the brain to know oneself, and the ability of spiritual travel and the key activities of forming plot memory have a key impact on self-knowledge.

In April 2005, Levine published the neuropsychological research of McKinnon and two others. Since then, hundreds of people who claimed that their self-memory was seriously deficient have contacted Levin's team. He asked everyone to go through a series of tests, and the results confirmed that only a dozen cases had such problems. This result shows that the discovery of McKinnon and two others is not a fluke. ? This has caused considerable problems. Levin said. ? If people can live well without situational memory, why should we put it in the first place in human evolution? How long will they last?

She is different and lucky, which is how she felt after staying in McKinnon for a long time. Memories will leave a deep impression on others, but only a little will be left for her. 1986, when the couple lived in Arizona, Green was bullied by a bunch of white people every time he went fishing. When he got home, his head was covered with scars. ? She cried while helping him with cold compress. Green said. Then he cried, too. They were very scared.

Mckinnon learns the cruel facts of the story again, but only Green knows the details and painful memories. For McKinnon, memory will not cause the trauma and fear associated with it. She said:? I can imagine my anxiety and fear, but I don't remember anything. ? I can't turn back. I can only imagine what it should look like ?

Soon they forgot the quarrel, which may be the reason why she and Green have been together for so long, she joked. She doesn't complain, and she is not familiar with the feeling of regret because of aging. The yearbook photos of 1972 show that she used to be a petite beauty with a delicate face, fairy head and dark skin. (? Stupid and childish? Looking at the photo, she said. She knew it was her, but she still put the photo on the other side, because in her heart, she has always been a 60-year-old woman with broad shoulders, gray hair and a pink face full of years. She doesn't know what haunts her memory, she only knows that they are necessary for those pasts.

More than a decade ago, a woman named Jill Price showed the opposite state to McKinnon, which attracted the attention of scientists at the University of California, Irvine. Researchers call it hyperthyroidism syndrome, or an excellent autobiographical memory. Price has an extraordinary ability. For her, everything in life is vivid:1984 July 18, a quiet Wednesday, as if even a needle had fallen to the ground, she wrote in her memoirs that this was the second time she had read the book in a flurry. 1983 On Monday, February 28th, when the last episode of M*A*S*H was broadcast, it was raining. The next day, when she was driving, the wipers suddenly went on strike. These scenes seem to have just happened, and she knows every detail.

Compared with McKinnon, Price was unknown, but her deeds immediately caused a sensation in the media. Diane sawyer found her on the front page of every page? Heroic deeds? Her super memory seems to have turned her into an enviable superman.

However, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and a report in Wired point out that Price's superior memory ability is accompanied by a paranoid obsessive-compulsive disorder, which drives her to record all the details accurately. This seems to have something to do with her childhood move to Los Angeles, and it is still rooted in her heart? Trauma? Related. Until the age of 40, she still lived with her parents and took pains to record every little thing with piles of paper.

All this is just to say: obviously, when a person has extremely unusual memories, our culture does not have the ability to teach us to choose jealous objects.

You might say that McKinnon can rely on technology to make up for her amnesia. After all, she lives in an era of mass production by a software company. Facebook, a platform that can carry virtual autobiographical memories, can make you go back to Google photos in a trance: artificial intelligence software will directly enter your photo library, bring up vivid faces and vivid events, and automatically generate small videos full of plot memories. Other tools will capture your life through words, and build a traceable database for your memory through e-mail, calendar reminders, homework, voice mail, words, photos, videos and other recording forms.

However, McKinnon lost his enthusiasm for recording. Once, she decided to keep a diary to keep her memory. ? But after two or three days, I lost my enthusiasm. ? She said. ? If I have fear (fear of losing my memory), I may be persistent in capturing every moment, but I have never experienced those moments, let alone persistent. ?

She sometimes uses email as a useful reference, but that's all. She never pays attention to social media, has no Pinterest account or Instagram account, and her only Facebook account is idle, which can't attract her attention at all.

Even though she has her own Facebook page, she rarely uploads photos and videos. She once photographed their departure on a Caribbean cruise with a rented camera, but she said that she suddenly felt bored. She said that she never takes pictures because they don't have the capital to attract attention. Sure enough, in the couple's refrigerator, bookshelf and wall, you can't find any traces of photos, and you can't find any photos about the seaside. You can only find a frameless wedding photo and several photo albums in the upstairs office.

Mckinnon closed the photo album recording her and Green's court wedding in Maywood, Illinois in 198 1. One of the photos recorded the surprised expression of a friend standing on the steps outside looking at the newlyweds. There's another record, Green. Open one? Surprise? Gift: The embarrassing scene of four cats having sex with each other. Like a god, can this photo album help McKinnon? Restore memory? . But she said that through these photos, she seems to be watching other people's weddings, which has nothing to do with herself.

But she still got something today. She knew the scene on their wedding day. When we were looking at this photo album, Green also mentioned his best friend who attended their wedding. But McKinnon said? I don't know where she is. ? As a photographer, she (the best friend who attended the wedding but didn't appear in the photo) was nowhere to be found.

I feel that everyone can make mistakes: Do we always forget who is behind the camera? Even if the photographer is himself.

Like a god, can this photo album help McKinnon? Restore memory? .

We clearly see that McKinnon can become like a normal person even without using technology. It is conceivable that in the future, technology can also make us become McKinnon. My iPhone has stored 12 17 photos and 159 videos in the past eight months. Looking at these pictures, my memory will become blurred. This experience is called by some researchers? Photo damage effect. ? These photos will be automatically stored in the cloud, reducing my burden of facing these huge memories, but it will also short-circuit my brain in the process of forming plot memories.

? What will happen if human beings lose some abilities? Mckinnon asked during our conversation, as if it were a wake-up call. ? If technology can replace it, what will mankind lose? Will the human experience change, bring benefits or bring disasters? Or is it just a change?

I heard McKinnon sobbing. We were sitting in the dark cinema of Olympia Central Shopping Center, and I saw her crying out of the corner of my eye. Most of the plots in Inside Out describe the psychological activities of a girl named Riley 1 1 year-old. When the cartoonist in the control room rescued her from the psychological disaster, she was on the verge of collapse: her key memory-the small luminous sphere repeatedly played on the video screen-disappeared. In other words, when Riley's personality structure began to collapse, her core memory disappeared.

Although this disaster is like a true portrayal of her life, McKinnon likes this movie very much. Mckinnon laughs when we talk about personality island, core memory and Riley's consciousness in the control room. ? If I have a memory, she said? I wonder if it will affect the brain headquarters. ? )

I was surprised to find that she doesn't like to record stories in life, but she likes to read stories, especially those with fantasy and science fiction themes, such as Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games. She has seen all the relevant books and movies but can't remember anything, which is good, because every review is her first experience. One more thing makes me jealous: she won't be affected by spoilers. )

But she can't make up lies, daydream or dream. This kind of unimaginative amnesia is common. Most of us can imagine the scene on the beach. For example, we can imagine holding a fruit juice rum ice wine (pi? A colada) lounging on a stool, enjoying the surging waves and flowing sand between his toes. When McKinnon tries to imagine this, she may be able to add a hammock to the scene. ? There may be a palm tree. But when I tried to catch the palm tree, the hammock was gone. ? She can't integrate scattered images into a complete puzzle. She can't play chess, although her husband is a good chess player. ? I can only hold one action in my head. ? In other words, she can't look back on the past or look forward to the future.

We did a lot of things that day, we tasted delicious food, we chatted, and we wandered around the shopping center. Although she doesn't remember any details, she doesn't mind the fact. When most of us are concerned about gains and losses, McKinnon only exists in the beauty of her own writing. There is no incitement or conflict in that world, and you will not be anxious or panic in the face of the result. She has effortlessly achieved some people's lifelong efforts: she lives completely in the present.

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