Can't Remember What I Forgot Your Memory, Your Mind, Your Future

When Sue Halpern decided to emulate the First modern scientist of memory, Hermann Ebbinghaus, who experimented on himself, she had no idea that after a day of radioactive testing, her brain would become so "hot" that leaving through the front door of the lab would trigger the alarm. This was not the First time while researchingCan't Remember What I Forgotthat Halpern had her head examined, nor would it be the last. Like many of us who have had a relative or friend succumb to memory loss, who are getting older, and who are hearing statistics about our own chances of falling victim to dementia, Halpern wanted to Find out what the experts really knew, how close science is to a cure, to treatment, to accurate early diagnosis, and, of course, whether the crossword puzzles, sudokus, and ballroom dancing we've been told to take up can really keep us lucid or if they're just something to do before the inevitable overtakes us. Beautifully written, sharply observed, and deeply informed,Can't Remember What I Forgotis a book full of vital information and a solid dose of hope. "Informative, beautifully written, and hard to put down, this is a book you have to remember not to forget to buy." Julia Alvarez

SUE HALPERN received her doctorate from Oxford University in 1985 and first began teaching at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. She is the author of Four Wings and a Prayer, Migrations to Solitude, and two books of fiction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Condé Nast Traveler, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. She lives in Ripton, Vermont, with her husband, writer Bill McKibben, and their daughter, Sophie, and is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College.


From the Hardcover edition.

Author’s Note

On the canted ceiling above my desk is a map of the brain. It
shows the frontal lobe and temporal lobe and parietal lobe and occipital
lobe as if they were places to visit–Rome, Milan, Trieste,
San Remo. The map, of course, is dumb. It says nothing about what
goes on in those places: that deep in the middle of the temporal
lobe, which itself is deep in the middle of the brain, there is a tiny,
cashew-shaped region called the hippocampus that is essential to
forming new memories, or that the prefrontal cortex, which sits behind
the eyebrows, is vital to foresight and being polite and paying
attention, or that the occipital lobe, which brings up the rear of the
brain, is central to sight itself.

I look at that map sometimes and think about how it is my own
brain apprehending it, and that to do so, it is traveling express. And
then my mind, declaring its independence from my brain, begins to
wander among the events of the day, past and future, and plans for
summer vacation, and concern for a friend who is sick and the dog
in the yard, but never getting so far afield that it doesn’t heed its
own call back.

Near the map, tacked to the wall, is a picture of the brain that is
doing all of that and all of this–this writing, thinking, typing,
seeing–my brain, in bright colors, which was taken a few years ago
in California. When I look at that picture I am not only seeing it,
but recalling that day, or aspects of it, so much has gone out with
the tide. I took notes on that trip, and carried a digital recorder, and
have read and reread those notes over the years, and listened to the
conversations, so I remember that day better than most, and what I
remember comes with a certain confidence, but even so it is fuzzy. I
cannot say, for instance, what kind of rental car I drove, or what
book I was reading later that afternoon when I went to the beach,
or which beach, specifically, it was.

We rely on memory not only to remember, but to walk and dream
and talk and smell and plan and fear and love and think and learn
and more and more and more. Memory is how we know the world–
that is a tree, this is a sentence–and know ourselves–I like chocolate
ice cream, I am a singer–and know ourselves in the world. Amnesiacs
make the case well: it is not, simply, that they don’t remember
their name or where they live, it is that absent memory, they are
strangers to themselves. The English philosopher John Locke believed
that we came into the world with our mind a blank slate, a
“tabula rasa,” ready for the pen of experience to inscribe. It’s a perfect
metaphor (even if it’s not exactly true), because it works to describe
what it’s like to gain knowledge, and what it’s like to lose your mind.
Stroke by uneven stroke, the eraser plies the board.

My father, before he died at the age of seventy-seven, had begun
to know this intimately, though never to the extent that the board
was wiped so clean that he approached Locke’s natal state. He
knew, and he talked about it–about how frustrating it was to read
the newspaper and then have to read it again, or to stare at a can
opener, not knowing what it was for, or to pick up the phone to call
a friend, whose funeral he’d attended two years earlier.

While it might have been natural for me to worry that my father’s
fate someday would be my own, I didn’t, really. The doctor
said he didn’t have Alzheimer’s disease, and since Alzheimer’s disease
tends to run in families, I figured I was safe. This was not one of
those calculate-your-odds kind of conclusions. It wasn’t a calculation
at all. At best it was a passing thought. Call it denial, call it repression,
or maybe arr

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Excerpted from Can't Remember What I Forgot: Your Memory, Your Mind, Your Future by Sue Halpern
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.