Excerpts

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 Excerpted from Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research 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.