LATIF NASSER: Hey, it's Latif. I have now worked here so long that I sometimes forget about entire episodes. And it feels especially ironic that I forgot about this one, "Memory and Forgetting" from 2007. On relistening, it was so good that I'm kind of shocked that I did forget it. The reason it came up recently is that one of our producers is working on a story about something extraordinary and surprising she found out about her own brain and memory. I want to say more, but I can't. The episode will come out soon. It's super fascinating. I cannot wait to share it with you. Anyway, as she was reporting, she dug up this episode, which we're gonna play for you now. It is as classic Radiolab as it gets. It has cow brains, Oliver Sacks, a 1967 Chevy Nova, everything you could possibly want in a podcast episode, obviously. Okay, so listen to this, dig it, and when the new episode comes out, don't forget that you remembered it here first.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And today, our program is about memory.

ROBERT: Oh my God!

JAD: Hey, we're the radio people.

SALES CLERK: Yes. Please, you want to see the furniture?

ROBERT: I think most people think about memory kind of like ...

ROBERT: So we're interested in this filing cabinet.

ROBERT: ... a file cabinet in your brain.

ROBERT: I'm looking for a fairly large capacity.

SALES CLERK: This is traditional style.

ROBERT: Something happens in your life.

ROBERT: This is real wood.

SALES CLERK: Yeah, this is real wooden filing.

ROBERT: You file it away.

ROBERT: Oh, this is pretty good.

ROBERT: And then later when you want to remember something, you flip back through the files, and there's the one.

SALES CLERK: This one?

ROBERT: Yeah.

ROBERT: You pick it up. "Oh, yes. I recall." And there it is, that's the memory.

ROBERT: Can you lock it?

SALES CLERK: Yes. We have the key.

ROBERT: Sure, sometimes you forget where you filed it.

ROBERT: Let me see if I can get ...

ROBERT: But it's there.

ROBERT: Oh, I can't ...

ROBERT: Somewhere. However, when we asked scientists about this analogy, they pretty much all said ...

SCIENTIST: No.

SCIENTIST: No.

SCIENTIST: No.

SCIENTIST: The filing cabinet analogy is just completely wrong.

SCIENTIST: Period.

JAD: Well, maybe that's because your metaphor is a little outdated, frankly.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: I think of memory as more like a—more like a hard drive.

JAD: Here we are, about to go into B&H.

JAD: That you might find at a tech store.

JAD: So much gear! Can you show me your hard drives?

SALES CLERK: Sure.

JAD: Like your brain is basically a biological disc drive.

SALES CLERK: This little one is 320 gigabytes.

JAD: How big is big these days for a hard drive?

JAD: And everything you do ...

SALES CLERK: Up to two terabytes.

JAD: ... everything you see ...

JAD: Could I put all the images I've ever seen in my life, could it go onto this hard drive?

SALES CLERK: Um ...

JAD: ... somehow all that experience gets stored in your head in some kind of neural code.

SALES CLERK: Digital information is stored in zeros and ones.

JAD: Then later when you wanna go back to it, you just find the right file, call it right up and there it is.

SALES CLERK: It's up on your computer screen.

JAD: Your memory. Just as you left it.

SALES CLERK: The way you put it in, the way you take it out, it's all the same.

JAD: Never changes.

SALES CLERK: Never changes. Zeros and ones.

JAD: But again, if you ask scientists about this analogy, they'll tell you ...

SCIENTIST: No.

SCIENTIST: Wrong.

SCIENTIST: Memory isn't like that. Memory is not an inert stack of zeros and ones.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, robotic voice: Malfunction. System is shutting down.]

ROBERT: Well, if neither of those metaphors are an apt description of memory, then what—how should we think about memory?

JAD: Well, maybe memory is more creative than that.

ROBERT: Creative?

SCIENTIST: Yes.

SCIENTIST: Yeah.

SCIENTIST: On a literal level it's an act of creation.

SCIENTIST: Yeah, exactly.

SCIENTIST: We're reconstructing those memories.

SCIENTIST: Construction.

JAD: Maybe it's more like painting or sculpture.

SCIENTIST: Everyone's constantly their own artist.

SCIENTIST: We take bits and pieces of experience.

SCIENTIST: Some things get sharpened, other things leveled.

SCIENTIST: And infused with imagination and ...

SCIENTIST: Out of that construct ...

SCIENTIST: Construct. Construct.

SCIENTIST: ... what feels like a recollection ...

SCIENTIST: It's a beautiful process.

SCIENTIST: It's—it's unbelievable.

JAD: Let's begin as simply as we can. What is a memory? Like, where do you find a memory? Where do you go to find it? There's a scientist we met, Joe LeDoux who works at NYU, who started looking when he was very young, in the most obvious place.

JOE LEDOUX: As a child I worked in my father's meat market, and the way the cows were slaughtered in those primitive days was with a .22 rifle.

JAD: They'd shoot them in the head?

JOE LEDOUX: They'd shoot them in the head, yeah. And my job was to clean out the—clean the brains.

JAD: This makes a convenient beginning to this story because perhaps ...

JOE LEDOUX: The texture of the brain is very fun to play with.

JAD: ... while the young LeDoux had his fingers in the cow's brain ...

JOE LEDOUX: You stick your fingers in there and have the sense that I was reaching into the cow's soul.

JAD: ... maybe he was also thinking, "Where in that mess are the cow's memories?"

JOE LEDOUX: It had these rough membranes over it and just stripped it.

JAD: "Can I touch a memory? Can I pinch it between my fingers?"

JOE LEDOUX: One bullet.

JAD: One bullet.

JOE LEDOUX: One tiny little bullet. And my job was to go in and find it and remove it, because if you were eating brains, you didn't want to chomp down on lead.

JAD: In any case, LeDoux developed a thing for brains. And many years later in college, he'd get another chance.

JOE LEDOUX: I was taking courses in psychology.

JAD: A professor of his asked him to come into this lab ...

JOE LEDOUX: Studying the brain mechanisms.

JAD: ... and work on rat brains. And no bullets involved. This time he really would be searching for memories.

JOE LEDOUX: And I got hooked on it.

JAD: You with me?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: All right. So it was the '60s, right? LeDoux was in school. And it was an interesting time for the field he was about to enter. Scientists had just discovered this drug. They found that if you give this particular drug to ...

JOE LEDOUX: I think it was probably done in goldfish first.

JAD: ... yeah, give it to a goldfish. Squirt a little in the tank.

JOE LEDOUX: Into the water.

JAD: Suddenly ...

JOE LEDOUX: The goldfish ...

JAD: ... can't make a memory.

JOE LEDOUX: After a goldfish has learned something ...

JAD: ... they'll swim around, have all kinds of experiences, but later remember nothing.

JOE LEDOUX: They won't form a long term memory for it.

ROBERT: What does a goldfish learn then? I mean ...

JAD: Uh, I actually have no idea. But apparently they do learn stuff, except when they have this drug in their system, in which case they'll learn stuff and forget it immediately. And the implications of this were huge.

JONAH LEHRER: Oh, yeah.

JAD: According to science writer Jonah Lehrer ...

JONAH LEHRER: Absolutely.

JAD: Because now for the first time, scientists could say that a memory, well it's a real thing.

JONAH LEHRER: This physical thing. It's not simply an idea, it's a physical trace left in your brain.

JAD: A trace made largely of ...

JONAH LEHRER: Proteins. You know, proteins are the building blocks of memory.

ROBERT: Well, how do they know that?

JAD: Because of that drug.

JOE LEDOUX: It's called anisomycin.

JAD: The amnesia-inducing one.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: What it does is target proteins.

JONAH LEHRER: It prevents new proteins from being formed.

JAD: It busts them up.

ROBERT: And that means what, exactly?

JAD: Well, no proteins, no memory. Well, let me give you an example of how all this works. And this is something LeDoux ended up doing after college.

JAD: The methodology. Can we start there?

JOE LEDOUX: Sure.

JAD: He would take a rat, put it in a box, and then play it a tone.

JOE LEDOUX: Just a five kilohertz pure tone.

JAD: Sort of like, boooop!

JOE LEDOUX: Something like that, yeah.

JAD: Now imagine you're this rat.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Your entire world is in this box. And suddenly a sound as if from God. And then the sound stops, and you're like, "What? What is—ow! Hey, he shocked me on my feet!"

JOE LEDOUX: The shock is, you know, a mild electric shock.

DAVID BUSH: I mean, it's less than getting static electricity.

JAD: This guy who works in LeDoux's lab ...

DAVID BUSH: I'm David Bush.

JAD: He actually demonstrated it for me.

DAVID BUSH: All right, so what ...

JAD: Or on me.

DAVID BUSH: What I'm gonna do is have you put your fingers on there, okay?

JAD: He made me touch the bottom of the cage.

JAD: Right. I'm putting my fingers on the bottom of the cage. I'm a little scared. Yeah. Yeah. Ah!

JAD: It's really not that bad. It's like static electricity, really.

JAD: Ow!

ROBERT: If you're you, or if you're a rat it might be a whole 'nother thing.

JAD: Even for a rat.

ROBERT: But what's the point? Why are we doing this?

JAD: Oh, well they're trying to make the rat form a memory.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: And here's how we now know that that works. So from the rat's perspective, the moment it hears the tone and then feels the shock, inside its head a bunch of neurons start to build a connection.

DAVID BUSH: Whenever you create a memory, it's an act of cellular constructions.

JOE LEDOUX: What we're talking about now is associative memories. Associations between two things in the outside world.

JAD: Between boooop! And bzzzt!

JOE LEDOUX: Those two events have to somehow be connected.

DAVID BUSH: It's as if you're building a bridge over a chasm and that connection ...

JAD: Well, that's basically a memory. A memory is a structure that connects one brain cell to another. So the next time that the rat hears that damn tone, inside its brain tone brain cells are physically connected to shock brain cells. It's gonna know that after this: boooop! Comes this: bzzzt! And so instead of just listening passively, it's gonna freeze.

DAVID BUSH: The back is hunched, and they're just frozen solid.

JAD: Bracing itself for what is about to happen.

DAVID BUSH: Exactly.

JAD: When LeDoux and his team see the rat freeze like that, they know it is in the midst of remembering.

JOE LEDOUX: They'll do that the rest of their life.

JAD: However ...

DAVID BUSH: If you inject a chemical into the brain that prevents these neurons from building this new architecture that a new memory requires, the rat will never form a memory because its neurons are prevented from forming all these new proteins, which a new memory requires.

JAD: And so whatever the rat was doing during the injection, it'll never remember.

DAVID BUSH: Play it the noise and then shock it, and then play it the noise and then shock it, and then play it the noise and then shock it, and the rat never learns.

JAD: It'd be like boooop! "Hey, what's that?" Bzzzt! "Ow! Booop! "Ooh, what's that?" Bzzzt! "Ow!" Booop! "Ooh, cool. What's that?" Bzzzt! "Ow!"

DAVID BUSH: Perpetually surprised by the shock.

JAD: So the basic rule is that if you get to the memory while it's being made, you can bust it up by inserting this drug.

ROBERT: So the memory never is actually formed.

JAD: Right, never committed to memory.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: But if the memory gets made and the protein bridge is there in your mind, it's built and built for all time.

ROBERT: So if you have the memory in there then you cannot erase it then.

JAD: Yeah, so it's about timing. If you get there first you can erase it, but if you get there after, no.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: And that's what everyone thought. Until 2000. One day, LeDoux was in his office and a guy walks in the door.

JOE LEDOUX: The person who walked through the door that day is Karim Nader.

KARIM NADER: Karim Nader. I would often go in Joe's lab and just tell him ideas and stuff.

JAD: This is Karim.

JOE LEDOUX: He was a postdoc in the lab.

KARIM NADER: I went into Joe's office and said "Joe, like, what do you think would happen if ..."

JAD: "What do you think would happen if, instead of giving the drug while the rat was making the memory, what if way after the fact, we gave it the drug while it was remembering the memory?"

KARIM NADER: You remembered something.

JAD: "Could we mess with the memory then?"

KARIM NADER: I thought, wouldn't it be cool if that happened?

JOE LEDOUX: I said, "Well, that'll never work.

KARIM NADER: He said, "That's never gonna work."

JOE LEDOUX: "Don't waste our money."

ROBERT: It was just a very naïve question.

JAD: Yeah. I mean, because the memory's already there.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: You can't erase a memory that is already there. I mean have you ever seen that movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?

ROBERT: No.

JAD: No? Well, that's essentially what it was proposing

KARIM NADER: Yeah. I mean, it was crazy. [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Here at Lacuna, we have perfected a safe, effective technique for the focused erasure of troubling memories.]

KARIM NADER: In this movie, Jim Carrey has all of these memories he wants to get rid of.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: I'm here to erase Clementine Kruczynski.]

KARIM NADER: And so he goes to this company that ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Good morning, Lacuna.]

KARIM NADER: ... performs this service.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: How are you today, Mr. Baird?]

KARIM NADER: And so they have him in this room.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Comfortable? Please try to focus on the memories.]

KARIM NADER: And he's retrieving all these memories.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: This is the day we met. Hi there. Hi. I'm Clementine.]

KARIM NADER: And each time he retrieves one ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: I'm Joel.]

KARIM NADER: ... they zap his brain.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Got it. I love you. Got it.]

JAD: Could we zap a memory that was already there? Could we go in and erase old memories? That was Karim's question.

KARIM NADER: I was just looking to do something conceptually challenging, just kind of fun, right? And just out there.

JAD: Joe thought he was crazy.

JOE LEDOUX: I didn't think the experiment was gonna work. And he said, "Okay." And so he went away and he did the experiment without telling me. And ...

JAD: A couple months later, Nader walks back in the door.

JOE LEDOUX: ... walked in the door and he said ...

KARIM NADER: "Joe, like this is really crazy, but it actually worked."

JOE LEDOUX: "It worked."

JAD: Karim said he took a rat, played it the tone.

KARIM NADER: Gave them a tone and then give them a mild shock to the feet.

JAD: So it could form a memory. Tested it just to make sure, and sure enough when it heard the tone, it froze.

KARIM NADER: Yeah.

JAD: Which means it had the memory. Good. Then he waited. A long time.

KARIM NADER: 60 days.

JAD: 60 days?

KARIM NADER: Yeah.

JAD: Two months later, he played the rat the tone, and as it's frozen thinking "Oh no! Oh no, I know what's about to happen," right at that moment, while it was remembering, he gave it the drug.

KARIM NADER: And then the next day we just put them back into the box, and we just gave them some tones to see how afraid they were of the tones. And the ones that got the drug, they behaved as if the tone doesn't mean that they're gonna get zapped anymore.

JAD: All of a sudden the rat had been sent back to square one. Now it was like—boooop! "Ooh, what's that?" Bzzzt! "Ow!" Memory was gone.

KARIM NADER: There was no memory.

ROBERT: No memory at all?

JAD: No.

JONAH LEHRER: That was the shocking result of the LeDoux-Nader experiment.

JAD: That's Jonah again.

JONAH LEHRER: The rat is already terrified of the shock, but if you inject the chemical as the rat is remembering what the sound means, the memory disappears. It's as if the memory had never been there in the first place.

ROBERT: Really?

KARIM NADER: Yeah. Joe looked at me, and he just looked very surprised.

JAD: What exactly did you say to him?

JOE LEDOUX: You know, "Holy bleep. Take a look at this because it's so bleep crazy."

KARIM NADER: It took me a while to really kind of believe that it was all true.

JAD: Plus, Joe and others had a concern: maybe this drug isn't erasing a memory, maybe it's just giving the rat brain damage and erasing everything.

JOE LEDOUX: So we designed an experiment that would test the specificity of these effects.

JAD: He wondered, could he pinpoint and extract one single memory of many? So in his latest study, what he did was he taught the rat to be scared of two tones, not just one.

KARIM NADER: So one's like a voop! And the other one is a pip. Like, repeating sounds of a pure tone.

JAD: And he teaches the rat to be afraid of both of these tones, each one results in a—bzzzt! Only this time, when he plays the tones 45 days later, he picks just one of them. Maybe for instance this one [tone] to pair with the drug.

KARIM NADER: And then the next day you test both.

JAD: Mm-hmm?

KARIM NADER: And only the one that was paired with the drug is affected.

JAD: So you erased tone one but not tone two?

KARIM NADER: Exactly.

JAD: So do re mi—you can just erase re?

KARIM NADER: That would be the idea.

JAD: Wow. That really is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind!

KARIM NADER: Well, that movie came out about two years after we published the study that really got all this going.

JAD: Do you think they stole from you?

KARIM NADER: I don't think they stole, but maybe they were thinking along these lines, and they were ...

JAD: They must've read it and been like, "Oh, my God!"

KARIM NADER: There was a write up in the Science Times, and they proposed this would be a treatment for PTSD.

JOE LEDOUX: Post traumatic stress disorder. People who go to war or have been through trauma.

JAD: People haunted by really bad memories.

JOE LEDOUX: They just can't escape the thoughts and memories that they keep reliving.

JAD: How would that work in a therapy situation though?

KARIM NADER: Suppose you have a holocaust victim who's lived for 50 years with these memories and, you know, you would say, "Well, let's talk about what went on in the camp, and the day you saw Mary in the line to go to the chambers."

JOE LEDOUX: You say close your eyes and just imagine.

KARIM NADER: Relive it.

JAD: And right as you're talking about it you swallow a pill?

JOE LEDOUX: Yeah.

KARIM NADER: More or less.

JOE LEDOUX: And so in fact, we've done that.

ROBERT: They've done that?

JAD: They have. Karim Nader now works at McGill University in Montreal, and he has teamed up with a clinical psychologist to try this on people. And it seems that when you give this drug as a person is remembering or reliving a traumatic event, the memory is eroded somewhat. The next time they think about it, it's not quite as painful.

KARIM NADER: One woman, she had been raped as a child by the doctor, and then when she told her mother, her mother said she was making up stories.

JAD: Wow.

KARIM NADER: Apparently she never spoke to anyone about this. And she used to get undressed in the dark in front of her husband.

JAD: Wow.

KARIM NADER: And so she came into the clinic.

JAD: He says she took the drug while thinking about the trauma.

KARIM NADER: And then a week later ...

JAD: She told the story again. And this time it wasn't nearly as hard.

KARIM NADER: She improved dramatically to the point where she was telling the story on TV.

JAD: On TV? Wow! So she went from telling no one about this—including herself—to being so open that she could tell thousands of people?

KARIM NADER: Yeah. She just felt that the emotional part was no longer overwhelming her.

JOE LEDOUX: Some ethicists say that it's wrong to mess with memory but, you know, that's what therapy is too. It's a process of changing your evaluation of situations, learning new things, storing new things.

KARIM NADER: At one point she said, you know, we've given her back herself.

ROBERT: Hmm. I—I know that she feels better, but there's something slightly creepy about this.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: That she feels better because something is now missing in her, something that troubled her. But she's been—in a way, a part of her has been deleted. I mean, look, I think of myself really, I'm Robert Krulwich and I'm a certain age, but really what I am is I'm a string of memories.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: I mean, that is as close to a way of describing the real me as I can find.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: I own those memories, and they define me. But you're saying you can come to me when I'm already formed, when I'm already there, you can give me a shot and you can fundamentally change me.

JAD: There's an assumption in what you're saying which is actually kind of wrong. There really isn't anything like a "real" memory. I mean, think about it: if you can erase a memory while it's being created—that's how we started—and now we learn you can erase a memory while it's being remembered using the same drug?

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: What that really means is that every time you are remembering something, you're actually recreating it. That's the only reason the drug works. And so if you're recreating it each time, then each time you're remembering something it's a brand new memory.

ROBERT: Well, no. But I've always kind of assumed that underneath all this remembering, there's some kind of special absolutely original memory locked in a vault somewhere.

JAD: No. No. That is the crazy implication of this experiment.

JONAH LEHRER: That the act of remembering on a literal level, it's an act of creation. Every memory is rebuilt anew every time you remember it.

JAD: And not only is it an act of creation, as Jonah says, Karim would say it's an act of imagination.

KARIM NADER: Every time you remember something you're changing the memory a little bit. We're always changing the memory slightly.

JONAH LEHRER: You think you're remembering something that took place 30 years ago. Actually, what you're remembering is that memory reinterpreted in the light of today, in the light of now.

ROBERT: So does that mean that there's no such thing as a memory for all time that hides in a secret vault somewhere? That all you've got is the most recent recollection of the experience?

JONAH LEHRER: Yes.

ROBERT: Well then, how do I know that any memory is verifiably true?

JONAH LEHRER: You don't. You don't. And one of the ironies of this research is that the more you remember something, in a sense the less accurate it becomes.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JONAH LEHRER: The more it becomes about you and the less it becomes about what actually happened.

ROBERT: So let's just do something. Imagine a couple in love and it's their first kiss. He kisses her and she kisses him back. She remembers the kiss of course, and he remembers the kiss of course. As they go through the rest of their romance and the next 36 years together, the kiss will essentially become replaced by two independently re-embroidered and increasingly dishonest kisses?

JONAH LEHRER: Assuming they think about that kiss enough, that's kind of what the theory implies.

ROBERT: But certainly there's gotta be somewhere, between the man and the woman, there's gotta be some true kiss, or is that kiss just gone?

JONAH LEHRER: That true kiss vanished the minute their lips separated.

ROBERT: Huh.

JONAH LEHRER: As soon as reality happens, it begins diverging in all our different brains on a very synaptic level.

ROBERT: Here's where you cue the really sad music.

JONAH LEHRER: They just grow slowly farther and farther apart.

ROBERT: Well, let me do it a different way. Let's suppose that Joan and Bob kiss, and then they part. It's a great kiss.

JONAH LEHRER: Uh-huh.

ROBERT: And then they never think about it again. I mean, it was a great kiss in the moment but they never think about it again.

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.

ROBERT: 30 years later, Bob is in a railroad station. Joan comes out of a train, their eyes meet, Bob sees Joan, sees her eyes, and remembers suddenly that kiss.

JONAH LEHRER: That memory is more honest than if he'd been thinking about the kiss every day of his life since.

ROBERT: Oh. You know, that's even sadder.

JAD: You know, but it's true. That's what scientists say.

JOE LEDOUX: Absolutely. We had a conference last week, and Yadin Dudai was here, and he proposed that the safest memory, a memory that is uncontaminatable, is one that exists in a patient with amnesia.

YADIN DUDAI: What I meant is that there is a sort of a paradox.

ROBERT: This is Yadin?

JAD: This is Yadin.

YADIN DUDAI: And I'm a professor in Israel.

JAD: Reporter Ann Heppermann tracked him down for us.

YADIN DUDAI: Intuitively you think if you use a memory, you know, you know better because you remember it better, you recall it better, you know the details better, and so on and so on. But this is not what science shows. If you have a memory, the more you use it, the more you're likely to change it. So if you never use your memory, it's secured. So taking it a bit farther, the safest memories are the memories which are in the brain of people who cannot remember.

JAD: Okay. Well, I guess we should go to break now.

ROBERT: Oh, yeah. And if you need more information, or you want to hear anything again, one word, Radiolab.org.

JAD: Radiolab will continue in a moment.

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And today on Radiolab we're looking at memory and ...

ROBERT: Forgetting.

JAD: Right, forgetting. And we're looking at how these two processes, remembering and forgetting, are intertwined. And writer Andrei Codrescu has an idea about this.

ANDREI CODRESCU: The other day, a friend of mine was explaining how she had to move these pixels around her computer, and had to add 20 megabytes of memory to handle the operation. I had the disquieting thought that all this memory she was adding had to come from somewhere. Maybe it was coming from me because I couldn't remember a thing that day. And then it became blindingly obvious: all the memory that everybody keeps adding to their computers comes from people. Nobody can remember a damn thing. Every time somebody adds memory to their machine, thousands of people forget everything they knew. Americans are singularly devoid of memory these days. We don't remember where we came from, who raised us, when our wars used to be, what happened last year or last month or even last week. Schoolchildren remember practically nothing. I take the Greyhound bus every week, and I swear half the people on there don't know where they got on or where they're supposed to get off.

ANDREI CODRESCU: The explanation is simple: computer companies are stealing human memory to stuff their hard drives. Greyhound, I believe, has some kind of contract with IBM to steal the memory of everyone riding the bus. They're probably connected by a cable or something. Every hundred miles—poof!—another 500 megabytes gets sucked out of the passengers' brains. The computer's thirst for memory is bottomless. The more they suck, the more they need. Eventually, we'll all be walking around with a glazed look in our eyes, trying to figure out who it is we live with. And then we will forget our names and addresses and we will just be milling around trying to remember them. The only thing visible about us will be these cables sticking out of our behinds, feeding the scraps of our memory to computer central somewhere in Oblivion, USA.

ANDREI CODRESCU: I think it's time for all these memory-sucking companies to start some kind of system to feed and shelter us when we forget how to eat, walk and sleep.

JAD: Andrei Codrescu with an essay from the book 101 Damnations. Anyways, Robert?

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: Mon amour.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Andrei, he's trying to make a point about, you know, historical amnesia and America and whatever, but what if we were to take what he's saying literally?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And explore it? Like, we know you can subtract a memory. But what if you could add a memory? Like, actually add a memory in—back into a brain that wasn't there before?

ROBERT: What do you mean by add memory?

JAD: Well, implant a false memory.

ROBERT: Oh.

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: Count back. Okay. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. My name is Elizabeth Loftus. I'm on the faculty at the University of California-Irvine.

JAD: Depending on who you talk to, Elizabeth Loftus is either a hero or Dr. Evil.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Her research, which goes back more than two decades, has completely changed how we think about memory.

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: Well, for many ...

JAD: I spoke with her recently about it.

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: For many years, I and other psychologists were doing experiments in which we distorted the memories of events that people had actually experienced. So we would take somebody who'd seen a simulated auto accident or a simulated crime, and we would alter the details in their memory report. We'd make people believe that they saw a car go through a stop sign instead of a yield sign. And we found it was not that hard to alter people's memories of these previously experienced events. But more recently, we've gone even further and shown that you can plant entirely false memories into the minds of people, memories for things that didn't happen.

JAD: Like what?

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: Well, we planted a memory that when you were about five or six years old, you were lost for an extended period of time in a shopping mall.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Mom? Mom?]

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: You were frightened, you were crying. And ultimately, you were rescued ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Are you lost?]

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: ... by an elderly person.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We'll find your mother.]

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: And reunited with the family.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Mommy!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mother: There you are!]

JAD: And how did you implant that memory?

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: We told them that we had talked to their parents, and that we'd learned some things that happened to them when they were a child.

JAD: They'd basically interview the subjects about their past.

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: They'd say, "Hey, do you remember that time when you were on the bike and you fell?"

ROBERT: Which they were making up.

JAD: No, no, no. They would start with a true story. They would start with a true story, and then they'd say, "Hey, do you remember that time"—which was true. "Remember that other time?" which was true. "And that other time?" which was true. And somewhere in the middle of all of those true stories?

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: They would slip in the lie.

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: The false, made-up story about being lost and frightened and crying. And in that particular study, we found that about a quarter of our subjects fell sway to the suggestion and they adopted it as their own memory.

JAD: A quarter of her subjects, when she checked with them later, now had in their head a memory of being lost and then found in the mall that never happened.

ROBERT: I would have been the number one guy in that quarter. [laughs]

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: What is happening in this situation is people take their image of an actual shopping center, actual family members, and they construct an experience ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mother: There you are!]

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: ... out of these bits and pieces. Investigators in this field have made people believe that they had accidents at family weddings, or that they were a victim of a vicious animal attack, or that they nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a lifeguard. Even with these pretty traumatic ideas, you can make people believe that it happened to them.

ROBERT: Actually, we had this very same experience. When I was in law school, we had this professor. He was a professor of property, and he was doing a lecture. And in the middle of the lecture—and this was not, you know, in any way we were not prepared for this.

JAD: Uh-huh.

ROBERT: All of a sudden, a guy zips into the class, the very front of the class, grabs something from the professor and then runs out.

JAD: Just stole it?

ROBERT: Stole it. I don't even remember what it was, but it happened so suddenly.

JAD: Uh-huh.

ROBERT: And Professor Bergen said, "Oh, my God, did any of you see the curly-haired guy? He just went—" and he just sort of threw it in. "The curly-haired guy." But it turned out that what he called the curly-haired guy, when the man came back later to present himself, was not a curly-haired guy at all. He was a straight-haired guy.

JAD: So the whole thing was staged?

ROBERT: Yeah. We were all eyewitnesses, and we all had been coached inadvertently to see something that wasn't true. And we all saw it.

JAD: What I find interesting though, is why that kind of suggestion works so well on memory. And Karim Nader, the guy we heard from earlier, scientist?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: He puts it this way: suppose you witness a crime, and the police ask you some questions later and they say, "Did you see a red Camaro leave the scene?"

KARIM NADER: And you're thinking about it going, "Yeah. No—you know, no red Camaro."

JAD: No, didn't see one. But then maybe the policeman asks you again, "Are you sure you didn't see one?" And suddenly you're like, "Well ..."

KARIM NADER: "I think—well, maybe there was. Maybe I forgot."

JAD: ... you start to question it, because as he puts it, when you are remembering something, the memory is unstable.

KARIM NADER: The memory comes back up to this unstable state.

JAD: It's being rebuilt, recreated. And in that moment, someone, without even meaning to, can slide something new in.

KARIM NADER: And so as the memory gets restored with the image of the red Camaro, the next day when the judge asks you, "Was there somebody with a—was there a red Camaro there?" from your perspective it's a real memory.

JAD: Yeah, but what's so fascinating to me about that phenomenon, assuming it's true ...

KARIM NADER: Yeah?

JAD: ... is that the red Camaro that is now in your head ...

KARIM NADER: Yeah.

JAD: ... is a vivid, technicolor, red Camaro. You can see the light bounce off the hood. It just feels real. You can taste the air.

KARIM NADER: It's amazing how detailed these things can be.

JAD: Which is why when someone contradicts your memory and says, "It didn't happen that way," you're like, "Yeah, it did. Screw you!"

ROBERT: Well, it feels like a robbery.

JAD: Right. Right.

ROBERT: They're taking it from you.

JAD: And in fact, this got Elizabeth Loftus in a lot of trouble. Back in the mid '80s there were a lot of people—I don't know if you remember this—coming forward with repressed memories. Like, "I was abused by a satanistic cult, and performed rituals and whatever." All that stuff.

ROBERT: Oh, right. I remember that.

JAD: We now know that a lot of those memories were imagined. And she says at the time, she was one of the only people to raise her hand and say, "Excuse me." And it got her in a lot of trouble.

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: I've never really seen anything like the wrath of hostility when I began to write articles and publish on this subject. It was pretty amazing, the vitriol.

JAD: What kind of things would they do or say?

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: Oh, they—you know, my life was threatened, armed guards would have to be hired at universities where I was being asked to speak. I had the bomb squad at my house on one occasion. One day, I was taking an airplane flight, and when the woman sitting in the seat next to me learned who I was, she started to swat me with her newspaper. And it was kind of hard to extract myself from her because, you know, airplanes are crowded places. You know, the fact of the matter is memory is malleable, and we might as well face the truth.

ROBERT: Well now, this isn't to say that you could have a repressed memory and it might—it might just be true. I mean, not all repressed memories are false.

JAD: Sure, sure.

ROBERT: And in that regard, this next story you're gonna hear—I don't want to tell you much about it. I'll just tell you it's about a painter.

JAD: And it's produced by Neda Pourang.

NEDA POURANG: The first thing you notice in Joe Andoe's studio is horses. A big milky one straight ahead, sepia ones to the left and right, staring at you like they don't care about you, but they don't mind you either. They're really like dreams of horses.

JOE ANDOE: I never paint horses that are being manipulated with a bridle or anything. They're mostly just hanging out. It comforts me to have paintings of horses around.

NEDA: Over the past 10 years, the horses have multiplied. And Joe doesn't even know why he keeps painting them.

JOE ANDOE: I guess it's kind of like I just kind of tune it in or something, or, like, you're tuning your guitar, you know? Ding, ding, ding, until, you know, two strings resonate, you know, and you know it's in tune.

NEDA: In a Manhattan studio, surrounded by stacks of these animals, you start forgetting you're in Chelsea. Maybe you're in a stable instead. Sometimes even the jessa starts to smell like mulch and hay. When Joe got here in the mid-'80s, no galleries were offering solo or group shows, and like all the other hundreds of artists in New York, he was struggling.

JOE ANDOE: I'd been in New York for about six years, and nothing was happening. And I was beginning to think nothing was gonna happen. And I was—you know, had a kid and I was married. And so I stopped painting for a few months, which is a long time for me. And I missed it, so I started painting again for myself. You know, after the dishes were done and all my domestic chores were fulfilled, I'd sit down at the dining table and paint.

NEDA: And what showed up on these canvases were pastures, lush and open. The kind of pastures you'd see on a postcard from somewhere in Wyoming, or in this case, Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Joe grew up.

JOE ANDOE: Well, I can show you some of my paintings. Me and my buddies, we'd park out here and we'd get high in the evening, like this is a summer evening, you know?

NEDA: Joe runs his hand through the air in front of a massive painting leaning against the wall. It's of a field at dusk.

NEDA: Beautiful.

NEDA: It's like he's showing me property.

JOE ANDOE: And we would trip and we would contemplate the universe, you know? Like, what do you think are those stars? What's behind them?

NEDA: It's one of those fields with thick grass that's matted where people might have laid down. There's some trees to lean against, separating the grass and the road.

JOE ANDOE: Our high school sat on Route 66, right on the edge of Tulsa. And, you know, you pull out of school at lunchtime, and you take a left and you could drive right down Route 66 into the heart of Tulsa. And you could take a right and you could go out to the—there's farmland. You know, this was in the early-'70s, and we would of course take a right.

NEDA: So when Joe stopped trying to paint for anyone else, he drifted backwards into his adolescence, all those breezy right turns out of the school parking lot.

JOE ANDOE: And ultimately, this is what people lined up for.

NEDA: Joe had one show, and then another one. Studio visits from private collectors. Then calls from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney—even sitcom art directors. All the while, he kept on painting his deserted landscapes. Then, as he describes it ...

JOE ANDOE: About 10 years ago, horses started showing up in my repertoire, so to speak.

NEDA: The pastures weren't empty anymore. They started to draw mares and foals to themselves. Some in the far distance, some so close that they're out of focus.

JOE ANDOE: And then about a year ago, I was—I started painting girls.

NEDA: Joe's first attempt at the human form. The girls are all on their own canvases. They're undressed, stepping out of a darkened space. Some of them look like they're about to say something.

JOE ANDOE: And I'm just following my gut. I'm painting these pictures, and I don't really know why. You know, and after a few months I was sitting back and I was sort of reflecting. I was looking at all these things, and I noticed that they all looked the same. They all looked like the same girl.

NEDA: Looking over all the paintings in the studio, they clearly are the same girl, but in a dozen different angles. She has the look of a 16 year old in 1972.

JOE ANDOE: Like my first love kind of thing.

NEDA: Her name was Kay.

JOE ANDOE: It was like my first soulmate. The first—you know how the first time you feel like you're not alone?

NEDA: She's beautiful. Oval face, almond eyes that look right into you.

JOE ANDOE: And then I remembered this moment with her and me and the horse in the car.

NEDA: Joe realized he'd been painting a memory—the fragments of one afternoon 30 years earlier, each ingredient emerging slowly.

JOE ANDOE: We were parked in the back seat of my Nova, '67 Nova in this pasture. And we were in the back seat, and a horse looked in the window. This is like this moment where it was like—boom!—you know, this horse is there, she's there. And—and I was in love. I had a beautiful naked girl there with me in the back seat of my car, you know? It just didn't get any better. I was skipping out of school so I wouldn't happen to be in class. You know, I was on easy street. I probably had $5 in my pocket, you know? Enough gas to get home. I had some cigarettes. I don't know.

NEDA: Why did you break up?

JOE ANDOE: [laughs] I think I cheated on her. I think that's why.

NEDA: Joe!

JOE ANDOE: I think that's what happened. I went to the lake and I did something I shouldn't have. Right, you know, in front of somebody she knew. She moved away to Minnesota for some reason. And she called me one day, and we—we went to—went out dancing, and we drank beer and danced. And I took her home to the place she was staying. She was staying with some friends in this old house behind an appliance store. And I dropped her off, and she looked at me like this and says, "Aren't you coming in?" And I says, "No, I have to go see somebody else." I forget her name.

NEDA: You had a new girlfriend?

JOE ANDOE: New girlfriend. And she lit a cigarette, slammed the door and she died in a fire that night. I got a call the next morning.

NEDA: A car door slams, a girl turns and looks over her shoulder at a guy she won't be seducing that night. A fragment of a moment frozen in time.

JOE ANDOE: I mean, the funny thing is she was so spirited, if anybody was gonna come back and haunt me, she would.

NEDA: How old were you?

JOE ANDOE: Probably 21.

NEDA: How old was she?

JOE ANDOE: She was probably 19.

NEDA: That day in the car, with his girl and the horse looking in, Joe thinks the memory of that one afternoon in Tulsa might be some sort of post traumatic pleasure syndrome—an echo that bounced off Jupiter and caught up with him again.

JOE ANDOE: And then again, they're just paintings, too. They're just color. And these are just excuses for me to make another painting.

NEDA: There's something alluring about Joe Andoe's paintings. They draw you in. Maybe that's why people pay big money for them. But the only thing that anyone who wasn't there in the field with Joe, Kay and the horse can do is look from the outside into an impenetrable past that's finished. That memory, that story, is self sustaining and whole, looping endlessly in an alternate universe.

JOE ANDOE: That's the reason I don't title these. I don't put—you know, there's no—there's no ending, there's no beginning. It's just every day I stir it up again.

ROBERT: Joe Andoe has a new memoir. It's called Jubilee City, and it is published by William Morrow.

JAD: We will continue in a moment.

JAD: Ready?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: This is Radiolab, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich. And on this show, we've been talking about ...

JAD: Memory.

ROBERT: Remembering and forgetting, yeah.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: And this next story is about the most drastic version of this particular back and forth that I can think of. It just can't get any worse than this. This is a story of a man named Clive Wearing. It was told to me by the famous neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks.

ROBERT: Okay, first of all, who was Clive Wearing when he was well?

OLIVER SACKS: He was a gifted musician and musicologist, who was really a pioneer in Renaissance music, especially the music of Orlandus Lassus.

DEBORAH WEARING: And he had a group called the London Lassus Ensemble.

ROBERT: This is Deborah, Clive's wife.

DEBORAH WEARING: And in every concert, his signature tune was "Musica Dei donum," Music, the gift of God.

ROBERT: Boy, music, the gift of God. That's sort of interesting.

DEBORAH WEARING: Exactly.

ROBERT: And then what happened?

OLIVER SACKS: Then rather suddenly in March of '85, he became ill.

ROBERT: It began, she says, with just a headache.

DEBORAH WEARING: And he often had headaches because he often overworked, so it was nothing out of the ordinary.

ROBERT: But it didn't go away.

DEBORAH WEARING: We called the doctor, and the local doctors pronounced that it was a very bad flu bug.

OLIVER SACKS: The nature of the illness was not clear, nor its gravity.

DEBORAH WEARING: Yes. On the—phew—fifth day of the headache, he was suddenly out of it.

ROBERT: Suddenly, he couldn't remember things.

DEBORAH WEARING: He didn't know my name, didn't know his home address.

OLIVER SACKS: When the diagnosis was made of a herpes encephalitis, the damage had been done.

ROBERT: He was left, says Oliver, with the most severe amnesia ever documented.

OLIVER SACKS: This is a man who, at least when things were very severe, would forget something in the blink of an eyelid.

ROBERT: It's very hard to imagine what this must have been like. His wife Deborah wrote about it though, in a book of her own. And she says, "His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired, but he didn't seem able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. The view before the blink, utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back brought him an entirely new view."

DEBORAH WEARING: Well, every moment is his first waking moment.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: It's a long time since I've seen anything. My eyes are open today for the first time.]

DEBORAH WEARING: There is no other moment for Clive except this one.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: If I can't remember now what was going on this morning or why I was here. I've never seen anything.]

ROBERT: This is Clive from a documentary filmed a year after he got sick.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: There is no memory for me at all, anything at all. I don't know what the hell is going on.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: What's wrong with you?]

ROBERT: You can hear his wife Deborah trying for the umpteenth time to explain to him what happened.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I've never seen anyone at all.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: This is one of the things that's wrong with you.]

ROBERT: All he can feel is that he's not there.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I've never seen anything.]

ROBERT: That he's been nowhere.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I've been blind the whole time, I've been deaf the whole time. No sense of touch.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: You've been conscious, but the brain hasn't been able to ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Not as far as I'm concerned. 'Conscious' actually means that the person who's involved is actually connected with it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: This hasn't happened.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: You're not being able to store—well, everything that you experience has been lost. It's fading away.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: It's not registering.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: It's not registering. That's right. It's not making any impact. It's not leaving a trace or an imprint on the brain. So it happens and then it fades.]

OLIVER SACKS: Proust has a wonderful description of waking up from deep sleep in a hotel or a strange room, and perhaps feeling confused or not knowing where you are or what's around you, or not even knowing who you are. He says that memory comes like a rope let down from heaven to draw one out of the abyss of unbeing. No such rope is available for Clive.

ROBERT: But the staff at the hospital tried to help.

DEBORAH WEARING: We put a diary by his bed, and we initially wrote in it, "You are in St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington. It is—" et cetera, et cetera. And then we encouraged Clive to write things down.

OLIVER SACKS: So he starts to keep a journal. He is extremely intent on trying to document his state. He is very, very precise.

DEBORAH WEARING: He would look at his watch to see what time was this momentous event occuring of first consciousness. And so he would write down, "10:06. Awake first time." And then have the same sensation and put "10:07. Awake first time. Truly awake first time. Ignore the last entry. Now I'm awake. This is the first real awakeness." And so the diaries are line by line a succession of astonished awakenings.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: "People's interest in the diary are rubbish." What does that mean?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I have no idea.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: Did you write that?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I have no consciousness of it at all, no. You're showing me now for the first time.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: But it's—is it your handwriting?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Yes it is, but I know nothing about it at all.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: So how do you think it got there?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I did it. I presume the doctors didn't know.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: But you must be ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: No, I haven't. I haven't seen the book at all until now.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: No, all I'm saying is ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: No that's mean. That means I haven't seen it. I have no knowledge of it at all. That's all. There's no knowledge of that book. It's entirely new to me.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: But you've put—who would put that ...?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I don't know. But no, no—for heaven's sake. I haven't seen the bloody thing.]

ROBERT: It seems about as horrible as anything I could imagine.

OLIVER SACKS: Yes. Clive gets a sense of deep horror many many times a day.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Same as death. No difference between day and night, no thoughts at all.]

OLIVER SACKS: No one quite knows what to do with someone with amnesia.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I've never seen any human being since I've been ill. I don't remember sitting down on this chair for example.]

OLIVER SACKS: They're not mad, they're not retarded.

ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: It's precisely like death.]

ROBERT: Clive has now suffered with this total amnesia for more than 20 years.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Can you imagine having one night 20 years long with no dream? That's what it's been like. Just like death. In that sense, it's been totally painless.]

ROBERT: And yet somehow, some things have sustained. The love he has for his wife Deborah remained part of him. But even though he doesn't remember, for example, his children's names, he doesn't remember anything about his immediate past or even his relatively distant past, when Deborah walks into the hospital room ...

ROBERT: ... and he sees her, what's happening?

OLIVER SACKS: He gasps ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Darling!]

OLIVER SACKS: ... with relief and excitement. And they hug, and he kisses her with enormous passion. He is suddenly being rescued from the abyss. There's suddenly something and someone familiar.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Have I not seen you at all until now? Haven't seen anyone at all until now.]

ROBERT: She goes home and the phone is ringing. She's just visited him.

OLIVER SACKS: Yeah. And she may find—she might find 20 calls on the message machine.

ROBERT: From a man who doesn't know she's been there.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Hi darling, Clive here. It's 10 to 7. I don't know anybody in this place. I know nothing about this case at all. I want to speak to you please. Can you come and see me please as soon as you possibly can? I don't care about anybody else in the world but you. Please, please come. Love you.]

ROBERT: 14 minutes later ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: This is Clive here. I don't want to speak to anybody else. I only want to speak to you, darling. Can you come and see me please? I haven't seen you yet and I want to. Please come, darling. Bye bye.]

ROBERT: 11 minutes later ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: This is Clive here. I have no idea what's been going on. Is there any way you can get to me tonight? Please do come. I want to see you, please. Please come. Please come, darling. It's Clive here. I don't care about anyone else. This is Clive here, in case you don't recognize my voice.]

OLIVER SACKS: Now he does not remember her in every way. He may fail to recognize her if she just passes. He cannot describe her. He may forget her name, but he does not forget her embrace, her warmth, her love, her kisses, her caring for him.

ROBERT: So the question is: what happened here that he could forget everything it seems, but not her? Well, when I asked Oliver, he referred to an experiment, a particular experiment.

OLIVER SACKS: Well, this was a famous—or infamous—experiment done by Claparède, who was a French neurologist in the beginning—and this was done at the beginning of the 20th century.

STEVEN JOHNSON: And there was this famous patient who basically had a version of the—of the memory problem that was in the film Memento.

ROBERT: That's science writer Steven Johnson.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Basically, she couldn't remember anything longer than kind of five or ten minutes. It would just disappear. And every day she would go see her doctor, and he would greet her and she would say hello and introduce herself, and he would say, "Well, we see each other every day," but she wouldn't remember. And then one day—this is kind of a funny story because it's not exactly what you want your doctor doing, one day what he did was, he concealed—as he was shaking her hand, he concealed a little thumbtack in his palm, and reached and shook her hand and pricked her hand. And she, you know, recoiled and said, "Well, you're a terrible doctor!" And then the next day ...

ROBERT: When she came back again and didn't know who he was ...

STEVEN JOHNSON: ... didn't recognize him at all as usual, and said hello and introduced herself. And then he reached out to shake her hand and she paused. And she had this instinctive kind of feeling like there was some kind of threat here. If she had no memory, if she couldn't remember who this guy was, how could she somehow remember this—this threat, the threat posed by the pinprick in the palm?

ROBERT: Well, this is Oliver's notion.

OLIVER SACKS: And I think memories of pain and joy, I think, are sort of primordial.

ROBERT: Deep down in the oldest parts of our brains, Oliver thinks, there may be a place for the memories that matter the most.

OLIVER SACKS: And I like the idea of a sort of subcortical safe vault.

ROBERT: For Clive, protected in the vault, out of reach from his amnesia, was love for his wife and one thing more.

DEBORAH WEARING: Yeah, I'd taken him off the ward to get some peace because he was hypersensitive to noise. And the most peaceful place happened to be the chapel. And we picked up an old hymn book, and for want of anything better to do, and because Clive talked jumble most of the time at that stage, I began to sing.

ROBERT: And all of a sudden, like it was the most natural thing in the world ...

DEBORAH WEARING: He joined in.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: [singing]]

DEBORAH WEARING: He could sing!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: [singing]]

DEBORAH WEARING: I was amazed that he could still read music and sing.

ROBERT: Was it a tentative sort of stumbling thing, or ...?

DEBORAH WEARING: No, no. It was just like falling off a log.

ROBERT: Full voice, strong, everything.

DEBORAH WEARING: Yeah. And I was so thrilled!

ROBERT: Did you want to sing another?

DEBORAH WEARING: Oh, you bet!

ROBERT: And another?

DEBORAH WEARING: Yeah, absolutely.

ROBERT: And if he could do that, she wondered, well what else could he do?

DEBORAH WEARING: We even brought his choir in ...

ROBERT: The one he used to conduct in London.

DEBORAH WEARING: ... to the hospital chapel. I had a hunch that if we stood Clive in front of them with a piece of music, he would be able to conduct. And it happened just as I'd hoped. His singers were flabbergasted. There was their old conductor bringing them in completely and utterly himself.

ROBERT: And almost the instant it was over, it was over. He had no memory of what he'd just done. In fact, later on she showed him a tape of that very performance.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: What would you say if I told you you conducted the Lassus Ensemble this week?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: [laughs] That's hilarious!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: I thought you'd say that.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: That's absolutely hysterical.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: Do you want me to prove it to you? [singing]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: This is the strangest thing I have ever seen.]

ROBERT: On the screen right in front of him, there he is on the pedestal, baton in hand, and he's conducting.

OLIVER SACKS: He is fully in the music, fully himself. So music in a way becomes this Proustian rope from heaven, which will recall him to himself.

ROBERT: And no one really knows why.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I remember that now. [laughs]]

ROBERT: What music does that makes this possible. Not just in Clive but in many others. Maybe it's something about music itself, that it's so richly organized, that every time you're in a song, you can feel what has been and what's about to be. Maybe Clive was just carried along in the architecture of music.

DEBORAH WEARING: But when the music stops, he falls out of time. Music gives him a piece of time in which to exist.

ROBERT: Out of time, out of memory, out of himself. There's two things left: there's love and there's the joy of music. Everything else is gone, but for some reason, those stay.

ROBERT: Thanks to Deborah Wearing, she's written a book about Clive called Forever Today: A Memoir of Love and Amnesia. Thanks also once again to Oliver Sacks, who's included a piece about Clive in his new book on music and memory called Musicophilia. And thanks to Uden Associates, producers of the 1986 Jonathan Miller documentary, Equinox: Prisoner of Consciousness.

JAD: That's our show for today. And never fear, if you didn't absorb everything he just said because you can always go to our website, Radiolab.org. We will give you links there to any of the books that you just mentioned. I think ...

ROBERT: You can also subscribe to the podcast, right?

JAD: Yes. Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: Or go to iTunes.

JAD: Oh, one more thing.

ROBERT: Hmm?

JAD: You can send us an email, too.

ROBERT: Please.

JAD: Radiolab(@)wnyc.org. That's the email address. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And this was Radiolab.

[LISTENER: Hey, I'm Liz Landau. I'm calling you from Washington, DC. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Luis Viera and I'm calling from Mexico City. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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