Story time!

I once bumped my head and got complete retrograde amnesia. I lost basically all of my episodic memory — that is, the memory of all my past experiences. My semantic memory appeared to be intact, which meant I retained my general knowledge of the world, such as who was prime minister. However, I basically lost all sense of my identity for a while. I didn’t even remember my name at first. Honestly, I don’t know if I can say that I ever truly remembered my name after the fact; I was fortunate that my memory did return to me gradually over the course of many days, weeks and months, but because I was told my name many times over that period, I never got that sense of remembering my name (I’m going to use the psuedonym Ann for the sake of this story)

Anyway, it was terrifying at the time, but now that I’m past the dread and trauma of it all, I can reflect on it as a cool experience. A few days after the accident, when I still had very little memory of who I was, I went to a Christmas party with many of my friends. However, it felt like being in a room full of strangers. It was awkward at first when I arrived; people didn’t know how to act towards me, and seemed uncertain of whether I was still the person they knew. That was a fear I shared. However, they seemed to ease up quite quickly, because it seemed that my personality was still authentic to the person they knew, even if I had to start from scratch in getting to know them. It’s a bizarre experience to reflect on, because now I have two sets of memories of meeting some of my dearest friends for the first time.

The most distressing part of it all was when I had gotten to know some of the people in my life, and had put together many of the fragments about who I was. I wasn’t sure that I was that person though. I felt like an intruder in someone else’s life, and I was terrified that I wasn’t the same person. All the wonderfully supportive people around me — how could I call them my friends when I wasn’t the same Ann that had earned their friendship. Apparently I still acted like her, but if I was her, why was there such a stark division between the two versions of Ann in my head: there was the Ann who existed before the accident, and the Ann that I was afterwards — I didn’t know whether I could consider them to be the same. If we were the same person, why was I talking about “her” rather than “me”?

Some months after the accident, a romantic relationship started between me and my best friend. We had been close friends for a few years prior, and he later confessed to me that a part of him was anxious that maybe we wouldn’t have been together if not for the bump to my head. I was surprised to hear this, because my friend was a super charismatic guy and this kind of anxiety seemed out of character for him. I understood where he was coming from though. I told him that it would be nice if I could tell him that his worry was a silly one, and that of course the amnesia wasn’t the only reason we were together. However, I didn’t actually know whether I was the same person. By then, it felt like the vast majority of my memories had returned, and no-one reported any discernible personality change to me. However, I had no way to know what significant memories, if any, were still missing to me. I didn’t think that his fears were true, but ultimately, I had no way of knowing, and I just had to live with that — and unfortunately, so did he.

One of the most disconcerting aspects of it all was how it felt to rediscover a memory. Have you ever had something remind you of a memory that was tucked away so deep in your mind that you didn’t even know you still had it until something brought it to the surface? A foggy fragment from childhood perhaps? Well that’s what regaining my memories felt like. In the early days, it was extremely vague bits that I remembered.

The first fragment was in the hospital waiting room, when I remembered that the friend who was with me was someone who reuses day old tea bags (they will take the mug they used the previous day and add a new teabag in with the old one, and pour in new hot water). Bear in mind that this was a person who I had initially thought had drugged and kidnapped me, because my first memory after the fall was feeling dizzy in a room, surrounded by complete strangers who claimed to be my friends. I was so overjoyed and surprised to have something come back to me that I loudly exclaimed this revelation in the half full hospital waiting room. The first thing I remembered of my best friend was snow, because of a road trip we’d taken together the previous year. The next fragment about him was barbeques (he enjoyed getting people together for one in the Summer), and the next bit was Lord of the Rings. At first, it felt like I was receiving loose, disparate fragments about a person, but over time, it began to feel more like I was filling in the final pieces in a mostly complete jigsaw. But then, that’s not far from how it feels to be close friends about a person, and to discover new facts about them, despite having known them for years.

Nowadays, when I have that feeling of a long forgotten memory returning to me, I’m unsure of whether it’s another fragment returning to me post amnesia, or if it’s just the regular kind of remembering stuff. It’s been around 6 years since the accident, so I have a heckton of new memories on top of that. A few years ago, I had that peculiar feeling of a memory returning, and I assumed that it was another amnesia thing returning, but then I realised that this particular rediscovered fragment happened after the accident, so this was just normal, run of the mill forgetting. That was jarring to realise that memory has always been fallible like this. Whilst yes, complete retrograde amnesia is a super rare experience, nothing had really changed.

Memories are always slippery things. I’ve read neuroscience research that suggests that when we remember a thing, we’re sort of rewriting the memory. It’s like if every time you checked out a book from the library, you weren’t allowed to return that specific book, but instead had to write out the book and return a new copy of the same book. Even if you try hard to be accurate, there’s inevitably going to be some errors in transcription (just look at transcription errors in manuscripts before the invention of the printing press). This means that the more you check out a particular book, the more likely it is to be changed. Trippy stuff, huh? That’s what I mean when I say that nothing had really changed. The amnesia made me feel unstable because I didn’t have my memories to rely on to build my sense of reality, but memories will always be fallible. We like to pretend they’re not, but everything we perceive is filtered through our own subjective filters, and then each time we reflect on our recollections, we pass those memories through the filter again. Even before my amnesia, my memories were not an accurate reflection of reality — that’s just a lie that makes us feel more at ease with the inherent instability of our own perceptions and experiences. That fact was brought to my attention in a rather abrupt way, but it’s one of the reasons I’m oddly glad for this absurd experience. It was certainly philosophically interesting.

I could talk forever on this topic, because it was a hell of a ride, but I’ll stop here, because this comment is long enough already. I’m open to answering any questions that y’all want to throw at me though, because God knows there aren’t many people with an experience like this. You don’t have to worry about being overly intrusive or about upsetting me, though be aware that I might not get round to answering your questions.

Well, you’d be interested to know that people with amnesia and cannot form new memories still become accustomed to people are are friendly around them despite not knowing who they are or why they feel friendly. It’s in a different part of the brain. Also some forms of muscle memory are literally stored in your muscles.

Depression struggled with me for several years, I lost my ability to recall events which happened in my life. I had knowledge of my life’s events, but I wasn’t able to actually recall any of them. My son’s birth, my parents’ faces, etc. I felt dead inside and considered myself already dead, even if my mortal coil still churned on like some kind of pale imitation of life.

Anyway, one day, a traumatic event from my past resurfaced itself, and I was forced to confront it. After that, I slowly began regaining my memories which had been locked away. I made the choice to leave an abusive relationship, I reconnected with my loved ones from my earlier life. I still sometimes hear the whisper in my ear to end it all, but it’s not as persistent, not as loud. I can touch the memory of the trauma without feeling like a pit just opened within me.

I guess what I’m saying is, I was dead when I lost my memories, and when I got them back, I am alive again.

I had west Nile virus and it got into my brain and it was a mess.

Anyhow, during that years long Rollercoaster of a recovery, there was a period of apparently a week where I don’t remember at all.

Like, woke up in a hospital I’d never seen before. Wandered out to have strangers greet me as if they knew me… had to literally ask the question “where am I? How long have I been here?”

Anyways, the experience made it difficult to escape considering questions similar to yours. Who was that guy who was apparently walking around doing stuff and talking to people that week in MY body?

Short answer: always me. People have such little understanding of how at the mercy of chemicals and electrical impulses they are. You’re you when it’s all working, you’re still you when it’s not. Trying to tie something as foundational as identity to something as ephemeral as memory isn’t a good idea, unless you want identity to be something that changes second to second.

My point of view is that the entire “you” concept needs to be constructed in the first place because it isn’t a self-evident, easily-defined thing. There are centuries of philosophy on this topic, none of it conclusive. Ergo: it’s kind of your call if you are even “you” when you wake up each morning, or just a fresh iteration with your memories that believes it’s “you.” Having hit my 50s I’m quite confident that the person in all my pictures from college is not “me” in any meaningful way. All the memories I have from that time are unreliable reconstructions anyway - stories my brain tells itself.

Years ago a friend was in a horrible car wreck and came out mostly paralyzed and with no memory of the last few years. She didn’t remember her college friends and clung to her newly found relgious support group. She was never religious before. Her personality was completely different in numerous ways. She was effectively a different person and we no longer had anything in common. I don’t know what happened to her after that, but I mourned the loss of a friend.

I’m personally of the belief that you are largely the sum of your experiences, so yeah a total loss of memories would mean I am by some definition “dead”. That said, you could easily argue by that same logic that the “me” of a year, month, or even minute ago is also “dead”, since she lacks the experiences that makes me who I am now. I don’t even dispute that that much tbh.

How deep do you want to go down the rabbit hole?

Do you trust your memory? Is how you remember it really how it happened? If someone else tells you it happened another way, is there any way to tell which one, or even if either, is correct?

If the memory happened long ago, how much of the body that was there then is still here now? Is any of it?

How much of your knowledge can be trusted? Do you still believe thunder is the sound of clouds bumping together, or some other old story from your childhood?

If you have a memory of a dream, or a hallucination, is it a memory of a real event? If you don’t remember that it was a hallucination, does it become real for you?

Step out of self-focus for a moment. What is a memory? The resonance between a perceived pattern and the stored pattern in the pattern-recognition system in your head. If the pattern isn’t perceived to trigger the memory, do you still remember? If the connection is malformed, and the smell of chocolate reminds you of the taste of cheese, what does chocolate taste like when it isn’t in your mouth? If the connection is fully broken, and you forget your name, who do you become? Who are you if, after living longer as this new self than as the old self, your brain heals and restores your memory of who you were?

Is the body that holds this memory you? Where are the edges of that object? Materials move constantly in and out of the visible bounds thought of as your flesh, through lung tissue, through skin, through disgestive tissues, eyes, teeth, all of it to varying degrees. Nothing is impermeable. When oxygen is absorbed by your skin, carried to a neuron that forms part of the pattern that tells you you had a chicken sandwich last night, is chemically bonded to another molecule and expelled again, when it is part of you? Is it part of the memory?

Research shows ones personality can be changed by as little as how long it has been since lunch. Are you a different person when you are hangry?

How much of you is your memory? If your memories go away, how much of you remains? Does any?

Is there even a you? The you you are now is clearly almost nothing like the you you were as a child. Are you still the same person? If yes, how? If no, when did the transition happen from one to the other? If information is part of what makes you you, are you even the same person you were when you started reading this comment?

If there is no real separation between you and the things that move in and out of you, is memory anything more than a cycle of reactions, matter and energy triggering chemical changes triggering chemosyntesis, chemotaxis, osmosis. Do even those things exist, or are they merely more patterns of information found to assist the pattern of matter that stores them in the function of preserving that information?

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, PHILOSOPHY RABBIT HOLE!

The Apple TV show “Severance” is mind fucking presented as entertainment.

It imagines a process whereby you can be made to forget all your personal history. Employers use it so they can have workers who don’t care about anything except the company and their jobs. At the end of the day the ‘original you’ comes back for 16 hours.

I can think of some other science fiction that deals with the same idea.

People with amnesia are usually considered still alive, I expect.

Sorta. Its why you sorta lose a person to demetia. Even with retrograde amnesia I have heard a persons personality. Likes, dislikes, etc. Do not change. So there is something a bit more to a person.

You are a delusion, a narrative device conjured up by your unconscious mind to try to make sense of your actions.

I believe that the entire concept of “self” is just an illusion. There is no “you” back there behind your face looking out into the world. There’s just consciousness - the fact of experience and its content. The sense of self is just an appereance in consciousness. Not something that’s outside or separate of it.

I’m an amnesiac and one of the first things I learned is that memories don’t really matter. The past is over, what matters is what you choose to do and not what you did. Obviously people do terrible and sometimes unforgivable things. I can sympathize with people who can’t let stuff go, but I personally just can’t be bothered by it anymore though. I have and will offer support to even my abusers.

To me, a person is how they act and what they want in the present. Lived experience affects everything a person does, the parts of a person’s past that are relevant reveal themselves in the present through how a person is.

This was my grandfather’s axe; the head’s been replaced twice and the handle three times since he owned it.

It’s the same pizza we had last week. / Eww! Shouldn’t you have gotten rid of it by now? / No – I mean, it’s just got the same toppings! We ordered it last night!

If you could swap memories with another person, which body is “you”? Well, that depends on what the meaning of the word is is… Mr. President.

An annoying amount of philosophy “problems” are really just equivocation about different kinds of equivalence.

These ramblings brought to you from my aging – though not yet lost – memories of long hours of procrastination during my sophomore year in college…