Living without memory

The situations that the different people described are in are disturbing and distressing, but what extraordinary things they are capable of, and what strange aspects of knowledge, consciousness and how humans (& perhaps other animals) function their capacities throw some illumination onto.

Sometimes I feel that what I'm aware of as “self” is like a little sailboat scudding along over sunlit wavetops on a wafer-thin surface — a bit like a scale diagram of the biosphere in relation to the size of the earth — while all kinds of life and currents are going on unseen beneath.

A Neurologist’s Notebook

The Abyss

Music and amnesia.
by Oliver Sacks, The New Yorker, September 24, 2007

www.newyorker.com/ reporting/ 2007/ 09/ 24/ 070924fa_fact_sacks?currentPage=1

Clive Wearing now has “a memory span of only seconds – the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded. New events and experiences were effaced almost instantly … he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was utterly forgotten …
In addition to this inability to preserve new memories, Clive had a retrograde amnesia, a deletion of virtually his entire past.”

A short film; A sad memory

Doll Face
fraser.typepad.com/ frolix_8/ 2006/ 12/ doll_face.html
(via Pharyngula)

Sorry for long gaps in posting, for anyone who cares. A combination of not feeling too good, and having to use times when I am for catching up on a lot of stuff in Real Life. Plus some being distracted by the "ooh, shiny!" web factor and not getting around to blogging it. Some sad memories tonight; sometimes it seems time flies, and other times memories can be so real and strong and present.

In midst of life is death, and life goes on
And that's the hardest thing, for those who stay
For love and spring and work get in the way
Are consolation, balm, but still you're gone.
We live life day by day, and days accrete
To bury you in stratigraphic time
Remembered in a place, a new-found rhyme,
Caught in the finished past, enclosed, complete.
We rage in helplessness at time and death
But onwards is the one direction left
The hope of future joy, although bereft,
For we must dare to live, while we have breath.
(On Easter morning, roll away the stone
Behold the empty tomb: but still alone.)
   — Jo Walton