Returning & Forgetting

   Since returning from our trip to the Cornish coast of England, both my wife and I have had a longer-than-usual (for us, at least) time recovering from jet lag.  The throwing off of our circadian rhythms keeps waking us up at 4 or 5 in the morning, despite our best efforts to resist naps and go to sleep at our normal hours.  Hunger also follows the pattern, arriving way ahead of schedule and virtually gone by dinner time.  It is something both frustrating and fascinating, once again displaying the complexities of the brain (here's how the National Institutes of Health puts it: The biological clocks that control circadian rhythms are groupings of interacting molecules in cells throughout the body.  A "master clock" in the brain coordinates all the body clocks so that they are in synch.  The "master clock" that controls circadian rhythms consists of a group of nerve cells in the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN.  The SCN contains about 20,000 nerve cells and is located in the hypothalamus, an area of the brain just above where the optic nerves from the eyes cross)..

   Less than a week has passed and already, other than a few quick showings of a few photos and videos, the memories and images are shifting over to another section of my mind, as if clearing a space for the new thoughts and memories that will arrive.  So I was drawn to an article in The New Yorker called Life Lines by Daniel Zaklewski, a piece about a rather successful artist (covers for magazines such as The New Yorker, art work for Lotus software, postcards at the MOMA, etc.).  The unique feature of this artist, Lonni Sue Johnson, is that she has severe amnesia;  as the author states, "once an event slips her mind, it is gone for good," a "singular brain" as scientists term it.

   For Lonnie Sue Johnson, this loss of immediate memory came from a bout of encephalitis which severely affected her hippocampus in her brain, causing the amnesia.  As the article mentions: In movies, amnesia is often portrayed as a vaporizing of identity, but the condition rarely manifests itself that way in real life.  Johnson does not ask others, “Who am I?”  She retains “semantic memories,” or factual knowledge, of some fundamental aspects of her life story: she knows that her name is Lonni Sue, that she grew up in Princeton, and that she worked as an illustrator on a farm in upstate New York.  But even the bare essentials are often beyond reach: her retrograde amnesia, or difficulty remembering her past, is so extensive that she cannot recall any friends, or even her ex-husband, a music professor she lived with for a decade...Such debilities can be found in many people with dementia.  Far more unusual is Johnson’s inability to record memories, or anterograde amnesia.  Her “temporal window”—the period of time that she can reliably keep track of—slams shut after only a minute or two.  If something distracts Johnson, her mental continuity can last a few seconds... Sometimes, mid-conversation, you can see a mental hyperlink break, as Johnson’s eyes start darting, covertly seeking orientation.  Her life is an endless series of jump cuts.  In our age of pinging distractions, people often express a desire to “be present,” but Johnson belies such sentimentality.  She is marooned in the present.

   Coming back, it seemed as if our trip to Cornwall had happened last week, or last year, or ten years ago, for it was now rapidly becoming memories relegated to our own hippocampus sections (and put on our surrogate computers), the placement of time now drifting off like a broken satellite in space.  This was somewhat captured in the movie Interstellar where Matthew McConaughey plays astronaut Joseph Cooper and enters a portion of the "singularity" of a black hole, finding that beings in the future had recorded every thought and action in our current three dimensional world, past, present and future; but he soon realizes, they didn't know what to do with it, so there it was, just all being stored for later discovery. 

   But as the article on Lonnie Sue Johnson goes on, it would appear that our memories are cumulative, a learning process that builds upon earlier experiences.  “We tend to assume that she experiences life the same way as the rest of us do, from moment to moment, and just doesn’t store anything,” Turk-Browne told me.  “This assumption seems wrong.  It underestimates the role of memory in perception—our ongoing experience is always being informed by the past.”  In 2011, scientists discovered hippocampal cells that pulse at regular intervals, marking how much time has elapsed since an earlier event.  Turk-Browne speculated that Johnson’s “sense of time might be compressed.”  Then again, “a vacant past might be like a boring movie, dragging on due to a lack of intrigue, change, and surprise."...The N.Y.U. psychologist Jerome Bruner has written that the “self is a perpetually rewritten story,” but anterograde amnesiacs are not subject to the revisions of experience, and Johnson is unlikely to abandon her cheery industriousness. Or her case may simply confirm one benefit of being an amnesiac. As Turk-Browne put it, “Everything feels a bit new to her all the time.”

   Our brains our fascinating pieces of our bodies, constantly changing and adapting and revamping...to stimuli, to chemicals, to impact and abuse.  This piece on the rise and possible failure of Alcoholics Anonymous in The Atlantic by author Gabrielle Glaser shows some of this adaptation going on behind the scenes:  Alcohol acts on many parts of the brain, making it in some ways more complex than drugs like cocaine and heroin, which target just one area of the brain.  Among other effects, alcohol increases the amount of GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), a chemical that slows down activity in the nervous system, and decreases the flow of glutamate, which activates the nervous system. (This is why drinking can make you relax, shed inhibitions, and forget your worries.)   Alcohol also prompts the brain to release dopamine, a chemical associated with pleasure.
Over time, though, the brain of a heavy drinker adjusts to the steady flow of alcohol by producing less GABA and more glutamate, resulting in anxiety and irritability.  Dopamine production also slows, and the person gets less pleasure out of everyday things.  Combined, these changes gradually bring about a crucial shift: instead of drinking to feel good, the person ends up drinking to avoid feeling bad.  Alcohol also damages the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for judging risks and regulating behavior—one reason some people keep drinking even as they realize that the habit is destroying their lives.  The good news is that the damage can be undone if they’re able to get their consumption under control.

   So here I am, wide awake at 4 or 5 in the morning, my brain still back in England-time but my memories already processing and shifting back to the routine at home in the States...make coffee, go swim, mow the lawn, pay the bills, all revealing a fascinating partitioning of the brain, the active multi-tasking over past and present.  But it's spring here, and awake with me at this hour are dozens or hundreds of birds outside, their mini-alarms quietly and pleasantly bringing me into the present that is geographically here.  Morning has arrived anew, not only here but everywhere around the world, jet lagged or not.  It is being created and stored everywhere, and it is only up to us "to know what to do with it."