Hello, everyone!

I know I’ve been hinting at this one for a while, so at long last, let’s talk about one of my most favorite literary tropes: amnesia. It’s been a top 5 trope of mine since gradeschool, even though these days I often complain about being dissatisfied with the amnesia stories I’m presented.

One might be tempted to connect this affection of mine with the fact that I also have a diagnosed memory disorder, and got diagnosed with it at around that same time. One would have a reasonable point, although I do think the fascination goes deeper.

The problem that I keep running into is that memory is so complex, and my interest in it runs deep enough, that it doesn’t fit into a newsletter of reasonable size. So, as I’ve done before, I’m gonna break it into several (not necessarily consecutive) newsletters.

But I’m going to be a bit unintuitive. Because most stories about amnesia involve people who have what we call retrograde amnesia—they’ve forgotten some or all of their past, but with a solid cutoff, past which they’re fine. The only exceptions I can think of are stories taking on dementia, and the movie Memento.

But I’m going to start someplace else entirely, because I think understanding memory is best done by looking first at those who suffer a different sort of real life amnesia; anterograde amnesia.

Let’s start with psychology’s most well known case of real amnesia. In fact, he’s one of psychology’s most famous case studies in general (after Mr. Phineas Gage). If you’ve taken a college level intro to psych course, you might have heard of him as H.M., but his name was Henry Gustav Molaison. He was one of the most studied people in the history of psychology, from his experimental brain surgery in 1953, right up till is death in 2008.

The surgery was supposed to be an attempt to cure debilitating epilepsy, and technically, it did at least significantly improve his epilepsy. (It had previously been tried on several patients with psychosis, to absolutely no benefit.)

But, after the surgery, Mr. Molaison couldn’t form most types of new memories.

There are so many types of memory. There’s long term, short term, working, declarative, episodic, implicit, procedural. I almost defined all of those but frankly I think that gets too homework-like for a newsletter that’s supposed to be fun. It’s worth looking up though if you like this kind of thing.

The thing you need to know is that these forms of memories form a complex ecosystem of neurological record that interact with each other and at times depend on each other.

My personal deficits are in short term memory- especially if the thing I have to remember includes sequential information.

When I go to my local convention, and I need to find a specific room, I walk up to someone, and ask for directions. They will often give me a list of like 4 steps. By the time I’ve made it to the escalators, I’ve forgotten the rest. I find someone else to ask, get those directions again, do one more step. Rinse and repeat till I find my destination.

If something can’t be successfully committed to short term memory, it’s not likely to make it into long term memory. I’ve been going to the same convention in the same hotel for years, but the information has never stuck. So, a bunch of things you’d think were in my long term memory are simply not there.

You’d likely think this means I have bad memory overall.

You wouldn’t be exactly wrong, because of that missing link. I didn’t learn my own social security number until I was 37, and if I hadn’t started a business with egregious amounts of paperwork, I’m confident I still wouldn’t know it.

But because memory is so varied, it’s a lot more complex than that. My visual memory is top shelf. I can draw layouts of buildings I haven’t seen in decades and recall all kinds of visual details, right down to light quality. I have a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of commercial jingles from the ‘90s and I didn’t even want to remember that. I remember details of the lives of dozens of therapy clients plus my own friends and family with ease. I managed to get a graduate degree.

This is why I’m so passionate about the complexity of memory.

While Mr. Molaison is the most famous amnesia patient, the one that most struck me during my studies is a Mr Clive Wearing, an English musician and conductor who experienced illness-induced brain damage that left him with a maximum 30 second memory span—and nothing else. He has no conscious memory of his history prior to his illness, and next to no way to create new memories, either. He exists in a rolling half minute of now, with nothing before or afterwards.

Every morning he awakes with no sense of having existed before, and runs to a journal, to declare that this time, for the first time, he is awake. He’d cross out the previous entries. He was eventually able to remember that he had children, but has never developed the capacity for remembering their names or specifics.

Strikingly, when he sees his wife, his feelings for her endure, even if he felt he had never seen her before. He has the sensation of falling instantaneously madly in love with her, even when she got up to use the bathroom and came back. At times, he can remember that she was his wife, but felt enduringly like they’d been separated for years, even if it’d been moments. He does not know her name.

He can still play piano and, astonishingly, even learn new pieces. He can learn new facts and skills, but has no sense of when or how he acquired them.

He eventuality was able to understand that he’s had an illness, and his memory is impaired.

But his whole life is permanently contracted to this moment, and this moment again, over and over. No history, and no future to project from this history. He is trapped, forever, in a single, shifting moment.

Real human brains are so complicated and so infinitely weird. It pains me how little our fiction really engages with that, when stories are such a big part of how we understand our own natures. What does it mean to know yourself? What does it mean to know someone else? What does it mean to love them?

We should be getting much weirder with all of it, is what I’m saying. We know more now than we ever have before about how we work. And I want fiction to keep up with what we’ve learned. Being weirder could actually more interesting and more realistic.

I want to and will say more, but that will have to wait for future months.

In the mean time, it’s Queer Pride month! I’ve got my first book in two low price ebook bundles of other queer books to celebrate.

The first bundle is 11 queer scifi, fantasy and horror books for $10, from now through the 13th. You can find that one here.

And the other is 25 books by queer disabled authors for $25! That one isn’t available till June 21st, on the cusp between queer pride month and disability pride month. Starting then, you can get that book bundle right here.

Another newsletter-news tidbit that I want to share with you is that you can come see me at CONvergence this year! I will be an invited participant with a meet and greet/signing table (ok to come if you don’t want anything signed. I know most of you opted for the ebook). I’ll also be on the Humans and Genetic engineering panel as well as the Beyond Binary: Gender and Robots panel, and be giving a solo presentation on Exploring Cyborg Psychology that I am incredibly excited about, exploring real and fictional cyborgs and how their tech may impact mental health. It’s been a research subject of mine for well over a decade now. If you want something really fun to do over 4th of July weekend, and can make it to Minneapolis, check it out here!

And as for this month’s free good-thing-to-do, please consider telling the FCC that you think it’s absurd that that want to include a warning label on media that isn’t cisgender enough for Republicans. Treating people who anybody can see walking down the street as the same as content with torture or porn is insulting, pointless, and mean-spirited. You can find out more about that and find out how to comment here. We don’t need more deliberately discriminatory policies. You may not have any reason to know this, but TV for kindergardeners has actually taken a huge turn towards gender inclusion in recent years, in a completely appropriate and nonchalant way. There’s no reason to walk that back except to appeal to ultra-conservative parents who don’t want to have to pay any attention to their kid’s screen time.

And that’s enough from me for now. Thank you, as always, for reading!

Best wishes,

Lee Brontide