Memory Hidden in Mist

“Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memory and take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.” This was a quote by Mark Lawerence from his book “King of Thrones.” Lawerence talks about memory just in the idea of being able to remember past events that were important to us, and losing this would cause us to lose all feeling toward life and lose passion towards life. But is that all memory is. Just recalling past events, or is it something more. Oliver Sacks shows in his book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” that there could be many different aspects of memory. After reading the book it is easy to see that memory can have a huge impact on almost everything we do.

Imagine not being able to consciously forming habits, being stuck in only one area of time, or not being able to remember what parts of your body are yours. All of these seem likely completely preposterous ideas to us who don’t suffer from impaired memory abilities. Most of the everyday activities that we do would be completely impossible for people with these deficits.

One part of our memory that most people know of is forming new memories. This allows us to gain new skills, follow along with a timeline of modern events, but what happens if you suddenly stop and you don’t feel older and you feel like you are still after World War 2. Sacks had a patient that was nicknamed “The Lost Mariner.” The patient thought he was still nineteen years old, but in reality he was forty nine years old. The loss of the ability to form and retain new memories made it impossible for him to learn new information. He could do math,...

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...ged healed. There was a sense of nostalgia because these long forgotten memories had brought back a part of her life, it had made her feel complete. In Mrs. O’M’s case she had to deal with the problem of hearing songs for a significant longer period of time. Her songs were the same three songs in a row. These songs had no emotional attachment, as the Irish songs had with Mrs. O’C. They soon became a curse for her to deal with them. When the symptoms finally vanished, she was asked by Sacks if she missed the music, and unlike Mrs. O’C, Mrs. O’M was extremely ecstatic to be rid of these symptoms that were forced upon her.

It is easy to see how important memory is through the several chapters that were mentioned in the above sections, and Sacks had even more examples. One of the most striking chapters about memory of our bodies was “Eyes Right.” In this chapter Mrs.