210 Self and the Phenomenon of Life
b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanity “9x6”importance of memory in constructing the biographical self, the stuff of
who a person is.
Such extreme conditions of memory loss are very rare, but more
common and slow versions befall many elderly people suffering from
Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia, the latter caused by impaired
blood flow to the brain or cumulative small strokes.^2 These people irre-
versibly lose their memory bit by bit, until they no longer are their own
self. In the book bearing the depressing title Remind Me Who I am,
Again! Linda Grant described how her demented mother had lost her
recent memories and was about to lose the remote memories: “Only the
deep past remained, which emerged at moments, in bits and pieces. ...
This moment, the one she is really living in, is lost from sight as soon as it
happens. And the long-ago memories are vanishing too. Only fragments
remain. Soon, she will no longer recognize me, her own daughter. ...
Memory, I have come to understand, is everything, it’s life itself.”^3
Memory is the thread that connects the pieces of your past into a
sensible whole. In a shorter version, it is the equivalent of a calling card
you present to a new acquaintance at a cocktail party; in a longer version,
it is the résumé that you prepare for a prospective employer. If your self is
a portrait, memory is the paint applied on the canvas, one stroke at a time.
From the biological standpoint, animals need memory so that their
experiences can influence future actions in a positive way — increasing
their chance of survival. Unlike other animals whose duration of mem-
ory storage is limited by their life span, humans have the unique ability
to preserve and transmit their memory across many generations in the
form of writing and digitized records.
10.2 The Story of HM and the Secret to Human Memory
The first clue to unlocking the secret to human memory came in 1953,
when a 27-year-old man named HM (Henry Molaison, 1926–2008)
underwent surgery to cure his intractable seizures. The procedure con-
sisted of removing his medial temporal lobe (mainly the hippocampus