Ahhh, said George, that is fine, very fine, but what cure for the memory hole?
Wow indeed.
Flowers for Algernon, anybody?
Flowers for Algernon – one of my all time favorites.
Outstanding news for everyone with older parents.
Re. Algernon. I think there was a movie made from that with Cliff Robertson.
Ah yes, “Flowers for Algernon.” Great minds read Neo-Neocon.
Sometimes, I wish I were a mouse – they get all the really neat cures.
Reminds me of this movie, which is actually pretty interesting.
This is very promising research, but I must say that Yahoo’s science writers are lousy. I got stuck on the part about brains releasing genes, so I checked another article via Google. Apparently the researchers have identified a gene that codes for the PKR enzyme and they have some understanding of how this gene is regulated and how PKR is released. I could only access a summary of the article, but it appears that the process is complicated. It drives me crazy when writers reinforce the one gene equals one trait or illness clichee. Sometimes this is true, but most of the time, we are a lot more complicated.
Yes, expat, the phrase “brains releasing genes” kind of made me go “WTF?”
Only people without such a memory would wnt it
For those like me and rainman who have such not having it would be better
Care to relive the worst parts of ur life with perfect graphic recall as i do? Care to be hated and attacked by others? Care to suffer schizophrenia from too much and no capacity to handle it?
Maybe more later.
Have to switch borrowed phones
6 hr drive from surabaya to solo
By the way xmas decorations in islamic majority country and xmas carrols about christ are all over and not like in the states!
The Cliff Robertson movie was “Charlie”, I believe. It made reference to “Flowers for Algernon” in the film. In the movie, his brain damage was due to a high fever as a child.
My father-in-law had Alzheimer’s, and though I hate to say it, I would take the .38 caliber Universal Cure before I would go through that myself, or inflict it on my family. To the people working on this research, I can only echo Insty and say, “Faster, please”.
More and more of the very tantalizing research on disease, genetics, and our understanding about how the human body works that is being reported these days make it seem likely that the human lifespan will, in the relatively near future, be extended by possibly decades or longer; I’ve occasionally seen what I consider wild speculation by some of the writers coving these developments, talking about life spans of 150 years or perhaps many more.
Many science fiction stories dealing with theme of long life or even immortality often have as one of the things they focus on the problems such long life would present where memory is concerned. Could we comfortably live very extended, hundreds of years long lives, when we would be endlessly repeating —and remembering–the same basic events over and over again–breakfast, buying groceries, walking down the lane, looking at the moon, falling in love? After a while, would the almost endless repetitions of basically similar events and experiences just clog up our memories, make life less and less interesting, a burden, boredom instead of an endless delight? What, too, is the storage capacity of the human brain as regards memories?
One solution that is sometimes proposed in these stories is “editing,” i.e. every so often we go through our memories and edit out the repetitions or unwanted parts, and either delete them permanently or offload them onto some storage device for later retrieval if necessary. Even more complications would present themselves, I imagine, if one also had a perfect or near perfect memory which, I would imagine, would only intensify memory problems as the hundreds of years ticked off.
So, for these writers–peering into the future and speculating about what things might be like–very long life and a perfect memory might not be the boon they at first appear to be.
Read “flowers” when it first came out in “Fantasy & Science Fiction” magazine ‘way back. It was a terrific book because it was written in the first person and the author got the protagonist believably from mentally deficient to MENSA sounding in style and insights, and then starting back again.
The movie was “Charly” (the rat), spelled wrong because the character was not a good speller, or much else, outside the short period where the drug was working.
Besides “Flowers for Algernon,” another fictional treatment of memory (in this case, hyper-memory) is Borges’ “Funes, the Memorious,” discussed here.
I also once read a work of science fiction long ago, but I can remember neither the name nor the author. It was a short story, the premise of which was that people had incredibly long lives. The consequence was boredom and ennui, and to counteract that, they invented a way to put their consciousness into other beings, such as animals, for a period of time. Anyone ever read this story? I’ve long been wanting to find it again.
Extraordinary memory capacity in humans usualy associated with schizophrenia. Untill we get better understanding of this disease, all experiments with memory boosting are VERY DANGEROUS.
I’m with Surellin, faster please. Of course, I wish I also had more things worth remembering.
Sergey, could you elaborate on the connection between extraordinary memory and schizophrenia. I thought schizos remember things that aren’t real.
On the subject of delusions versus reality did you hear that Obama considers himself the fourth best president in US history? Apparently CBS cut that out of an interview he gave but the underground smuggled it out or something.
Dead on sergey
those who can handle the info aren’t schizo those who can’t well are or are possibly autistic where the lack of filtering makes them tune out the world or stim for solace
That short story (actually a novelette) about immortal humans getting temporarily transformed into animals for recreation or psychotherapy is probably “The Star Beast” by Poul Anderson.
[BEGIN QUOTE]
“Won’t you change?” she asked.
“Oh, yes. I won’t ever be able to remember a lot of things I now know. I doubt if even the most intelligent tiger could understand vector analysis. But that won’t matter, I’ll get it back when they restore my human form. When I feel the personality change has gone as far as is safe, I’ll come here and you can send me back to Rebirth. The important thing is the therapy–a change of viewpoint, a new and challenging environment– Avi!” He sat up, on one elbow and looked down at her. “Avi, why don’t you come along? Why don’t we both become tigers?”
“And have lots of little tigers? No, thanks, Harol. Maybe some day, but not now. I’m really not an adventurous person at all.”
[END QUOTE]
There are actually people who for some reason remember everything – I think it was 60 Minutes that did a story on this phenomenon recently. They interviewed Marilu Henner and about 4 others who can recall everything about every day of their lives – what they did, said, wore, ate, etc. The downside was that they have such vivid memories of their emotions that it can be overwhelming; recalling the day a parent died is like reliving the event. The interesting thing was that only one of them (Marilu) was married. It seems that it would be hard to live with someone (or hard for them to live with you) when you can remember everything about them (every slight, mistake, etc.).
I remember my 82 year old grandfather telling me he couldn’t remember what he did yesterday or what he had for breakfast, but he could recall scenes from his younger life in great detail. It seemed to him that the newer, repetitive experiences didn’t register, while his mind was actively recalling experiences from so many years before. Maybe it is a way of preparing us for our eventual demise or providing us with mental activity to prevent boredom?
I’m approaching that age and am beginning to experience the same phenomena. Recent memories fade quickly. Memories from many years ago (my childhood and early adulthood) seem quite fresh and vivid. I have been working on writing down these memories (sort of a bio) as a something for my daughter to read after I’m gone.
As I’ve gotten older and less physically capable, I have had to replace some of my physical activities (fishing, skiing, mountain climbing, back packing, body building, and heavy carpentry) with less strenuous activities. Learning to use the computer and to roam the blogosphere has been a big help.
It would be nice to have a drug that can defend against alzheimers, but I don’t think I would want perfect recall. Artfldgr has already pointed out some of the negatives. I think what most of us want is to not become mentally unable to function as in dementia or alzheimers caused by aging, rather than have total recall. At least that’s my preference.
I doubt that perfect recall is attainable if one has never had it in the first place.
The 60 Minutes piece on the total recall group (which inspired the new series “Unforgettable”) revealed that they all categorize like mad: they have a tremendous inner filing system. It’s almost like OCD: Marilu Henner showed the TV audience her closet, organized by color and season; shoes likewise.
This formidable indexing capacity is what keeps them sane, they said.
I have that problem Libby
while it allows me to tie things together that most don’t or can’t it also has me not forgetting slights and other such things
we forget for good reasons
if not then we would all have better memory
in trth our memories are great our recall sucks
Properly handling memories includes ability to forget. Without it overflow of information causes desorganization of thought process. Such cases are rare, one of them was described in detail in a book of a Russian psychologist Luria: “A little book about a big memory”. It was case study of a patient, Shereshevsky, who never forgot anything. He could recollect in detail every day of his life, what weather was in every hour of this day, where he was, what he heard and sought. He became a mnemonist, that is, showed to public his extraordinary abilities. He could memorize by a single glance huge tables of random numbers and then wright them down by memory without mistakes, cited long texts consisting of random words years after he read them. This all was a torture for him: he tried to develop special mental techniquies to forget, like burning this imaginary texts written on paper in his imagination. Nothing worked. Also he had synestesic perception: sounds has colour and texture, letters had taste and smells of their own. Many memories were painful because of bad smells and noises associated with them.
I have tried to find the source for over forty years, no kidding, and came up empty. I had a feeling if I wrote the question on the blog, someone would come to the rescue.
I loved that story when I was probably around ten years old. I remember it was tigers (or lions), too. So it must be the same story. I’ll check it out further.
Sergey: It has been speculated by many that the Luria book was the inspiration for Borges’ story Funes.
You’re welcome! I’ve enjoyed lurking on your blog, so I’m glad to be of service. By the way, there are several sci-fi stories titled “The Star Beast” (e.g. a Heinlein novel), be sure you get the one by Poul Anderson. By checking the dates and contents on the ISFDB page I linked to, you may be able to figure out which collection you read it in. Used copies will be plentiful at sites such as .
Butch M: I already found that out about the Heinlein novel, and where to find the Anderson story. I’ve got a new post in the works about the whole experience.
By the way, the Verna story at the link above always reminded me of “The Pied Piper,” which as a child I found very compelling and somewhat scary (here’s the Grimm version, and here’s Browning’s poetic version, the one with which I was familiar as a child). I wonder if that was intentional on the part of author Jack Finney.
By the way, you may be interested to know that there are sites dedicated to solving this kind of mystery. Two of the best ones are the BookSleuth Forum at Abebooks.com
which is for general discussion of written sci-fi and fantasy, so story ID queries should include YASID (Yet Another Story ID) in the header.
Strange things happen to our memory skills as we approach certain age. Some skills obviosly deteriorate, while others become more acute compared to what they used to be. Last year I noticed troubles with recollecting people’s names, even those I knew well. Strange, but it is only about their names: the persons themselves I remember quite well, their past lives, personal traits and so on – these memories are not affected. At the same time, I began to recollect word by word the books I have read, poems, songs and so on which I thought I completely forgot, hundreds of them. Many of these songs and poems are really idiotic, like propaganda stuff of Soviet era. There were good reasons to forget them – but I can’t. Some are vulgar and obscene, relicts of street culture of my youth and adolescence. Is this a symptom of something or just normal ageing?
A Russian joke: “What is the name of this German guy due to whom I almost lost my mind?”
– Altzheimer, Granny”.
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Ahhh, said George, that is fine, very fine, but what cure for the memory hole?
Wow indeed.
Flowers for Algernon, anybody?
Flowers for Algernon – one of my all time favorites.
Outstanding news for everyone with older parents.
Re. Algernon. I think there was a movie made from that with Cliff Robertson.
Ah yes, “Flowers for Algernon.” Great minds read Neo-Neocon.
Sometimes, I wish I were a mouse – they get all the really neat cures.
Reminds me of this movie, which is actually pretty interesting.
This is very promising research, but I must say that Yahoo’s science writers are lousy. I got stuck on the part about brains releasing genes, so I checked another article via Google. Apparently the researchers have identified a gene that codes for the PKR enzyme and they have some understanding of how this gene is regulated and how PKR is released. I could only access a summary of the article, but it appears that the process is complicated. It drives me crazy when writers reinforce the one gene equals one trait or illness clichee. Sometimes this is true, but most of the time, we are a lot more complicated.
Yes, expat, the phrase “brains releasing genes” kind of made me go “WTF?”
Only people without such a memory would wnt it
For those like me and rainman who have such not having it would be better
Care to relive the worst parts of ur life with perfect graphic recall as i do? Care to be hated and attacked by others? Care to suffer schizophrenia from too much and no capacity to handle it?
Maybe more later.
Have to switch borrowed phones
6 hr drive from surabaya to solo
By the way xmas decorations in islamic majority country and xmas carrols about christ are all over and not like in the states!
The Cliff Robertson movie was “Charlie”, I believe. It made reference to “Flowers for Algernon” in the film. In the movie, his brain damage was due to a high fever as a child.
My father-in-law had Alzheimer’s, and though I hate to say it, I would take the .38 caliber Universal Cure before I would go through that myself, or inflict it on my family. To the people working on this research, I can only echo Insty and say, “Faster, please”.
More and more of the very tantalizing research on disease, genetics, and our understanding about how the human body works that is being reported these days make it seem likely that the human lifespan will, in the relatively near future, be extended by possibly decades or longer; I’ve occasionally seen what I consider wild speculation by some of the writers coving these developments, talking about life spans of 150 years or perhaps many more.
Many science fiction stories dealing with theme of long life or even immortality often have as one of the things they focus on the problems such long life would present where memory is concerned. Could we comfortably live very extended, hundreds of years long lives, when we would be endlessly repeating —and remembering–the same basic events over and over again–breakfast, buying groceries, walking down the lane, looking at the moon, falling in love? After a while, would the almost endless repetitions of basically similar events and experiences just clog up our memories, make life less and less interesting, a burden, boredom instead of an endless delight? What, too, is the storage capacity of the human brain as regards memories?
One solution that is sometimes proposed in these stories is “editing,” i.e. every so often we go through our memories and edit out the repetitions or unwanted parts, and either delete them permanently or offload them onto some storage device for later retrieval if necessary. Even more complications would present themselves, I imagine, if one also had a perfect or near perfect memory which, I would imagine, would only intensify memory problems as the hundreds of years ticked off.
So, for these writers–peering into the future and speculating about what things might be like–very long life and a perfect memory might not be the boon they at first appear to be.
Read “flowers” when it first came out in “Fantasy & Science Fiction” magazine ‘way back. It was a terrific book because it was written in the first person and the author got the protagonist believably from mentally deficient to MENSA sounding in style and insights, and then starting back again.
The movie was “Charly” (the rat), spelled wrong because the character was not a good speller, or much else, outside the short period where the drug was working.
Besides “Flowers for Algernon,” another fictional treatment of memory (in this case, hyper-memory) is Borges’ “Funes, the Memorious,” discussed here.
I also once read a work of science fiction long ago, but I can remember neither the name nor the author. It was a short story, the premise of which was that people had incredibly long lives. The consequence was boredom and ennui, and to counteract that, they invented a way to put their consciousness into other beings, such as animals, for a period of time. Anyone ever read this story? I’ve long been wanting to find it again.
Extraordinary memory capacity in humans usualy associated with schizophrenia. Untill we get better understanding of this disease, all experiments with memory boosting are VERY DANGEROUS.
I’m with Surellin, faster please. Of course, I wish I also had more things worth remembering.
Sergey, could you elaborate on the connection between extraordinary memory and schizophrenia. I thought schizos remember things that aren’t real.
On the subject of delusions versus reality did you hear that Obama considers himself the fourth best president in US history? Apparently CBS cut that out of an interview he gave but the underground smuggled it out or something.
Dead on sergey
those who can handle the info aren’t schizo those who can’t well are or are possibly autistic where the lack of filtering makes them tune out the world or stim for solace
That short story (actually a novelette) about immortal humans getting temporarily transformed into animals for recreation or psychotherapy is probably “The Star Beast” by Poul Anderson.
[BEGIN QUOTE]
“Won’t you change?” she asked.
“Oh, yes. I won’t ever be able to remember a lot of things I now know. I doubt if even the most intelligent tiger could understand vector analysis. But that won’t matter, I’ll get it back when they restore my human form. When I feel the personality change has gone as far as is safe, I’ll come here and you can send me back to Rebirth. The important thing is the therapy–a change of viewpoint, a new and challenging environment– Avi!” He sat up, on one elbow and looked down at her. “Avi, why don’t you come along? Why don’t we both become tigers?”
“And have lots of little tigers? No, thanks, Harol. Maybe some day, but not now. I’m really not an adventurous person at all.”
[END QUOTE]
The publication history is here:
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?62714
Great news!
There are actually people who for some reason remember everything – I think it was 60 Minutes that did a story on this phenomenon recently. They interviewed Marilu Henner and about 4 others who can recall everything about every day of their lives – what they did, said, wore, ate, etc. The downside was that they have such vivid memories of their emotions that it can be overwhelming; recalling the day a parent died is like reliving the event. The interesting thing was that only one of them (Marilu) was married. It seems that it would be hard to live with someone (or hard for them to live with you) when you can remember everything about them (every slight, mistake, etc.).
I remember my 82 year old grandfather telling me he couldn’t remember what he did yesterday or what he had for breakfast, but he could recall scenes from his younger life in great detail. It seemed to him that the newer, repetitive experiences didn’t register, while his mind was actively recalling experiences from so many years before. Maybe it is a way of preparing us for our eventual demise or providing us with mental activity to prevent boredom?
I’m approaching that age and am beginning to experience the same phenomena. Recent memories fade quickly. Memories from many years ago (my childhood and early adulthood) seem quite fresh and vivid. I have been working on writing down these memories (sort of a bio) as a something for my daughter to read after I’m gone.
As I’ve gotten older and less physically capable, I have had to replace some of my physical activities (fishing, skiing, mountain climbing, back packing, body building, and heavy carpentry) with less strenuous activities. Learning to use the computer and to roam the blogosphere has been a big help.
It would be nice to have a drug that can defend against alzheimers, but I don’t think I would want perfect recall. Artfldgr has already pointed out some of the negatives. I think what most of us want is to not become mentally unable to function as in dementia or alzheimers caused by aging, rather than have total recall. At least that’s my preference.
I doubt that perfect recall is attainable if one has never had it in the first place.
The 60 Minutes piece on the total recall group (which inspired the new series “Unforgettable”) revealed that they all categorize like mad: they have a tremendous inner filing system. It’s almost like OCD: Marilu Henner showed the TV audience her closet, organized by color and season; shoes likewise.
This formidable indexing capacity is what keeps them sane, they said.
I have that problem Libby
while it allows me to tie things together that most don’t or can’t it also has me not forgetting slights and other such things
we forget for good reasons
if not then we would all have better memory
in trth our memories are great our recall sucks
Properly handling memories includes ability to forget. Without it overflow of information causes desorganization of thought process. Such cases are rare, one of them was described in detail in a book of a Russian psychologist Luria: “A little book about a big memory”. It was case study of a patient, Shereshevsky, who never forgot anything. He could recollect in detail every day of his life, what weather was in every hour of this day, where he was, what he heard and sought. He became a mnemonist, that is, showed to public his extraordinary abilities. He could memorize by a single glance huge tables of random numbers and then wright them down by memory without mistakes, cited long texts consisting of random words years after he read them. This all was a torture for him: he tried to develop special mental techniquies to forget, like burning this imaginary texts written on paper in his imagination. Nothing worked. Also he had synestesic perception: sounds has colour and texture, letters had taste and smells of their own. Many memories were painful because of bad smells and noises associated with them.
Butch Malahide: thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!!
I have tried to find the source for over forty years, no kidding, and came up empty. I had a feeling if I wrote the question on the blog, someone would come to the rescue.
I loved that story when I was probably around ten years old. I remember it was tigers (or lions), too. So it must be the same story. I’ll check it out further.
Sergey: It has been speculated by many that the Luria book was the inspiration for Borges’ story Funes.
You’re welcome! I’ve enjoyed lurking on your blog, so I’m glad to be of service. By the way, there are several sci-fi stories titled “The Star Beast” (e.g. a Heinlein novel), be sure you get the one by Poul Anderson. By checking the dates and contents on the ISFDB page I linked to, you may be able to figure out which collection you read it in. Used copies will be plentiful at sites such as .
What did I do wrong? Let me try that again.
http://www.abe.com
Butch M: I already found that out about the Heinlein novel, and where to find the Anderson story. I’ve got a new post in the works about the whole experience.
You have no idea how long I wondered about that story. It’s a bit like this one, a mystery I’d solved earlier.
By the way, the Verna story at the link above always reminded me of “The Pied Piper,” which as a child I found very compelling and somewhat scary (here’s the Grimm version, and here’s Browning’s poetic version, the one with which I was familiar as a child). I wonder if that was intentional on the part of author Jack Finney.
By the way, you may be interested to know that there are sites dedicated to solving this kind of mystery. Two of the best ones are the BookSleuth Forum at Abebooks.com
http://forums.abebooks.com/abesleuthcom
for all kinds of written works, and specifically for fantasy and science fiction there’s the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/topics?hl=en&lnk
which is for general discussion of written sci-fi and fantasy, so story ID queries should include YASID (Yet Another Story ID) in the header.
Strange things happen to our memory skills as we approach certain age. Some skills obviosly deteriorate, while others become more acute compared to what they used to be. Last year I noticed troubles with recollecting people’s names, even those I knew well. Strange, but it is only about their names: the persons themselves I remember quite well, their past lives, personal traits and so on – these memories are not affected. At the same time, I began to recollect word by word the books I have read, poems, songs and so on which I thought I completely forgot, hundreds of them. Many of these songs and poems are really idiotic, like propaganda stuff of Soviet era. There were good reasons to forget them – but I can’t. Some are vulgar and obscene, relicts of street culture of my youth and adolescence. Is this a symptom of something or just normal ageing?
A Russian joke: “What is the name of this German guy due to whom I almost lost my mind?”
– Altzheimer, Granny”.