Moonwalking With Einstein Part 2

David Rodrick, a young research a.s.sociate in the lab, gleefully described the place as "our toy palace." When I arrived a couple weeks after my initial phone call with Ericsson, there was a floor-to-ceiling nine-by-fourteen-foot screen set up in the middle of one of the rooms displaying life-size video footage of a traffic stop. It was shot from the perspective of a police officer walking up to a stopped car.

For the previous few weeks, Ericsson and his colleagues had been bringing members of the Tallaha.s.see SWAT team and recent graduates of the police academy into his lab and placing them in front of the big screen with a Beretta handgun loaded with blanks holstered to their belt. They bombarded the officers with one hair-raising scenario after another and watched how they responded. In one scenario, the officer saw a man walk toward the front door of a school with a suspicious bulge that looked like a bomb strapped to his chest. The researchers wanted to know how officers with different levels of experience would react.

The results were striking. Experienced SWAT officers immediately pulled their guns and yelled repeatedly for the suspect to stop. When he didn't, they almost always shot him before he made it into the school. But recent graduates of the academy were more likely to let the man with the bomb stroll right up the steps and into the building. They simply lacked the experience to diagnose the situation and react properly. At least that would be the superficial explanation. But what exactly does experience mean? What exactly did the more senior officers see that the younger recruits didn't? What were they doing with their eyes, what was going through their minds, how were they processing the situation differently? What were they pulling from their memories? Like the professional chicken s.e.xers, the senior SWAT officers had a skill that was difficult to put into words. Ericsson's research program can be summarized as an attempt to isolate the thing we call expertise, so that he can dissect it and identify its cognitive basis.

In order to do that, Ericsson and his colleagues asked the officers to talk aloud about what was going through their minds as the scenario unfolded. What Ericsson expected to learn from these accounts was the same thing he's found in every other field of expertise that he's studied: Experts see the world differently. They notice things that nonexperts don't see. They home in on the information that matters most, and have an almost automatic sense of what to do with it. And most important, experts process the enormous amounts of information flowing through their senses in more sophisticated ways. They can overcome one of the brain's most fundamental constraints: the magical number seven.

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In 1956, a Harvard psychologist named George Miller published what would become a cla.s.sic paper in the history of memory research. It began with a memorable introduction: named George Miller published what would become a cla.s.sic paper in the history of memory research. It began with a memorable introduction: My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has a.s.saulted me from the pages of our most public journals. This number a.s.sumes a variety of disguises, being sometimes a little larger and sometimes a little smaller than usual, but never changing so much as to be unrecognizable. The persistence with which this number plagues me is far more than a random accident. There is, to quote a famous senator, a design behind it, some pattern governing its appearances. Either there really is something unusual about the number or else I am suffering from delusions of persecution.

In fact, we are all persecuted by the integer Miller was referring to. His paper was t.i.tled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information." Miller had discovered that our ability to process information and make decisions in the world is limited by a fundamental constraint: We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.

When a new thought or perception enters our head, it doesn't immediately get stashed away in long-term memory. Rather, it exists in a temporary limbo, in what's known as working memory, a collection of brain systems that hold on to whatever is rattling around in our consciousness at the present moment.

Without looking back and rereading it, try to repeat the first three words of this sentence to yourself.

Without looking back Easy enough.

Now, without looking back, try to repeat the first three words of the sentence before that. If you find that quite a bit harder, it's because that sentence has already been dropped by your working memory.

Our working memories serve a critical role as a filter between our perception of the world and our long-term memory of it. If every sensation or thought was immediately filed away in the enormous database that is our long-term memory, we'd be drowning, like S and Funes, in irrelevant information. Most of the things that pa.s.s through our brain don't need to be remembered any longer than the moment or two we spend perceiving them and, if necessary, reacting to them. In fact, dividing memory between short-term and long-term stores is such a savvy way of managing information that most computers are built around the same model. They have long-term memories in the form of hard drives as well as a working memory cache in the CPU that stores whatever the processor is computing at the moment.

Like a computer, our ability to operate in the world, is limited by the amount of information we can juggle at one time. Unless we repeat things over and over, they tend to slip from our grasp. Everyone knows our working memory stinks. Miller's paper explained that it stinks within very specific parameters. Some people can hold as few as five things in their head at any given time, a few people can hold as many as nine, but the "magical number seven" seems to be the universal carrying capacity of our short-term working memory. To make matters worse, those seven things only stick around for a few seconds, and often not at all if we're distracted. This fundamental limitation, which we all share, is what makes us find the feats of memory gurus so amazing.

My own memory test did not occur in front of the Human Performance Lab's floor-to-ceiling projection screen. There were no guns holstered to my belt, no eye-tracking devices attached to my head. My humble contribution to human knowledge was extracted in Room 218 of the FSU psychology department, a small windowless office with a stained carpet and old IQ tests strewn across the floor. Ungenerously, it might be described as a storage closet. did not occur in front of the Human Performance Lab's floor-to-ceiling projection screen. There were no guns holstered to my belt, no eye-tracking devices attached to my head. My humble contribution to human knowledge was extracted in Room 218 of the FSU psychology department, a small windowless office with a stained carpet and old IQ tests strewn across the floor. Ungenerously, it might be described as a storage closet.

The man administering my tests was a third-year PhD student in Ericsson's lab named Tres Roring. Though his flip-flops and blond surfer mop might not suggest it, Tres grew up in a small town in southern Oklahoma, where his father is an oil man. At age sixteen, he was the Oklahoma State Junior Chess Champion. His full name is Roy Roring III-hence "Tres."

Tres and I spent three full days in Room 218 taking memory test after memory test-me wearing a clunky microphone headset attached to an old tape recorder, Tres sitting behind me, legs crossed, with a stopwatch in his lap, taking notes.

There were tests of my memory for numbers (forward and backward), tests of my memory for words, tests of my memory for people's faces, and tests of all sorts of things that seemed unlikely to have anything to do with my memory-like whether I could visualize rotating cubes in my mind's eye, and whether I knew the definitions of "jocose," "lissome," and "querulous." Another multiple-choice exam called the Multidimensional Apt.i.tude Battery Information Test gauged my Trivial Pursuit skills with questions like: When did Confucius live?a. 1650 A.D.b. 1200 A.D.c. 500 A.D.d. 500 B.C.e. 40 B.C.

and: In a gasoline engine, the main purpose of the carburetor is toa. mix gasoline and airb. keep the battery chargedc. ignite the fueld. contain the pistonse. pump the fuel into the engine Many of the tests Tres administered were lifted directly from U.S. Memory Champions.h.i.+p events, like the fifteen-minute poem, names and faces, random words, speed numbers, and speed cards. He wanted to see how I'd do on them before I'd ever tried to improve my memory. He also wanted to test me on a few of the events that are only used in international memory compet.i.tions, like binary digits, historical dates, and spoken numbers. By the end of my three days in Tallaha.s.see, Tres had collected seven hours of audiotaped data for Ericsson and his grad students to a.n.a.lyze later. Lucky them.

And then there were the extensive interviews conducted by another graduate student, Katy Nandagopal. Do you think you have a good natural memory? Do you think you have a good natural memory? (Pretty good, but nothing special.) (Pretty good, but nothing special.) Did you ever play memory games growing up? Did you ever play memory games growing up? (Not that I can think of.) (Not that I can think of.) Board games? Board games? (Only with my grandmother.) (Only with my grandmother.) Do you enjoy riddles? Do you enjoy riddles? (Who doesn't?) (Who doesn't?) Can you solve a Rubik's cube? Can you solve a Rubik's cube? (No.) (No.) Do you sing? Do you sing? (Only in the shower.) (Only in the shower.) Dance? Dance? (Ditto.) (Ditto.) Do you work out? Do you work out? (Sore subject.) (Sore subject.) Do you use workout tapes? Do you use workout tapes? (You need to know that?) (You need to know that?) Do you have electrical wiring expertise? Do you have electrical wiring expertise? (Really?) (Really?) For someone who wants to know what's being done to him so that he might someday tell other people about it, being the subject of a scientific study can be exceedingly trying.

"Why exactly are we doing this?" I'd ask Tres.

"I'd rather not tell you everything right now." (If there was something I was going to be tested on later-and as it turned out, there was-he didn't want me to know.) "How did I do on that last test?"

"We'll let you know when this is all done."

"Can you at least tell me about your hypothesis?"

"Not now."

"What's my IQ?"

"I don't know."

"High, though?"

The mind-numbing memory exam that SF, the Carnegie Mellon undergraduate, took over and over again for 250 hours for two years is known as the digit span test. It is a standard measure of a person's working-memory capacity for numbers. Most people who are given the test are like SF when he started: They're only able to remember seven plus-or-minus two digits. Most people remember those seven plus-or-minus two numbers by repeating them over and over again to themselves in the "phonological loop," which is just a fancy name for the little voice that we can hear inside our head when we talk to ourselves. The phonological loop acts as an echo, producing a short-term memory buffer that can store sounds just a couple seconds, if we're not rehearsing them. When he began partic.i.p.ating in Chase and Ericsson's experiment, SF also used his phonological loop to store information. And for a long time his scores on the test didn't improve. But then something happened. After hours of testing, SF's scores started inching up. One day he remembered ten digits. The next day it was eleven. The number of digits he could recall kept rising steadily. He had made a discovery: Even if his short-term memory was limited, he'd figured out a way to store information directly in long-term memory. It involved a technique called chunking. that SF, the Carnegie Mellon undergraduate, took over and over again for 250 hours for two years is known as the digit span test. It is a standard measure of a person's working-memory capacity for numbers. Most people who are given the test are like SF when he started: They're only able to remember seven plus-or-minus two digits. Most people remember those seven plus-or-minus two numbers by repeating them over and over again to themselves in the "phonological loop," which is just a fancy name for the little voice that we can hear inside our head when we talk to ourselves. The phonological loop acts as an echo, producing a short-term memory buffer that can store sounds just a couple seconds, if we're not rehearsing them. When he began partic.i.p.ating in Chase and Ericsson's experiment, SF also used his phonological loop to store information. And for a long time his scores on the test didn't improve. But then something happened. After hours of testing, SF's scores started inching up. One day he remembered ten digits. The next day it was eleven. The number of digits he could recall kept rising steadily. He had made a discovery: Even if his short-term memory was limited, he'd figured out a way to store information directly in long-term memory. It involved a technique called chunking.

Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item. Chunking is the reason that phone numbers are broken into two parts plus an area code and that credit card numbers are split into groups of four. And chunking is extremely relevant to the question of why experts so often have such exceptional memories.

The cla.s.sic explanation of chunking involves language. If you were asked to memorize the twenty-two letters HEADSHOULDERS-KNEESTOES, and you didn't notice what they spelled, you'd almost certainly have a tough time with it. But break up those twenty-two letters into four chunks-HEAD, SHOULDERS, KNEES, and TOES-and the task becomes a whole lot easier. And if you happen to know the full nursery rhyme, the line "Head, shoulders, knees, and toes" can effectively be treated like one single chunk. The same can be done with numbers. The twelve-digit numerical string 120741091101 is pretty hard to remember. Break it into four chunks-120, 741, 091, 101-and it becomes a little easier. Turn it into two chunks, 12/07/41 and 09/11/01, and they're almost impossible to forget. You could even turn those dates into a single chunk of information by remembering it as "the two big surprise attacks on American soil."

Notice that the process of chunking takes seemingly meaningless information and reinterprets it in light of information that is already stored away somewhere in our long-term memory. If you didn't know the dates of Pearl Harbor or September 11, you'd never be able to chunk that twelve-digit numerical string. If you spoke Swahili and not English, the nursery rhyme would remain a jumble of letters. In other words, when it comes to chunking-and to our memory more broadly-what we already know determines what we're able to learn.

Though he'd never been properly taught the technique of chunking, SF figured it out on his own. An avid runner, he began thinking of the strings of random numbers as running times. For example 3,492 was turned into "3 minutes and 49 point 2 seconds, near world-record mile time." And 4,131 became "4 minutes, 13 point 1 seconds, a mile time." SF didn't know anything about the random numbers he had to memorize, but he did know about running. He discovered that he could take meaningless bits of information, run them through a filter that applied meaning to them, and make that information much stickier. He had taken his past experiences and used them to shape how he perceived the present. He was using a.s.sociations in his long-term memory to see the numbers differently.

This, of course, is what all experts do: They use their memories to see the world differently. Over many years, they build up a bank of experience that shapes how they perceive new information. The experienced SWAT officer doesn't just see a man walking up the front steps of the school; he sees a nervous twitch in the man's arm that calls up a.s.sociations with dozens of other nervous twitches he's seen in his years of policing. He sees the suspect in the context of every other suspicious person he's ever come across. He perceives the current encounter in light of past encounters like it.

When a graduate of the Zen-Nippon Chick s.e.xing School looks at a chick's bottom, finely honed perceptual skills allow the s.e.xer to quickly and automatically gather up a stock of information embedded in the chick's anatomy, and before a conscious thought can even enter his or her head, the s.e.xer knows whether the chick is a boy or a girl. But as with the senior SWAT officer, that seemingly automatic knowledge is hard earned. It is said that a student of s.e.xing must work through at least 250,000 chicks before attaining any degree of proficiency. Even if the s.e.xer calls it "intuition," it's been shaped by years of experience. It is the vast memory bank of chick bottoms that allows him or her to recognize patterns in the vents glanced at so quickly. In most cases, the skill is not the result of conscious reasoning, but pattern recognition. It is a feat of perception and memory, not a.n.a.lysis.

The cla.s.sic example of how memories shape the perception of experts comes from what would seem to be the least intuitive of fields: chess. Practically since the origins of the modern game in the fifteenth century, chess has been regarded as the ultimate test of cognitive ability. In the 1920s, a group of Russian scientists set out to quantify the intellectual advantages of eight of the world's best chess players by giving them a battery of basic cognitive and perceptual tests. To their surprise, the researchers found that the grand masters didn't perform significantly better than average on any of their tests. The greatest chess players in the world didn't seem to possess a single major cognitive advantage.

But if chess masters aren't, as a whole, smarter than lesser chess players, then what are they? In the 1940s, a Dutch psychologist and chess aficionado named Adriaan de Groot asked what seemed like a simple question: What separates merely good chess players from those who are world-cla.s.s? Did the best-cla.s.s players see more moves ahead? Did they ponder more possible moves? Did they have better tools for a.n.a.lyzing those moves? Did they simply have a better intuitive grasp of the dynamics of the game?

One of the reasons chess is such a satisfying game to play and to study is that your average chess buff can be utterly befuddled by a master's move. Often the best move seems entirely counterintuitive. Realizing this, De Groot pored through old games between chess masters and selected a handful of board positions where there was definitely one correct, but not obvious, move to be made. He then presented the boards to a group of international chess masters and top club players. He asked them to think aloud while they brooded over the proper move.

What De Groot uncovered was an even bigger surprise than what his Russian predecessors had found. For the most part, the chess experts didn't look more moves ahead, at least not at first. They didn't even consider more possible moves. Rather, they behaved in a manner surprisingly similar to the chicken s.e.xers: They tended to see the right moves, and they tended to see them almost right away.

It was as if the chess experts weren't thinking so much as reacting. When De Groot listened to their verbal reports, he noticed that they described their thoughts in different language than less experienced chess players. They talked about configurations of pieces like "p.a.w.n structures" and immediately noticed things that were out of sorts, like exposed rooks. They weren't seeing the board as thirty-two pieces. They were seeing it as chunks of pieces, and systems of tension.

Grand masters literally see a different board. Studies of their eye movements have found that they look at the edges of squares more than inexperienced players, suggesting that they're absorbing information from multiple squares at once. Their eyes also dart across greater distances, and linger for less time at any one place. They focus on fewer different spots on the board, and those spots are more likely to be relevant to figuring out the right move.

But the most striking finding of all from these early studies of chess experts was their astounding memories. The experts could memorize entire boards after just a brief glance. And they could reconstruct longago games from memory. In fact, later studies confirmed that the ability to memorize board positions is one of the best overall indicators of how good a chess player somebody is. And these chess positions are not simply encoded in transient short-term memory. Chess experts can remember positions from games for hours, weeks, even years afterward. Indeed, at a certain point in every chess master's development, keeping mental track of the pieces on the board becomes such a trivial skill that they can take on several opponents at once, entirely in their heads.

As impressive as the chess masters' memories were for chess games, their memories for everything else were notably unimpressive. When the chess experts were shown random arrangements of chess pieces-ones that couldn't possibly have been arrived at through an actual game-their memory for the board was only slightly better than chess novices'. They could rarely remember the positions of more than seven pieces. These were the same chess pieces, and the same chessboards. So why were they suddenly limited by the magical number seven?

The chess experiments reveal a telling fact about memory, and about expertise in general: We don't remember isolated facts; we remember things in context. A board of randomly arranged chess pieces has no context-there are no similar boards to compare it to, no past games that it resembles, no ways to meaningfully chunk it. Even to the world's best chess player it is, in essence, noise.

In the same way that a few pages ago we used our knowledge of historic dates to chunk the twelve-digit number, chess masters use the vast library of chess patterns that they've cached away in long-term memory to chunk the board. At the root of the chess master's skill is that he or she simply has a richer vocabulary of chunks to recognize. Which is why it is so rare for anyone to achieve world-cla.s.s status in chess-or any other field-without years of experience. Even Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess prodigy of all time, had been playing intensely for nine years before he was recognized as a grand master at age fifteen.

Contrary to all the old wisdom that chess is an intellectual activity based on a.n.a.lysis, many of the chess master's important decisions about which moves to make happen in the immediate act of perceiving the board. Like the chicken s.e.xer who looks at the chick and simply sees its gender or the SWAT officer who immediately notices the bomb, the chess master looks at the board and simply sees the most promising move. The process usually happens within five seconds, and you can actually see it transpiring in the brain. Using magnetoencephalography, a technique that measures the weak magnetic fields given off by a thinking brain, researchers have found that higher-rated chess players are more likely to engage the frontal and parietal cortices of the brain when they look at the board, which suggests that they are recalling information from long-term memory. Lower-ranked players are more likely to engage the medial temporal lobes, which suggests that they are encoding new information. The experts are interpreting the present board in term of their ma.s.sive knowledge of past ones. The lower-ranked players are seeing the board as something new.

Though chess might seem like a trivial subject for a psychologist to study-it is, after all, just a game-De Groot believed that his experiments with chess masters had much larger implications. He argued that expertise in "the field of shoemaking, painting, building, [or] confectionary" is the result of the same acc.u.mulation of "experiential linkings." According to Ericsson, what we call expertise is really just "vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the a.s.sociated domain." In other words, a great memory isn't just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence essence of expertise. of expertise.

Whether we realize it or not, we are all like those chess masters and chicken s.e.xers, interpreting the present in light of what we've learned in the past, and letting our previous experiences shape not only how we perceive our world, but also the moves we end up making in it.

Too often we talk about our memories as if they were banks into which we deposit new information when it comes in, and from which we withdraw old information when we need it. But that metaphor doesn't reflect the way our memories really work. Our memories are always with us, shaping and being shaped by the information flowing through our senses, in a continuous feedback loop. Everything we see, hear, and smell is inflected by all the things we've seen, heard, and smelled in the past.

In ways as obscure as s.e.xing chickens and as profound as diagnosing an illness, who we are and what we do is fundamentally a function of what we remember. But if interpreting the world and acting in it are rolled up in the act of remembering, what about Ed and Lukas and other mental athletes I'd met? How did this supposedly "simple" technique called the memory palace grant them expert memories without their being experts in anything?

Even if Ericsson and his grad students wouldn't give me the results of all the tests I spent three days laboring on, I took enough notes on my performance to escape with some sense of where my baseline abilities stood. My digit span was about nine (above average, but nothing extraordinary), my ability to memorize poetry was abysmal, and I had not a clue when Confucius lived (though I did know what a carburetor was for). When I got back from Tallaha.s.see, there was an e-mail waiting in my in-box from Ed: Hey there star-pupil, I know that you've been keeping training to a minimum until after the Florida people have put you through your paces. Very well done-that's admirable in at least the sense that it will make for better science. But the next champions.h.i.+ps aren't a million miles away so you're going to have to begin preparing yourself p.r.o.nto. Better get some pep from me now: You need to get your head towards the grindstone and enjoy leaving it there.

FOUR.

THE MOST FORGETFUL MAN IN THE WORLD.

Having met some of the best memories in the world, I decided that my next step would be to try to seek out the worst. What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence? I went back to Google in search of Ben Pridmore's counterpart in the record books of forgetfulness, and dug up an article in The Journal of Neuroscience The Journal of Neuroscience about an eighty-four-year-old retired lab technician called EP, whose memory extended back only as far as his most recent thought. He had one of the most severe cases of amnesia ever doc.u.mented. about an eighty-four-year-old retired lab technician called EP, whose memory extended back only as far as his most recent thought. He had one of the most severe cases of amnesia ever doc.u.mented.

A few weeks after returning from Tallaha.s.see, I phoned a neuroscientist and memory researcher named Larry Squire at the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego VA Medical Center. Squire had been studying EP for over a decade, and agreed to bring me along on one of his visits to the bright bungalow in suburban San Diego where EP lives with his wife. We traveled there with Jen Frascino, the research coordinator in Squire's lab who visits EP regularly to administer cognitive tests. Even though Frascino has been to EP's home some two hundred times, he greets her as a total stranger every time.

EP is six-foot-two, with perfectly parted white hair and unusually long ears. He's personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot. He seems at first like your average genial grandfather. Frascino, a tall, athletic blonde, sits down with me and Squire opposite EP at his dining room table and asks a series of questions that are meant to gauge his basic knowledge and common sense. She quizzes him about what continent Brazil is on, the number of weeks in a year, the boiling temperature of water. She wants to demonstrate what a battery of cognitive tests has already proved: EP has a working knowledge of the world. His IQ is 103, and his short-term memory is entirely unimpaired. He patiently answers the questions-all correctly-with roughly the same sense of bemus.e.m.e.nt I imagine I would have if a total stranger walked into my house and earnestly asked me if I knew the boiling point of water.

"What is the thing to do if you find an envelope in the street that is sealed, addressed, and has a stamp on it?" Frascino asks.

"Well, you'd put it in the mailbox. What else?" He chuckles and shoots me a knowing, sidelong glance, as if to say, "Do these people think I'm an idiot?" But sensing that the situation calls for politeness, he turns back to Frascino and adds, "But that's a really interesting question you've got there. Really interesting." He has no idea he's heard it many times before.

"Why do we cook food?"

"Because it's raw?" The word raw carries his voice clear across the tonal register, his bemus.e.m.e.nt giving way to incredulity.

I ask EP if he knows the name of the last president.

"I'm afraid it's slipped my mind. How strange."

"Does the name Bill Clinton sound familiar?"

"Of course I know Clinton! He's an old friend of mine, a scientist, a good guy. I worked with him, you know."

He sees my eyes widen in disbelief and stops himself.

"Unless, that is, there's another Clinton around that you're thinking of-"

"Well, you know, the last president was named Bill Clinton also."

"He was? I'll be-!" He slaps his thigh and chuckles, but doesn't seem all that embarra.s.sed.

"Who's the last president you remember?"

He takes a moment to search his brain. "Let's see. There was Franklin Roosevelt ..."

"Ever heard of John F. Kennedy?"

"Kennedy? Hmm, I'm afraid I don't know him."

Frascino interjects with another question. "Why do we study history?"

"Well, we study history to know what happened in the past."

"But why do we want to know what happened in the past?"

"Because it's just interesting, frankly."

In November 1992, EP came down with what seemed like a mild case of the flu. For five days he lay in bed, feverish and lethargic, unsure of what was wrong, while inside his head a vicious virus known as herpes simplex was chewing its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in EP's medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of his memory.

The virus struck with freakish precision. The medial temporal lobes-there's one on each side of the brain-include the hippocampus and several adjacent regions that together perform the magical feat of turning our perceptions into long-term memories. Memories aren't actually stored in the hippocampus-they reside elsewhere, in the brain's corrugated outer layers, the neocortex-but the hippocampal area makes them stick. EP's hippocampus was destroyed, and without it he is like a camcorder without a working tape head. He sees, but he doesn't record.

EP has two types of amnesia-anterograde, which means he can't form new memories, and retrograde, which means he can't recall old memories either, at least not since about 1950. His childhood, his service in the merchant marine, World War II-all that is perfectly vivid. But as far as he knows, gas costs a quarter a gallon, and man never took that small step onto the moon.

Even though EP has been an amnesic for a decade and a half, and his condition has neither worsened nor improved, there's still much that Squire and his team hope to learn from him. A case like his, in which nature performs a cruel but perfect experiment, is, to put it cra.s.sly, a major boon to science. In a field in which so many basic questions are still unanswered, there is a limitless number of tests that can be performed on a mind like EP's. Indeed, there are only a handful of other individuals in the world in whom both hippocampi and the key adjacent structures have been so precisely notched out of an otherwise intact brain. Another severely amnesic case is Clive Wearing, a former music producer for the BBC who was struck by herpes encephalitis in 1985. Like EP's, his mind has become a sieve. Each time he greets his wife, it's as though he hasn't seen her in twenty years. He leaves her agonizing phone messages begging to be picked up from the nursing home where he lives. He also keeps an exhaustive diary that has become a tangible record of his daily anguish. But even the diary he finds hard to trust since-like every other object in his life-it is completely unfamiliar. Every time he opens it, it must feel like confronting a past life. It is filled with entries like this one: [image]

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9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.

Those scratched-out entries suggest an awareness of his condition that EP, perhaps blissfully, lacks. From across the table, Squire asks EP how his memory is doing these days.

"It's fair. Hard to say it's real good or bad."

EP wears a metal medical alert bracelet around his left wrist. Even though it's obvious what it's for, I ask him anyway. He turns his wrist over and casually reads it.

"Hmm. It says memory loss."

EP doesn't even remember that he has a memory problem. That is something he discovers anew every moment. And since he forgets that he always forgets, every lost thought seems like just a casual slip-an annoyance and nothing more-the same way it would to you or me.

"There's nothing wrong with him in his mind. That's a blessing," his wife, Beverly, tells me later, while EP sits on the couch, out of earshot. "I suppose he must know something is wrong, but it doesn't come out in conversation or in his way of life. But underneath he must know. He just must."

When I hear those words, I'm stung by the realization of how much more than just memories have been lost. Even EP's own wife can no longer access his most basic emotions and thoughts. Which is not to say that he doesn't have emotions or thoughts. Moment to moment, he certainly does. When informed of the births of his grandchildren, EP's eyes welled up each time-and then he promptly forgot that they existed. But without the ability to compare today's feelings to yesterday's, he cannot tell any cohesive narrative about himself, or about those around him, which makes him incapable of providing even the most basic psychological sustenance to his family and friends. After all, EP can only remain truly interested in anyone or anything for as long as he can maintain his attention. Any rogue thought that distracts him effectively resets conversation. A meaningful relations.h.i.+p between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.

Ever since his sickness, s.p.a.ce for EP has existed only as far as he can see it. His social universe is only as large as the people in the room. He lives under a narrow spotlight, surrounded by darkness. On a typical morning, EP wakes up, has breakfast, and returns to bed to listen to the radio. But back in bed, it's not always clear whether he's just had breakfast or just woken up. Often he'll have breakfast again, and return to bed to listen to some more radio. Some mornings he'll have breakfast for a third time. He watches TV, which can be very exciting from second to second, though shows with a clear beginning, middle, and end can pose a problem. He prefers the History Channel, or anything about World War II. He takes walks around the neighborhood, usually several times before lunch, and sometimes for as long as three quarters of an hour. He sits in the yard. He reads the newspaper, which must feel like stepping out of a time machine. Iraq? Internet? By the time EP gets to the end of a headline, he's usually forgotten how it began. Most of the time, after reading the weather, he just doodles on the paper, drawing mustaches on the photographs or tracing his spoon. When he sees home prices in the real estate section, he invariably announces his shock.

Without a memory, EP has fallen completely out of time. He has no stream of consciousness, just droplets that immediately evaporate. If you were to take the watch off his wrist-or, more cruelly, change the time-he'd be completely lost. Trapped in this limbo of an eternal present, between a past he can't remember and a future he can't contemplate, he lives a sedentary life, completely free from worry. "He's happy all the time. Very happy. I guess it's because he doesn't have any stress in his life," says his daughter Carol, who lives nearby. In his chronic forgetfulness, EP has achieved a kind of pathological enlightenment, a perverted vision of the Buddhist ideal of living entirely in the present.

"How old are you now?" Squire asks him.

"Let's see, fifty-nine or sixty. You got me," he says, raising his eyebrow contemplatively, as if he were making a calculation and not a guess. "My memory is not that perfect. It's pretty good, but sometimes people ask me questions that I just don't get. I'm sure you have that sometimes."

"Sure I do," says Squire kindly, even though EP's almost a quarter of a century off.