Reading time: 7 minutes
In 2000, I saw the movie Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan. The story of a guy who suffers from short term memory loss.
It made a big impression on me. I started to become intrigued by this topic. I wanted to understand how our memory works. I bought cognitive science magazines. I read books about how honest people can give false testimonies. I created a list of all my contacts, including a reminder of how we knew each other, in case I forgot. I discovered that most movies using amnesia in their plot were scientifically inaccurate — except Memento and Finding Nemo.
It became a real obsession. Quite a useless one, I must admit. Except for this one day, in a hospital, where a bunch of young adults had lost their hero.
My grandfather, our hero
My grandfather has always been a strong figure. His 12 grandkids, me included, grew up loving him and admiring him. He was funny, he was kind, he was endlessly curious.
By all means, he wasn’t perfect — and we loved him even more for that.
For example, at Christmas, he would invent codes that we had to decipher in order to know which gift was meant for who. Usually, my grandfather would have confused himself during the implementation of this code, making each label impossible to crack. We would mock him, he would justify himself endlessly.
When playing board games with my grandfather, you’d have to keep an eye on him, because he would cheat if he saw an opportunity. When getting caught, he would blame his old age: “Oh, I’m sorry, with my poor eyes, it’s hard to distinguish the 1€ and the 1000€ bills.”
Somehow, my grandfather had made us believe he was immortal.
Then one day, he had a stroke. Not a deadly one, but a bad enough one.
I arrived at the hospital. Most of my brothers, sister and cousins were there already. The mood was down.
They warned me before I entered the room: “He won’t recognize you.”
Life going backwards
During the previous decade, my grandfather had taken care of my grandmother, who had developed Alzheimer. It had been a long journey from her first, barely noticeable symptoms till her peaceful death.
Slowly, very slowly, we had seen her brain lose its ability to form new memories, then its ability to retrieve old memories, then its ability to function at all. It felt like someone was turning off switches, one by one. In retrospect, her illness was probably the real cause for my growing obsession about memory loss.
Some of my younger cousins were using my grandmother's memory issues to their advantage. When she would scold them, they would run away in the garden, hide for a couple of minutes, and then come back with an innocent face. My grandmother would still be angry, but wouldn’t remember why.
- “Why are you angry, Mutti?”, they’d ask.
- “It’s your naughty cousin! He did something bad, I’m looking for him”, she would reply.
(Christopher Nolan shot a similar scene in the movie Memento, capturing perfectly the aimless panic that we would see in my grandmother’s eyes.)
As we became young adults, our grandmother stopped talking. She stopped walking. She stopped eating, unless my grandfather would spoon-feed her, like a baby.
My grandfather’s appetite for life didn’t seem impacted one bit. In front of us, he would never complain. He took on the challenge, becoming this invincible grandfather figure that no event could shatter.
The magical mind
In the hospital bed, my grandfather is awake. He seems old. Of course, he is old, but it’s first time that I see it.
He’s mumbling stuff. He’s happy we’re here. We look friendly. One of my cousins told him we’re his grandkids. He’s really sorry for not being able to recognize us.
He looks at my face intensely. He wants to give me a sign that he knows who I am. “We have met before, haven’t we?”
My heart breaks.
My brain instantly fights back with a crazy idea. Maybe he hasn’t lost his memories, maybe he just can’t access them.
Maybe — just maybe — I can help him find them again. And for that, I can leverage my years of obsession about the brain and its mysterious ways of functioning.
I ask my brother to come close to me. Calmly, I talk to my grandfather.
- “Papily, I’m going to say 3 names. Listen to them carefully. Look at him, and listen to my voice. You ready?”
He nods. The room goes silent. I try to take the most neutral possible voice.
- “OK. Listen. Mathieu. Brice. Emmanuel. Which one is his first name?”
My grandfather can’t find the answer in his brain. He knows what it’s like to retrieve an information from his memory, and it’s obviously not working. His face is despair and shame.
- “Papily, make a guess. Mathieu, Brice, Emmanuel. It’s a game. Just make a guess.”
He thinks for a second. Then whispers:
- “Brice?”
A huge smile appears on my brother’s face, Brice.
- “Yes! That’s correct!”
My grandfather is happy to see everyone smile, but he doesn’t want us to get false hope.
- “It was pure chance. I chose the name randomly. I’ve always been lucky at games…”
At that point, I’m not certain of what happened. Indeed, it could have been pure luck. I decide to push the experiment further, and ask one of my cousins to join me.
- “What about him? Jules, François, Nicolas. What’s his name?”
My grandfather is not convinced. He doesn’t know.
- “Jules?”
The room goes wild.
- “Yes! Two in a row!”
Another cousin.
- “Marie, Julie, Sarah. What is her name?”
- “Sarah?”
- “Yes!”
And we continued until my grandfather pronounced everyone’s name in the room. He did make one mistake, on the last attempt, when trying to put a name on my face. At that point, the magic had already happened, so it made the entire trick even more real.
The oldest technology
As you have seen in last week’s story, my obsessive personality can be a burden, from a social standpoint.
However, that day in the hospital, being a nerd about brain quirks was the best contribution I could bring to that room.
Now, you may be wondering: what was the trick?
Well, storing information and retrieving information are two different things. And when the ability to consciously retrieve information is broken, there are alternative paths.
The one I tried to leverage is a misunderstood and undervalued feature of our brain. Like my grandfather, it’s not perfect, it has its flaws.
It’s called intuition.
And like any sufficiently advanced form of technology, it is indistinguishable from magic.
Thank you to Eliette Guyot, Laurent Memmi, Thomas de Phuoc, Ayça Sevkal-Guyot, Nelsie Berges, Babette Guyot, Fabien Crombé, Timothée Trichet, Kajan Siva and Jean-Luc Guyot for reading early drafts of this article.
The answer to last week’s game
1C 2G 3D 4I 5B 6H 7F 8A 9E (reminder of the challenge)
Congratulations to Stéphanie and Chris for getting it almost right, with just two combinations inverted!