MEMORY LOSS: THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY
by Don Donaldson
I once saw a guy on TV who could tell you what the weather had been every day of his life since he was six years old. He was what they call a Savant. He wasn’t normal. The normal brain is supposed to forget experiences like that, thereby keeping itself uncluttered enough that it can remember more important things. For example, while driving your car, it’s always good to remember which pedal works the gas and which one stops the vehicle. When crossing the street on foot, does the upraised hand on the signal across from you mean stop or go? Okay, I think you get the idea. So forgetting what you had for breakfast on Sept. 15, five years ago, is nothing to worry about. And nobody does. (Except for detectives who are always asking people where they were or what they were doing so long ago nobody could give them a satisfactory answer.)
It takes a lot of memory to function normally. What does my car look like? Where do I live? What’s my name? People generally don’t have trouble with questions like that because those memories are extremely important and they get reinforced practically every day. But for many of us, anniversaries and birthdays sometimes get lost in the myriad of activities a typical day requires. If asked, we could recite the date of those special events, but we just forget to remember them at the appropriate time. For men, those memory slips can be classified as bad or very bad depending on the temperament of their spouse.
In contrast to what I’ve described above, suppose you look at the clock one day and discover that you’ve lost four hours and have no idea what you did or where you were during that time. That’s not only an example of an ugly kind of memory loss, it’s one that would terrify you. Now imagine that it happened for the first time shortly after you started your new job at a mental hospital where some of your patients were criminally insane. Did you leave any of the insanity wards unlocked? Were you alone with any of the dangerous inmates? What the h… is happening to you?
That’s the situation facing the lead character in my book, THE MEMORY THIEF. Marti Segerson has accepted a job as staff psychiatrist at an old mental hospital in a rural area of Tennessee. She’s there to seek revenge on one of the inmates for something that happened to her when she was a child. She has a good plan, but couldn’t have anticipated the horrific events that soon overtake her.
In all my medical thrillers I try to push the existing frontiers of knowledge just a bit farther into the future. It’s interesting to me that some readers will not accept such a thing. They judge an event or situation in a novel to be believable only if it has already really happened somewhere. But where’s the fun in that? To me that’s like preferring to get a nap in the hotel while the rest of the group is climbing on a bus for a sightseeing trip to some exotic location. When it comes to writing, I’d rather get out of the hotel. In THE MEMORY THIEF, The nature of memory, how it’s captured, how it’s recalled, where in the brain it’s stored; all provided fertile ground for the kind of story I like to tell. I hope it’s one you won’t soon forget.
So who wants to go sightseeing with me?
Don Donaldson’s THE MEMORY THIEF is on sale for just $1.99 til the 15th! Pick it up today!
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