Ciara Greene
Appearances
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Yeah, exactly. So like she's, a lot of the time really what's happening here is that she's constantly reliving these same experiences and kind of perseverating on them and thinking about them. And then it does mean then that you're not able to let some of these things go.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So we often tend to think of this kind of really extraordinary memory as being an extra gift, that it's this extra like wonderful thing that you have, this skill that you have. And in some ways, of course, it is. And a lot of people who have this condition or, you know, who have this ability think of it as being wonderful. But there are significant downsides.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And one other way of thinking about this is that it's not so much a great ability to remember as it is an inability to forget.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So, yeah, so in the book, Jill talks a lot, firstly talks a lot about how she met her husband, Jim. And, you know, they had been, had a kind of a long distance relationship at first. And then when they met, they had this really, really strong connection and, you know, fell very deeply in love and got married and, you know, lived together forever.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
had this, you know, from her recollection, had this wonderful marriage. But there is this extremely tragic end to it, which is that after only two years of marriage, when Jim was only 42, he died. He had very severe diabetes and he suffered a stroke as a result of that and died as a result after several days in the hospital.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Yes, exactly. I mean, of course, many people listening might be saying, well, I remember my wedding day as well. But I think the thing is that it's not just these big key events that she remembers. It's also just everyday things. And she will remember not just our first date was great, but every detail of it in extraordinary clarity. But yes, towards the end then as well, she also cannot...
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So she describes in really great detail how when her father came home and told her that Jim had collapsed at work and then they're driving to the hospital and she goes through in this just exhaustive detail every phone call she made to the nurse and then the nurse is telling her this and then all these details of the drive to the hospital.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And then, you know, what the doctors were, you know, this horrible situation where he was in critical care for days and then eventually the doctors had to tell her they had to turn off the life support machines. The fact of this terrible thing happening is something that everyone would remember and nobody's going to have forgotten that their husband died so tragically.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
But it's every little detail of it. And she says that even like every time now, years and years later, she can't drive down that road where they drove to the hospital because every vivid little detail of that drive to the hospital is there, it comes back and they don't fade with time. You know, we have that cliche that time is a great healer.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And we do tend to see that, that over time, our negative memories tend to fade and we tend to hold on more to the positive memories. There are exceptions, but Jill's memory really doesn't seem to discriminate. She holds on to all of those details, whether or not they're still relevant, whether or not they're useful to her. She's still holding on to all of them.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Yeah, so I think the first thing to note is that forgetting is actually a fundamental component of memory. We tend to think of forgetting almost as the flip side of memory, and that memory is the positive of what we're supposed to do, and then forgetting is the accidental thing that happens. But that's really not the case.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Forgetting is a fundamental element of what happens in our memory processes. I think a lot of the problem here comes in that when we tend to make the mistake of thinking that our memories act like a computer system, that we should be able to just file away information and then it will stay in that same place.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And then later on, we should be able to retrieve that information and we pull it back exactly the same way it was before. And if we had a computer where we went to go and retrieve a file and the file wasn't there, it had been accidentally deleted, we'd be disgusted. That's not what a computer is supposed to do, right?
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
A computer is supposed to retain this perfect record of information as we recorded it. But that's not what our memories do. That's not how our memories work. rather than thinking of memory as being this kind of passive process where we just file information away and then it just stays there, memory is actually this really active process where we're kind of actively engaging in our memories.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
We engage in actively constructing and reconstructing our memories and we change the way our memories are stored in our brains. And part of that process is that forgetting is a kind of a natural sort of digestion process in memory, that we have lots and lots of different events in our lives and
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
One of the really key things that our memories do and that forgetting helps us do essentially is to identify the gist of those memories. So for example, right, like imagine every day probably you eat breakfast, okay, and probably most days you eat more or less the same thing for breakfast.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Maybe you eat something different on the weekends than you do the weekdays, okay, but probably you eat the same thing more or less every morning.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And you could, if you think of that computer metaphor, you could imagine that for every single day of your life, you should have a perfect, veridical recollection of exactly what you ate for breakfast, how you poured out the cornflakes, how you poured out the milk, how you sat down at the table, picked up your spoon, how many bites you ate, how many times you chewed each bite.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
But honestly, what a waste of time to remember all of these things in such detail. Really, all you really need to know is to sort of condense all of that information into Usually I eat cornflakes for breakfast. Okay. And then sometimes when something a little bit different happens, then we need to be able to remember that. Like, well, we ran out of milk this morning, so I had toast instead.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
I must remember to go to the shop and buy milk. But most of the time, remembering all of these very repetitive events in our lives in this perfect individual detail is actually a really inefficient way of storing information. Instead, we kind of condense that information down and we pull out the gist of those kind of repeated continuous events.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So if you can't do that, if you're not able to kind of essentially leave some of those details behind you, then what you're going to have more trouble doing is identifying the gist, identifying the commonalities among all of those different events.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Yes, absolutely. I think, again, it comes back to that idea that we really have these very unrealistic expectations of what our memories can or should do. And we tend to hold, to a certain extent ourselves, but really other people to very unrealistic standards regarding their memory.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And we tend to assume, for example, and there's lots of evidence of this, that in, for example, forensic or legal settings, as you've said, We tend to assume that if someone's memory changes or has gaps in it, that they're hiding something or that they're lying. That if their memory of an event changes, that shows that they're lying about that event and that they can't be trusted.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
If there's a gap in their memory, maybe they're lying, maybe they can't be trusted, there's something going on. Where in fact, that is completely normal. And if somebody is actually able to give you this perfect, clear description of what happened to them, a lot of that is going to have been essentially reconstructed and rebuilt.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So in fact, even the story I told you earlier on about my accident, and in particular, the story I told you about the incident with the ketamine and so on, I was literally under the influence of drugs. I do not have a clear memory of that, but I have a reconstructed memory of how I remember it having happened.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
That doesn't mean that that's actually necessarily an accurate representation of what happened. It's my reality, but it doesn't necessarily correspond to external reality.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Yeah, she says that, so people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. And I think that really is that idea again of that core aspect of what it is that we're trying to remember from events. So I remember that my bike accident was frightening and terrifying.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
But did I cross the white line before the back wheel went out or not? I don't know. I could probably, if I thought about that long enough, I would construct a memory in which I would tell you with certainty that I was on the correct side of the white line. But there's no guarantee that that memory is accurate.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
But what I can tell you with confidence is how I feel about it and about that core emotional content of the memory.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Well, yeah, that's the case with a lot of famous quotes. I mean, I'd say 90% of quotes on the internet are attributed to Oscar Wilde. And I mean, the man said a lot of things, but he didn't say everything.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
If you had that Jill Price-like, perfect, vivid memory of that first pregnancy, you might be more likely to say, there's absolutely no way I'm ever doing that again. That was like a horror movie. I'm not doing it again.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Sure. It was about three years ago and it was a rainy November night and it was dark and it was starting to rain and it was just a kind of cold, miserable night. And I was leaving work to go to my piano lesson and I was in a rush. So, you know, I rushed down the stairs and I got down to my bike and I realised I'd forgotten my helmet.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Yes. So Gillian was pregnant with her second child and she was really sick, as a lot of people are. She just had appalling morning sickness, which was not restricted to the morning. You know, she was just sick all the time. She felt absolutely miserable. And she was saying to me and to her husband and anybody who'd listen how miserable this was.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And I remember her telling me, you know, that this was just so miserable and it had not been anything like this bad the last time. And what was different with this pregnancy when it hadn't been this bad the last time? And I was listening to this in incredulity and I was just saying, like, Gillian, are you mad? It was just this bad the last time. I remember it. We were working together.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
We were good friends. Your first pregnancy was terrible. You were so sick. You were in bits. And her husband was saying the same. Her husband was saying, like, are you kidding? You couldn't get out of bed when you were pregnant the first time. It was so bad.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
I do tend to look at everything through this lens. So I just think it was absolutely fascinating how her memory of that had been distorted. And what always seemed obvious to me and to Gillian in retrospect was that her memory had not been distorted in a completely random way. It had been distorted in a very systematic way.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And if we think that, you know, about the purpose of evolution at its bare core, you know, of allowing us to propagate our genes, allowing us to reproduce. You know, you could think about that idea that would anybody ever have a second child if they remembered how bad it was the first time around?
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So that maybe there is an evolutionary benefit or like a functional benefit to misremembering or forgetting some of those negative experiences because it allows us to move forward with our lives. But there is some evidence suggesting that actually this is true
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
that women who are trying to get pregnant or want to have a second child do misremember the kind of the difficulties of their first pregnancy and of their first childbirth and that they will kind of dial down the negative elements of that and that sort of supports them to be able to kind of just even mentally deal with the idea of doing it again.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So I rushed back upstairs and all the way back up through this very large building and got my helmet, went back down. So then I was running late for my lessons.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
To an extent. I mean, it's not the case necessarily that we're actually just taking memories and taking them out and putting them away. But certainly we are kind of combining things together and digesting them in such a way that we're kind of clearing up some kind of mental space. Now, when I say mental space, I don't mean long-term memory storage.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
We actually do have quite like the ability to store a huge amount of information. A lot of the time when we talk about not being able to remember something, it's not that that memory isn't there anywhere, it's that we don't have an easy route to access it.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So, you know, you can think about, if we think about, you know, how memories are formed in the brain, they're formed by synapses forming connections between different neurons. Okay, so we create these networks of of connections between different neurons in the brain. And some of those networks have lots and lots of connections to them.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So there's like lots and lots of roads or routes to that particular memory, lots of paths by which we can access it. But some of our memories are kind of, those networks are a little less dense and there are fewer connections to them. So we don't have as many kind of easy routes to them. So they're kind of less easily accessed in a lot of ways.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And that's kind of that feeling that sometimes we have where, you know, you're walking down a street and then something, it could be a smell or a sight or just something really small triggers a memory that you haven't thought of for years and years and years.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And that is, you know, it was some memory, some kind of something that was stored in such a way that it had relatively few connections to other parts of your memory. And then but then something you essentially accidentally found yourself on the road to that memory and you're retrieving it.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
I was cycling through Donnybrook, which is a kind of a busy road. And on that road, there's a lot of buses, there's a lot of cars, there's a lot of cyclists. And what there isn't on that part of the road is a bicycle lane. The bicycle lane had stopped earlier. So in fact, as I was cycling along, I was weaving around traffic and in around buses. So I was cycling on wet roads. It's going too fast.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And so, you know, when we think about that kind of inside out idea of decluttering the memory in some ways, yeah, that that does happen to an extent that we are condensing down kind of the gist, you know, so out of all this list of US presidents, for example, which ones do I actually need to remember and which of them can I just collate into a list of there was a load of other guys who were probably all called Andrew, you know, so I think.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
I could not tell you the names of more than about six U.S. presidents. So there's ways that we can condense down what's actually going to be really important here.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
people on average tend to remember positive events more than negative events over time. We tend to kind of let a lot of the negative stuff go and keep a lot of the positive stuff.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So we'll tend to kind of remember that we got better grades when we were in school, or we'll tend to remember that we were more generous than we were, that we gave more money to charity, that we were more helpful to other people. And that we, you know, did things that, you know, will make us look good.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And there's some really nice work showing that it isn't just that we do this in a way that it makes us look good to other people. It's also that it makes us look good to ourselves. So, for example, there was a really nice study looking at grades where people were asked to remember their grades. But in this study, they knew that the researchers had access to their actual scores.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
But even so, when people would kind of ask to retrieve, you know, what were your grades like? And people who had gotten A's would remember them really well. People who had gotten D's did not remember them well. They remember that they had gotten B's or C's, even though they knew, the researchers knew the real data.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So it wasn't a matter of, I'm going to kind of slightly smudge this because, you know, I know there's a reason why I didn't do well there, but they don't need to know. You know they know. So your memory is actually being distorted to make you feel like you were a better student than you were or you were more generous or kinder or whatever.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Yeah, exactly. And this is, I suppose, it's kind of slightly tied into that idea that, you know, everybody is a better than average driver. Nobody is thinking of themselves as being a terrible driver. Nobody is thinking of themselves as, you know, oh, I was really only ever just average. But of course, this varies with a number of different things.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So, for example, with people who have depression, that tends to be a little bit less the case. And one of the things that that we can think about when we think about how our emotion interacts with our memory is that if we think about how our memories are very associative. OK, so I talked earlier on about that idea of you're walking down the street and something triggers a memory.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
A lot of our memory works in the same way in a lot of different contexts. And one of the things that's really interesting from an emotional context is that we tend to retrieve memories that are congruent with our current emotional state. So if I'm currently feeling very happy, I'm more likely to be able to remember events when I was happy.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
If I'm feeling sad or depressed, I'm more likely to be able to retrieve memories from my life that are sad or depressing. And then what that will mean is that I'll have a kind of slightly skewed perspective of my life, that I'll tend to, you know, view my life as being glass half empty instead of glass half full.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Okay, so this idea that that's referred to as a schema that we have, we create these schemas, these sort of mental frameworks that we use to store lots of information in our memories. one model of depression is that depression is caused by a kind of a negative schema.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So essentially a way of seeing the world that tends to characterize things as very negative, both in the moment, but also in terms of how we were, the kinds of memories that we're retrieving. So somebody with depression might have more difficulty retrieving positive memories and will find that they keep drifting into thinking about the more negative side. And then
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Because they'll do that, then we'll have another cognitive bias that will say, you know, OK, if I retrieve, let's say, six memories from my life and four of the memories that I retrieve are really sad ones, I must have had a really sad life.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And you can probably see where this is going because I skidded on the bike and I skidded right in front of a bus, which fortunately didn't hit me. But it was one of those e-bikes and electric bikes that has, you know, the electric power in it, which means it's very heavy and the down tube is really heavy. So as I fell, my leg got caught in the down tube. and snapped my leg in half.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And that may well be true, but it can also be influenced by the fact that that bias is leading you to retrieve those memories in the first place and then leading you to kind of over-interpret the frequency of those as being representative of your life as a whole.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Yes. So in this study, they had the participants read descriptions of a person. And the description would include both positive and negative things.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
traits of the person so they might describe the person as being kind but sometimes they're a bit dishonest okay and so you know all the kind of things that we all are to greater or lesser extent everybody's a bit of a mixed bag um and then the participants were later told that these this is a description either of you so other people have described you in this way or it's a description of some other third party okay what they called chris
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And then later on, they asked the participants to recall as much of the description as they could. And what they found is that when people recalled the CRIS study, they recalled kind of both the positive and the negative details.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
But if the description was supposed to apply to themselves, then they only really recalled the positive details and they were much less likely to recall the negative ones. So again, we have this sort of systematic thing where we're likely to remember the part where somebody said, oh, well, you know, she's a very kind person. but not the part where they said, well, she's sometimes a bit sneaky.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Yeah. So again, if we take that same idea of giving people a summary of a description of themselves or of somebody else that includes both positive and negative traits, the extent to which people will remember those seems to depend on whether or not
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
people think that those are things that they can change or not okay um so if if people think that these kind of negative traits are are kind of malleable then you know then they're like okay well that's fine maybe I still have those but it's kind of something I can fix but if it's something that's completely um like kind of you know something that you can't do anything about like
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
oh, well, she's a nice person, but she's really unfortunately short. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about that. Well, then you're likely to forget that detail coming in. But if they say like, oh, well, she's a really nice person, but sometimes, you know, she has a habit of rolling her eyes. You kind of go, OK, well, I could probably change that.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So you could say, oh, I suppose sometimes I do do that, but I'm working on it, you know. So we're less likely to misremember or to forget those details where we feel like there's something that we can change or something we can do about them. And they don't feel like they're a fundamental part of who we are.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Absolutely. Yeah. So we really think it is. And I think that's one of our key messages is that, yeah, that forgetting is not just a side effect of memory. It's not memory failing. It's part of what memory is supposed to do. And that forgetting is functional. It helps us to see the the gist among different things. It helps us to recognize kind of what's important to us and what isn't.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
It helps us to hold on to the things that really support us to live our lives. So like, if we think about not just like what memory is, but what memory is for, That memory isn't something that was just kind of created out of whole cloth. It's something that we evolved.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
It's like if you could imagine a little small bunch of twigs and then you snap those twigs. They don't snap cleanly. They snap with shards. And I had this very strange experience where I, you know, I've heard of this happening before, but I'd never experienced it where I didn't feel the pain straight away. I was lying on the ground and, you know, you get that moment of shock.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And we evolved... All the kind of... Both the physical and the mental attributes that we have evolved are things that have survived evolution because they offer us some kind of benefit for either survival or for reproduction. So all of these kind of... what we see as memory distortions or memory errors or sometimes called memory sins.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
All of these things that sometimes are annoying to us, but actually, really, a lot of these are things that we have evolved to be able to do and they are functional. They support us to live, thrive and survive. OK, so they help us to be happier. And if we look at, say, things like mental health, being happy, having good mental health has huge survival advantages.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So we know that people who are happier live longer. They're healthier, you know, all of these things. So it's not just a kind of touchy-feely, oh, I'll feel better. It's like these things actually have survival benefits.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So we have a lot of work looking at, say, false memories for fake news, showing that people, firstly, that people can very easily form false memories. If I show you a news story about like a political scandal that never happened, there's a fairly decent chance that you will go, oh, yeah, yeah, I remember that.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And you'll tell me where you remember it from and how you felt at the time and all kinds of things. OK, even though we just made it up. But what we find really consistently is that that is way more likely if that story is congruent with your existing ideological views.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So if it's a story that reflects well on your group or reflects badly on the other side, you're much more likely to form a false memory for that than you are if it reflects well on the other team or reflects badly on your team.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And again, that is part of that idea where we think it's a part of kind of shoring up those social bonds that we're kind of reinforcing that sense of identity with our social groups. And, you know, being part of a social group is, again, a hugely important survival factor. And humans are social animals. We don't survive well on our own.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
We live as part of a society and being integrated in a society and feeling part of a social group is a hugely important part of our psychological makeup.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
We kind of tend to see our thoughts and believe in our thoughts as objective reality. And sometimes kind of there's a therapeutic technique called defusion that's about trying to take that step back. So to put it simply, it's that idea of to recognize your own thoughts and to reflect on them. So to kind of to see things like saying, for example, you might have the thought, I'm a failure.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
OK, you can either say like, well, that means I am a failure, as in this thought has objective reality, or you can take a step back and say and recognize that, no, I'm having the thought that I'm a failure. That actually doesn't mean that I am. I just recognize that I'm having that thought and just taking that little bit of distance and recognizing that not every thought that you have
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And I was lying on the ground and I tried to stand up and I couldn't stand up. And I didn't know why I couldn't stand up. And then I looked down and my shoe had come off somewhere. I don't know where it had gone. My shoe had come off, but my leg was dangling like a kind of like a stuffed sock. The bus driver came rushing out and he was like, are you okay?
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
necessarily holds objective truth that you can take that distance from them and say these are look observe my thoughts observe how my thoughts are working observe the patterns that they go in and and then recognize that
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And I was like, well, no, I think I broke my leg, but it still didn't hurt. And then it was only a little while later that the pain started to come in. The bus driver called 999. So we called the emergency services, but it took nearly an hour for the ambulance to get there because it was a very busy, wet evening. So they was snarled up in traffic.
Hidden Brain
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This incredibly sharp, overwhelming, almost electric pain. And I suppose it's because it's nerve pain, essentially. It's the shards of the bone sawing against the nerve. I've never had the experience before where I would actually scream with pain, but not intend to. It was completely involuntary. I'd feel like screams were being drawn out of me against my will.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Just incredibly agonising, like electrifyingly sharp, overwhelming, blinding pain. You know in a hospital where they ask you, you know, how's the pain on a scale of 1 to 10? My previous 10 was now a 6 on the broken leg scale of 1 to 10.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
I'm allergic to one of the most common anesthetic. So they said, we'll try ketamine. I'd never had ketamine before. And I'm sure if you're taking this for recreational purposes, that maybe it's a good time. If you're starting out in a happy state and you're comfortable and relaxed with friends, but if you're starting out in a state of fear and pain, It was terrifying.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
It was a really, really terrifying experience. It felt like it lasted about a thousand years. It was... I, you know, had this incredibly vivid hallucinations and I, you know, came to believe at one point that, like, I had... I had ceased to exist, that I no longer existed. And I could feel not pain, but pressure, which obviously in retrospect was pressure on my leg as I tried to set it.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
But it felt to me like I was being compressed through, I felt like I was a train being compressed through a train tunnel. And it was this really, really surreal and very frightening experience. And I've had a lot of
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
flashbacks to that experience since and then after all that it didn't work they tried to set my leg and they put it in plaster but it didn't work so then they said actually after all that we need to do surgery anyway I'm assuming there must have been a very lengthy period of rehab after this much work on your leg Ciara Yeah, so I mean, I couldn't walk at all for several months.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
I was on crutches then afterwards for six months and there was very extensive physiotherapy and rehab and so on. It's three years later now and I do still have pain in my leg. You know, it's much, much better and I don't limp anymore. Mostly I can walk fine. But I used to dance and I used to do things that I can't do anymore. So, you know, it has had a lot of knock-on consequences in my life.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
More than I think, I think previously I would have used the expression, you know, somebody breaking a leg. Oh, you might break a leg. And you think it's, you know, unpleasant, but not a huge deal. But it was quite life-altering in a lot of ways.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Yeah, so definitely the memories have stayed with me. I'll find myself kind of repeatedly thinking about parts of it. In terms of getting back on a bike, well, of course, I couldn't for a long time because physically I was totally unable to. I was in a wheelchair for a while and then I had you know, crutches for a long time.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And, you know, but then maybe six, seven months after the accident, I did get back on the bike. I just said, right, I'll do a short cycle from my house down to my parents' house, which is not, you know, maybe a few miles. It's not very far. And I did it and I was proud that I did it, but my heart was going... I just going like the clappers the whole time.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And I found that I couldn't release my, I had this death grip on the handlebars and I couldn't release my hands from the handlebars enough to turn right. So of course we drive in Ireland on the left-hand side of the road. So turning left is easy enough. You just stay on the side you are. Turning right involves crossing over the road. You have to indicate.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So I did it to prove to myself that I could do it. But it was such an anxiety provoking experience that I couldn't. I feel there is a thing with a lot of activities like cycling where you need to have a sort of illusion of invulnerability in order to do it. And that illusion was completely shattered. But I knew how vulnerable I was. And there was no getting around that.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
There was no pretending that this was a safe thing to do. I no longer believed that it was in any way a safe thing to do. So I never I still have the bike and I still want to get back on it, but I've never gotten back to being able to cycle to work, for example.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
I don't think I've even really gotten to that stage. I think if I was even to think about, you know, would I do it tomorrow? Because I'd have to plan. I'd have to think, well, you know, I'll pack the bike bag and I'll pump up the tyres, you know, on the bike. And just straight away, I'm just like, no. There's always a thing. It's particularly... I live in Ireland. It rains a lot.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
This is no surprise. If I look out the window and it looks like it might be wet, it might be rainy, the road might be slick... Absolutely no way. The thought of getting on the bike is really very frightening. I start to feel very anxious about it. So even if I'm driving and I see people, you know, cyclists weaving around, I get so anxious on their behalf. What if they slipped? What if they fell?
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
What if they got knocked down? What if they had an accident? But it's absorbing a good amount of my attention.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
Yes, to a certain extent. But then I had a strange experience maybe a year and a half ago. So maybe again, about a year and a half after the accident, I had laser eye surgery. It only takes about 10 minutes and it's not painful. They put, you know, anesthetic eye drops into your eyes.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
But obviously your eyes are open for the surgery and there's, you know, a laser coming in and doing things and there's a lot of pressure on your eye. And when they're doing that, you see strange things. Like it looks like kind of like a tunnel.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
You know, you have that kind of vibe of things looking like things are coming away, shooting away from you or coming towards you like they're down a tunnel. And I had this almost flashback to that ketamine experience where I told you it felt like I was being compressed and squeezed down a tunnel. And it was just the visual elements of that gave me this...
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And I knew that's what was happening at the time. And I didn't have a panic attack or anything. But I was aware that it was like, God, this is like that. And it made it very, very unpleasant. And it felt like a long 10 minutes.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So Jill Price is a woman who's very well known because she has an extremely rare condition that's called highly superior autobiographical memory, which is usually abbreviated as HSAM. And what it is, is a really extraordinary memory for the events of your own life.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So somebody with HSAM, like somebody like Jill, for example, will be able to tell you in enormous detail about all the incidents of their lives. Like somebody who you might be able to say, tell me what the weather was like on the 30th of September, 1998. And most of us would go, how on earth would I possibly know that? But somebody with HSAM, someone like Jill, would say, oh, yeah, I remember.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
It was really sunny. But the clouds came over at about three o'clock. We thought for a while it was going to rain, but then it didn't. And I was hanging out with my friends and my friend picked me up. And then we went off down to the shopping center and we hung out outside Claire's accessories. And my friend was thinking about getting her ears pierced.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And, you know, would be able to give you this extremely detailed blow by blow account of their own personal experiences.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So she tells the story that her dad used to work as the agent for Jim Henson, who, of course, was the creator of the Muppets and the the brain behind Sesame Street. And, you know, he would tell all these kind of stories about, you know, to the family and everybody all about Sesame Street and about Jim Henson and how incredible it was. And at the time, Jill was very young.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
She was in nursery school. But her dad arranged for her whole class to go on a field trip to Jim Henson's studio where all of the puppets were created. And this, you know, they've talked it up for ages. And this is something, of course, that they were all really, really looking forward to it. But when the day came around for the field trip, Jill was sick. She had tonsillitis.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So she wasn't able to go. And of course, being very, very young, she didn't understand that, you know, her father had already committed to this and had already committed to take the whole class with her. So they had to go ahead without his own daughter. They had to go ahead and run the trip. And she was devastated.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
couldn't understand why he was doing this, taking all of her friends, leaving her behind. And even though she had tonsillitis, so she had a really sore throat, she stood there screaming at the top of her lungs, screaming at her parents so they were not letting them go.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
And she says, you know, that it was a small thing in retrospect, but that when every time she thinks about it, she still feels this overwhelming sense of disappointment every time she sees the Muppets.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
So every time you see a Muppets Christmas Carol, you're brought back to this moment of not just a rose-tinted view of, oh, ha ha, this is a funny thing that happened to me as a child, but really like almost being right back there again and feeling it as though she's right there in the moment again.
Hidden Brain
Forget About It!
No, so it's actually, it is very unusual. Whereas, say, my memory of a childhood event might be very, very fuzzy, very foggy. I might remember kind of a core detail of that event, but I might not remember how I got there or what happened afterwards or what I was wearing. All of those really, really clear details, those are still very vivid in Jill's memory.