Stories

On September 1, 1953, a 27-year-old man named Henry Molaison underwent experimental brain surgery to treat his severe epilepsy. The surgery worked. The seizures stopped. But when Henry woke up, he had lost the ability to form new memories. For the next 55 years, until his death in 2008, Henry lived in a perpetual present. Every person he met was a stranger minutes later. Every conversation was new. Every day was the first day of the rest of his life-literally. ...

On November 4, 1970, a social worker in Arcadia, California encountered a girl who appeared to be six or seven years old. She wasn’t six. She was thirteen. She weighed 59 pounds. She couldn’t stand up straight. She couldn’t chew solid food. She couldn’t speak-not a word, not a sound beyond occasional whimpers. She’d been locked in a small room for nearly her entire life. Tied to a potty chair during the day, confined to a sleeping bag in a crib at night. No toys. No conversation. No human interaction beyond someone occasionally bringing food. ...

Dr. P. was a distinguished music teacher and singer who could tell you the exact interval between any two notes you played. He could identify a Brahms sonata from the first three measures. He could conduct a choir through complex harmonies without missing a beat. But he couldn’t recognize his wife’s face. Worse than that-when Dr. P. went to leave the neurologist’s office after his examination, he reached for his wife’s head and tried to lift it off her shoulders. ...

In December 1880, a 21-year-old woman in Vienna developed paralysis in three limbs, hallucinations, speech disturbances, and a cough with no physical cause. Doctors examined her thoroughly. There was no tumor, no infection, no injury, no disease they could identify. Yet she couldn’t move her right arm or legs. She had violent convulsions. She saw terrifying hallucinations. And for weeks at a time, she could only speak in English-having completely forgotten her native German. ...

In 1930, four identical baby girls were born to a family in a small Midwestern town. Genetically, they were as similar as four humans can be-monozygotic quadruplets, sharing 100% of their DNA. They grew up in the same house, with the same parents, eating the same food, attending the same schools. And all four developed schizophrenia. On the surface, this seems like a clear-cut case of genetic determinism: identical genes, identical illness. ...

In July 1959, social psychologist Milton Rokeach gathered three psychiatric patients in a room at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan. Each man had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. And each man believed, with absolute conviction, that he was Jesus Christ. Rokeach’s hypothesis was straightforward: when confronted with two other people making the same claim, at least one of them would experience cognitive dissonance strong enough to crack their delusion. Face-to-face with contradictory evidence, reality would reassert itself. ...

Every few seconds, Clive Wearing wakes up for the first time. He opens his eyes. He looks around. And he experiences what he believes is his first moment of consciousness after years of being unconscious. He writes in his journal: “8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.” A few minutes later, he crosses it out and writes: “9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.” Then he crosses that out too and writes: “9:34 AM: NOW I am awake.” ...

In 1941, during a German air raid on Norway, a young woman named Astrid L. was struck in the head by bomb shrapnel. She survived. She recovered. But when she started speaking again, something was wrong. Her accent was different. Not slightly different-completely different. She was Norwegian. She’d lived her entire life in Norway, speaking Norwegian with a Norwegian accent. After the injury, she spoke Norwegian with what sounded like a strong German accent. ...

In the winter of 1878, a Cree man named Swift Runner arrived at a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post in Alberta, Canada. He was emaciated, nearly dead from starvation. He said his family-his wife and six children-had all died during the harsh winter. He’d buried them in the snow. He was the only survivor. The authorities were suspicious. Swift Runner showed signs of starvation, but not as severe as someone who’d watched his entire family die of hunger should show. ...

A man is waiting for his wife outside a restaurant. A woman approaches him. She’s smiling, clearly recognizing him. She starts talking as if they know each other well. He has no idea who she is. He politely engages, trying to figure out from context clues who this person might be. A colleague? A neighbor? Someone from his wife’s social circle? The woman seems confused by his confusion. She touches his arm, says something about “the kids.” ...