A tumor stole every memory I had – what happened when they came back

I love stories like this. By studying what happens to the brain when something goes wrong we gain a sliver of insight into how the brain works. In this case he was able to store memories but he could not retrieve them. When the cyst was drained he almost immediately gained access to all those memories again. Fascinating!

Such a fascinating article.

1) It makes the brain sound like a Kafka queue that kept growing but never had any consumers, until his tumor was removed.

2) It's interesting how there was a disconnect between his active consciousness and whatever other process was reindexing/reinterpreting his raw memory data. Sort of a nod to my napkin theory about the brain being a multi process machine.

3) The fact that the memories didn't replay in order kinda makes sense. It's like a natural fact of concurrency; you don't know what order the output is going to show up in, unless you sort the data afterwards, and by sort I guess we mean looking at the raw data and stitching it together (like a binary sort).

I actually had a similar incident with memory loss some years ago. It wasn't because of a tumor but from severe central sleep apnea, that as near as I've ever been able to figure out had been going on for about a decade and was taking a significant toll on my body and brain. The way he describes the memories coming back to him is much more eloquently put than I've ever been able to manage. I hadn't hit a point where I had lost the ability to reason, but it sounds like the memory loss was comparable. There was a period of about 2-3 years where I just hadn't been able to recall much that happened recently or long ago. I wasn't quite as fortunate (I think) as him with the recovery of memory, there are still people and relationships that I don't fully recall and likely never will at this point, but the things that did come back came back in that same kind of jumbled B before A kind of way. It was incredibly frightening for the first few months like that because memories would just pop into place and I'd realize that I didn't recall them before and feel like I just wasn't me during that time, I was some incomplete version of myself and had no idea that I was missing parts of myself. It's an incredible experience to get those things back but it's awfully frightening looking back onto the times when they weren't there and not being able to help the thought that a large part of you just wasn't there for years at a time, and if you're really the person that was there before, during, and after the whole thing. That did lead to a good deal of depression for myself during some of that, after realizing things that I did that just didn't look or sound like me because of everything I was missing. It sounds like he had a lot of help from his friends and family which was tremendous in getting him to this point. I also likely wouldn't have fared nearly as well without mine.

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