Reply To: The Woman who Can’t Forget (Year 1 Thur.)

[Anonymous]

We can learn from both stories, that our memory is a complex structure, in which every element is important in its own way. We have different types of memory, each one of them has different tasks. However, not every person has this mechanism working the same way. Some people have impaired or superior memory. Clive, known as the man with the seven second memory, has one of the worst cases of amnesia in the world. His case is not only interesting because of the fact he doesn’t remember most important events from his past, but also because he can still remember the facts and play the piano. It shows us that having some types of memory damaged (like episodic memory), we can still have other types working just fine (like semantic memory). As Jill said, science knows a lot about forms of impaired memory, but very little about forms of superior memory, like her own. Hyperthymesia is not as great as it seems to be in the beggining initially. Jill is forced to live in a nightmare, just like Clive. The difference between them is that Clive remebers too little, and Jill remebers too much. The emotional intensity and random nature of her memories had nearly driven her mad. At the end of the day we still don’t fully understand the nature of memory. Not until we will be are able to classify and explain every case like these two.

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