LOSING MEMORIES

This is a story right out of science fiction.

The BBC reported that a man who went to the dentist for a root canal left with his memories locked in on 1:40 p.m. on 14 March 2005 – right in the middle of a dentist appointment.

A member of the British Armed Forces, he had returned to his post in Germany the night before after attending his grandfather’s funeral. He had gym in the morning, where he played volleyball for 45 minutes. He then entered his office to clear a backlog of emails, before heading to the dentist’s for root-canal surgery.

“I remember getting into the chair and the dentist inserting the local anesthetic,” he said. After that? A complete blank. It is like any new memories were written in invisible ink that slowly disappears from his mind after 90 minutes.

Today, he only knows that there is a problem because he and his wife have written detailed notes on his smartphone, in a file labelled “First thing – read this."

Even the events leading up to his amnesia are highly puzzling. The dentist thought it was a reaction to the anesthetic or a brain blood vessel had burst. But other medical evaluations could not confirm a cause.

The patient could work out how to solve a complex maze, however, he had completely forgotten the skill three days later. “It was like a déjà vu replica of the same errors – he took the same time to relearn the task once more,” says his doctor.

One possibility is that this kind amnesia is a “psychogenic illness." Some patients report memory loss after a traumatic event – but that tends to be a coping mechanism to avoid thinking about painful past events; it doesn’t normally affect your ability to remember the present. However, this patient had suffered no trauma, and according detailed psychiatric assessments, he is otherwise emotionally healthy. 

The answer may be hiding in the thicket of tiny neural connections we call “synapses”. Once we have experienced an event, the memories are slowly cemented in the long term by altering these richly woven networks. That process of “consolidation” involves the production of new proteins to rebuild the synapses in their new shape; without it, the memory remains fragile and is easily eroded with time. Block that protein synthesis in rats, and they soon forget anything they have just learnt. 

Crucially, 90 minutes would be about the right time for this consolidation to take place – just as he starts to forget the details of the event. It is like the protein production just stops so memories cannot be locked in place.

This story is relayed to LOST fans for the simple reason as a possible explanation of the untold torment of what "awakening" meant to the main characters. They had to "awake" in order to move on in life. But why in the sideways world they could not remember the island past has always been a confusing bit of mythology. Instead of not allowing the memories to set in the synapses, the LOST characters' memories were "masked" by something until a traumatic or emotional event triggered the release of that mask. This falls into the category of circumstantial evidence to the premise that LOST's foundation story line was about mind control and illusion over reality.