DISCONNECTED MEMORIES.
THE suggestions we threw out a fortnight ago on the subject of the curious psychological case in New Orleans, where a young German, George Nickern, lost, by a fall, all sensation and all consciousness, recovering, however, in about six weeks, under medical treatment, every faculty except memory, and having, as it were, to begin life anew at the age of twenty, has brought us some new cases of so much interest that we cannot resist discussing one very remarkable question which they suggest, and for the resolution of which they provide new data. This question is whether we recognize ourselves in the same way in which we recognize a room, by the furniture it contains, by the position of the fire and the windows, and the books and the desk and the sideboard,—whether in like manner we recognize ourselves by observing the same stock of powers and memories one minute which we observed the last (with the addition, of course, of the intervening experiences), or whether, on the contrary, self-consciousness is not something wholly distinct from those " notes " of us by which other persons know us, from our modes of viewing things, our tricks of thought and manner, our stock of information, our practical talents, in a word, from any and all the items of any psychological and moral inventory that either we ourselves could construct or any one else could construct for us. Now, let us look at the curious cases of altered or dual memory with which we have been supplied, and see how far they shed any light ou the question we have suggested.
It would seem that the remarkable cases of lapses of memory are of two kinds,—one kind being akin to what the medical profession now call aphasia, where there is no sort of self-oblivion at all,—the psychological peculiarity, indeed, of which is that the mind, though it may be perfectly sane, hits on the wrong words by which to express itself without being aware that it has done so, and yet—the network of association being still but little impaired—often on very remarkable metaphorical expressions for the words really wanted. Thus we remember an old geologist suffering from aphasia, asking his son concerning the writer and his wife, " whether he had ever seen these two specimens before," —his scientific understanding evidently classing men as mere " specimens " of a species in natural history. We suspect that the cause of this kind of loss of memory, expressed of course psychologically and not physiologically, is that there has been too weak a hold of self-consciousness on the ordinary forms of language, and that memory remaining strongest in those departments where the self-conscious action of the mind has been strongest, loses its grasp of all words learned by rote as it were, and without reflective analysis, though retaining its hold on those which have run the gauntlet of analysis and reflection. We suspect that the same account may be given of the first of the two cases mentioned by our correspondent " B. K. R." in another column, where, after an attack of paralysis, the patient, though completely recovering her memory of all her previous life and knowledge, yet completely lost her power of recognizing the printed and written alphabet either for the purpose of reading or writing, and had to learn afresh after the age of seventy to decipher even the familiar passages, iu the New Testament and elsewhere, which she had never forgotten how to recite, and of which she grasped the full significance. In point of fact, nothing is more arbitrary,—nothing, that is, more completely devoid of those various converging trains of association by which we recover so many lost facts,—than the connection between the sounds and the shapes of the letters, and nothing that we know in life is more completely learned without the help of reflection, by mere rote. We do not wonder, then, that in the case of a sudden failure of memory, unattended by any loss of self-consciousness, the loss should fall upon the earliest links of purely arbitrary associations, i.e., associations formed by contiguity in time between a certain set of sounds and a certain set of forms, but not associations even of the same organ of sense, and not associations which more than one monotonous set of experiences had ever rivetted. It was only like losing the link of connection between the keys of a piano and the notes they would strike,—a sort of knowledge which, if unconnected with any scientific rationale, would, we should think, be very apt to go, as self-consciousness can enter exceedingly little into the process of learning it. All mere rote-knowledge, in which the more completely you suppress your own reflective powers, the quicker you get on, is pretty sure to go first. For it is the knowledge of self which is the root of memory, and hence of the period before the child gains a knowledge of itself, as distinguished from its mere sensations, it can recollect nothing. All the arbitrary rote-processes, therefore, into which self-knowledge enters very slightly indeed, are pretty sure to ooze away first.
But the second case mentioned by our correspondent "B. K. R.." is far more curious, and, to our minds, far more instructive in relation to the rationale of such losses of memory. It is, as we understand it, the case of a lady with what we may call a forked memory,—i.e., two distinct states of memory, each of them grafted on to a common stock dating more than a year previously, but growing separately since that time. This, we say, is the construction we put on " B. K. R.'s" account of the Norman lady's case ; though she describes it as two quite distinct and alternating states of memory, " but linked together by recognition of the same persons and objects." She tells us indeed that each memory, both the "normal" and the "abnormal," went back straight to the last moment when it was interrupted by the transition to the other state. But this seems to us to imply that both went back to the time before the fracture took place. If she recognized her husband, and servants, and house, and furniture, and remembered how to sew and sing, 8:c., in the " abnormal" state, as she did, she clearly had a good stock of experience at her service, gathered from the time before her disease began. She could not have known her husband without remembering her marriage, nor her songs probably without remembering something of the time when she learned them, and so forth. Even though she required, as we understand, to be made doubly acquainted with any recent event, her husband's journey and return, for instance,—once in her normal and once in her abnormal state,—before she could recognize the fact in both states, still had she forgotten, in her
abnormal state, all she had learned before this morbid condition began, there would not have been the means of making her au fait of the general facts around her in her abnormal state at all. We infer: then, that we may assume that though the normal and abnormal memories alternated, each succeeding and excluding the other, after the dualism had once begun, yet each of them drew upon the common stock which preceded the first occurrence of the abnormal state. To suppose that what our correspondent calls the abnormal' memory led back to a mere blank as regards the time preceding her first seizure, would be inconsistent with supposing that she knew her husband and the priest, and felt her usual reverence for both, and could sing her old songs, and so forth. We suspect, then; that both states were really abnormal, although only one of them seemed to change the lady's character and to impress upon it a more childish and less self-conscious aspect,—that there had been, when she was first seized, some virtual untwisting of the thread of her life, one of the untwisted fibres connecting it with the condition in which she seemed most like herself, and another with the trance-like condition described by our correspondent in which she lost her usual self-conscious timidity, her consideration for others (excepting her husband and the priest), and became wayward and wilful. But whether this conjecture be correct or not, nothing can show more clearly how much memory of external events depends upon the power to find the same self within. This Norman lady could remember in each condition the events associated with that state of her own mind in which she then was, but not those connected only with the other aspect of herself. The tie in each case was her self-consciousness. When she found the wayward, comparatively unself-conscious, childlike self uppermost, she recollected the husband, and the priest, and the servants, and the events associated with that aspect of herself. When she found the timid, selfrestrained, anxious woman uppermost, she remembered the husband, and the priest, and the servants, and the events associated with that side of herself. But did not both these phases belong to her true old self? and was it not, as it were, the double refraction, or breaking of herself into two distinct states, in the one of which the childlike, wayward side of her had almost utterly disappeared, and in the other of which the reflective, anxious deliberative side of her had almost utterly disappeared, which caused this dualism in her memory ? All memory really -consists in restoring, from a fragment of a past state of consciousness, the whole of that past state of consciousness. But if the uniting link,—the self,—known to us at one moment is essentially different in aspect from the self known to us at another moment, none of the objective facts to be remembered, even though they were the same, could seem the same. It is then the split, the cleavage, in self-knowledge which in this case causes the dualism of memory.
The third case we have been referred to is contained in a very -curious tract by Mr. Robert Dunn (M.R.C.S.), published in a Lancet of 1845, and reprinted from it in a small tract, in the same Tear. It is the story of a young woman who, at the time in illbealth, fell into a river and was nearly drowned. She was rescued and brought to her senses again, and for some days was quite herself, though very ill; but in about ten days she fell into a fit, and when she recovered from this fit, she was found to have lost her sense of hearing, her sense of taste, and her power of articulation, and to have totally lost all memory of persons and things about her, though she retained very keenly her power of vision and her sense of touch. When she returned home she recognized no one and nothing, -not even her mother, and for a long time she utterly forgot from day to day what she had been doing the previous ,day, so that her memory even in this abnormal state was mot continuous. The curious thing was that her love of wild flowers, and her love of her mother soon showed themselves again, and that the „first return of articulation was in an attempt -to ask the cause of her mother's grief when she saw the latter in trouble many months after she herself had fallen into this state ; and next, in naming the wild flowers she saw when taken into the country. Latterly she was unhappy if the man to whom she had been formerly engaged were not near her, and eventually it was apparently jealousy at seeing him paying attention to another which threw her, about a year after her seizure, into a second fit, from which she recovered in her right mind, but without the slightest memory of the intervening year. She recovered her old memory of persons and things, spoke as usual, and before long recovered her hearing too, which was the last linkipi her recovery. One marked feature in this case is the evident flickering of a half-memory beneath her blank forgetfulness, as in her restless ness, when her mother, and subsequently her former lover, were not near her. She recovered, too, her former skill in sewing,—she had been a dressmaker,—before she could possibly have relearned the art, and as we have seen, named wild flowers rightly, and used many words quite rightly, before she came to herself at all. But the distinctive feature of her condition was the remarkable loss of self-consciousness which was so much the feature of her case, that during the first few months after her seizure she would fall spontaneously into utter unconsciousness several times in the day.
What, however, we desire to note most is this,—that as she gradually recovered her former power, she does not seem in any degree to have gradually recovered her self-recollection. On the contrary, she regained that per salturn after the second fit, and not iu any degree by recognizing what we may call the old furniture of her mind, as she gradually regained it. And the same point is noticeable in all other cases of this kind. Thus the Norman lady, though most of her objects of interest were common to the two states, was not thereby helped to any moral continuity between the one state of mind and the other. She also passed per saltum from the self-recollection of what our correspondent calls her normal state to the self-recollection of her abnormal state, and was not helped even by the mass of common memories which must have belonged to both since in both she recognized the authority of her husband and her father confessor over her, to connect the two. Indeed, it is the characteristeric of all the cases of discontinuous memory we have heard of, that though there may be a gradual recovery of words and faculties, yet wherever the self-recognition has failed, it returns either per salturn, or not at all. The lady who forgot how to read and write while remembering everything else distinctly, never lost her self-recollection at all.
Dr. W. B. Carpenter, who read a very remarkable paper a few months ago before the Royal Institution, on "The Unconscious Activity of the Brain," suggests, we think, in part a key to the problem. He points out that operations performed automatically, and without training, by many of the lower animals, have to be learned by man ; but when learned can be performed without any self-consciousness, and therefore, of course, without any recollection. " Thus a man in a state of profound abstraction walks through a crowded street without jostling his fellow-passengers or bruising himself against lamp-posts ; and he follows the line of direction which is most familiar to him, even though at starting he had intended to take some other." And we may add, of course, he can remember nothing of what he has done, for he has done it without self-consciousness, which is essential to memory,— memory being nothing but the complete recovery of a former state of consciousness involving both the self and the not-self. Now, as in one of the above cases the only thing forgotten was those arbitrary associations between sounds and forms in which self-consciousness is least of all called out, so in all the others what seems to have been forgotten was not so much the objects of thought as the connecting subject,—the self which united them. The mere artistic dexterities were often recovered, just as a man might exercise them in a fit of abstraction or in his sleep, without the recovery of this self-recollection. What the Norman lady forgot in her "abnormal " state was her brooding self ; what she forgot in her " normal " state was her spontaneous, childlike, unreflecting self ; and as her husband, and priest, and household duties belonged to both sells, she recognized them in both states, but under so different a light that they did not link into the same memory. Mr. Dunn's patient forgot herself altogether, like the young German in New Orleans, and did not recollect herself till after the second fit, though many of her " unconscious" mental energies returned long before it. These people, in their oblivious condition, were all acting like the man who threads his way to the city without attending to it, except that instead of being abstracted through the excess of musing reverie, a blank mist seems to have fallen over their self-knowledge, which made all the scenery of the background dim. The Norman lady alone got a glimpse of herself, but of two different sides of herself in her different phases. Yet in all cases alike the act of self-recognition was sudden, and not gradual, as if to make it clear that though we are liable to lose our self-recognition, no less than our power of recognizing external objects, yet that this self-recognition does not depend upon an accumulation of individual memories of our features of character, but is a distinct intuition, and this not the less that the fully conscious self may be so different from the child-like unconscious self, that it is possible to recognize each self separately without connecting the two indivisibly together.
Previous page
