L. Navid Osbert (東京)
9 November 2009
I was preoccupied at the time being impressed with that high school teacher’s technique, but no… I’m sure remembering it now. There was a message to me there, a lesson within the lesson for the amnesiac historian. The broken pot of memory in the limp plastic bag of the body. Where did my eyes go at that crucial moment?
I got an email from Joji on Tuesday saying the original files had been lost. On Wednesday I got an email from Kay saying that Joji wanted to meet up again. He didn’t respond to any emails I sent him after that, so I just did what Kay said and met him at the same coffee shop near Saitama-Shintoshin station.
“I was wrong. The data should still be there,” he turned the small black hard drive over in his hands once, slowly, like he was inspecting an ancient artifact for carved glyphs. He handed it to me. “If you plugged this into your computer now and booted it, you would see that it was blank and contained only free space, but that’s not true. When a hard drive is formatted, the actual memory stored on it is not erased or destroyed at all. Everything is still there, it’s just hidden.”
“Hidden?”
“It’s not hard to do. Computers are amnesiac. It’s not retrograde amnesia like what you have, but a worse kind, anterograde amnesia. Like that movie. They can’t remember anything they don’t have written down, in a manner of speaking, not even if only a few seconds have passed. And this includes the information of where they’ve written things down. So even if all sorts of important information is properly saved and stored on a computer, if the information that allows the computer to find where that information is stored is lost, the information becomes for all intents and purposes irretrievable.
“Suppose you were an anterograde amnesiac. Memento, that was the name of the movie. And let’s say you for some reason buried important objects in a field for retrieval later, because you didn’t have any better way to store them. And let’s say the exact locations of burial were chosen according to a pneumonic system. Of course, no matter how intuitive the pneumonic system might be, since you’re an anterograde amnesiac who forgets everything in a matter of minutes, you have to write yourself strict clear directions, or draw an extremely precise map. If you don’t, you won’t be able to find them. This is how computers store information on a hard drive. Re-formatting the hard-drive is equivalent to burning the map and directions. The stuff is still buried in the field, but not only can you not find it any more – without the map and directions, you the anterograde amnesiac have no reason to suspect there is anything at all buried in any field anywhere that has anything to do with you.
“Or, picture someone who’s stumbled into Japan without knowing anything about it. They’re trying to drive from your apartment in Shimokitazawa to Landmark Tower in Yokohama for the first time without a map, without street directions, and most importantly, without any clue that a building called Landmark tower or a city called Yokohama exists.”
“Great,” I said. First impressions maintained. He sure liked to talk. As irrelevant as most of the information might be, as before I had no pressing reason not to listen, and as before I found myself almost entranced by the way he went on and on. “So that’s the deal with your hard drive. It’s got everything we need buried in a field somewhere, but no knowledge of that fact, much less any means of actually finding and digging anything up.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“So how do we get the information we need?”
He shrugged. “Dig up the whole field.”
“You can do that?”
“Sure,” he said. “Computer logic is strict and absolute, not flexible and intuitive. The hard drive keeps a map, called a file system, which records the location of every bit of information written on it. If you want it to lose some information, you tell it to delete it. But why should it go to the trouble of actually hunting down the information and destroying it when it would be much simpler to just wipe it off the map? To you the user it looks the same. You say you need to find a house after it’s erased it, it checks its map of its internal city, and says no such residence. It doesn’t need to drive to the address and check; it has absolute faith in its map. As an anterograde amnesiac, it has to – without faith in its record-keeping systems, what else does it have? In fact, not only doesn’t it need to drive to the address and check – it can’t. Its utter conviction that such a place does not exist prevents it from getting there. Even if it’s been there hundreds of times, the only copy of the street directions are destroyed forever, and it can’t navigate on sight using landmarks or muscle memory. It needs strict, clear, logical directions. But what it can be forced to do is drive door-to-door to every place in the city and report what it finds there. If you let it do that for long enough, it’ll find the place you’re looking for. Of course, it won’t know when it finds it. That’s for you to decide.”
“You’re pretty knowledgeable, aren’t you?”
“I’ve got too much free time.”
I scratched my head. “I follow your metaphor, and thank you for personifying it to make it easy to follow, but I’m afraid none of that helps me know what to actually do when I plug it into my computer. It’s not like I can just sit down and type ‘Hey, check everywhere and let me see what you do find!’ and be done with it.”
He threw his head back and laughed appreciatively. “Sure, of course,” he said, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his baseball jacket, “I wrote out directions for you. I just thought you might be able to enjoy the horribly tedious task if you had some kind of more human narrative to understand it by. And I thought that maybe thinking about the way computers remember might be interesting to you, given your peculiar relationship with that thing called memory. Long-winded old man – but I guess there’s not much sense in apologizing for habit, is there?”
He held out a small, twice-folded piece of notebook paper, and I took it, setting it on top of the small black plastic case of the hard drive.
“Thanks,” I said. “It is interesting. I’m not sure if I can personally relate much to it, though – I can form new memories just fine. I know Landmark Tower exists, that there is a city to the south of here called Yokohama, and I could probably find it even without directions if I absolutely had to. There’s just a particular date and time prior to which I can’t remember anything. And whatever I may have buried in whatever fields back then, if I’ve made it this far without needing it back, then I can’t see why there’d be much point in going and poking around for it now.”
“I wonder. You should think about what the actual neurological implications of your type of amnesia might be, though.”
“Such as?”
“Have you seen any images of your brain sense the accident? Cat-scans? MRI’s?”
“It’s been a long time, but yeah. They took some in the hospital in Bali.”
“Was it all there?”
“What do you mean?”
“Were chunks of gray matter missing? I mean, was the brain you’d spent all those years growing still there?”
“Well, as far as I could tell, yeah. It looked like pictures of brains look. No shrapnel or debris actually penetrated my skull, either, so I have to assume there isn’t anything missing.”
“And you wouldn’t believe your brain was mostly destroyed during the injury and regrew in time for those images to be taken?”
“Why would I think that?” I was getting impatient.
“You don’t, do you?”
“I don’t.”
“So physically, the places where all of your old memories were stored have not gone anywhere. Unless you posit that the memories are stored in some kind of magical soul-ether and that your soul-ether was destroyed by the injury, it seems reasonable to assume the memories themselves are still there too. Isn’t it more likely that it’s just your brain’s retrieval system that was damaged? That the file system was corrupted, rather than all the data being literally erased?”
“That’s assuming the brain works just like a computer hard drive.”
“They don’t have to work exactly the same. We don’t know exactly how the brain’s storage and retrieval system works, but we know it has one. This is obvious just in the fact that naming a song title can call to mind its melody, and that the melody can in turn awaken some emotional experience we have associated with it. The phrases first love or high school summon specific memories in each brain just like typing a file name in a computer search engine would bring up all related files. We also know that memory formation in the brain functions in some sense like the interplay between a computer hard disk and RAM. Long term memory, like a hard drive, holds memory reliably for years, even when we sleep, but can be unreliably slow on retrieval. Short term memory, like RAM, uses information shuttled back and forth to and from long-term memory, and can’t hang onto it for long, but can recall it lightning-fast for the time it is there.”
“Okay,” I said, “so if the analogy really does hold as far as you’re saying it does, then the memories are still there, though the connections that allow me to actually access them are damaged. The map or street directions to them have been burned.” I picked up the folded piece of notebook paper he gave me. “This may allow me to tell my computer, ‘check everywhere and see what you find,’ but unless you know of a way to tell my brain the same thing, this is just moot conjecture.”
“And there’s the rub,” he said, pinching his chin thoughtfully between his index finger and thumb.
“Well,” I took a breath and nodded, scooping up the hard drive and the folded piece of paper and getting to my feet. “Thanks for this.”
“One thing is puzzling about that,” he said, as if I hadn’t moved or said anything at all. “You’d think there’d be some kind of a light-bulb moment of reconnection when you encountered information you’d once been able to remember but have forgotten. For example, you spent a good deal of time in Japan before the accident, but you say that all you feel hear is a vague nagging sense of returning. No sharp flashes of I’ve been here before when you see a particular intersection, no particular staircase in a particular train station? And what about John and Yoko? For all your pre-amnesia obsession, not one single song or photograph or famous quotation sets off sparks of sudden remembrance in your brain? It really seems like a computer hard drive, re-writing the some of the same files after a format without realizing they’re already there. The analogy works more than it should, more than you’d think the difference between man and machine would allow.”
“Well,” I had thought about this before. I returned to my seat. “I’ve read memory described as operating according to cores around which auxiliary information is arranged as nodes on a web. Maybe no particular song, no particular photograph or quotation, not even the names John Lennon and Yoko Ono are analogous enough to the lost core memory around which all the related auxiliary memories were clustered. Maybe without being reintroduced to that core, all of the auxiliary information will continue to seem new. So that core would be like the address entry on the file-system map. That which lets you know with certainty that this house is in fact this house.”
“Hm,” he furrowed his brow. “You’re talking about the Platonic essence of the thing. In that case, you wouldn’t be able to recognize John and Yoko as the John and Yoko you knew of, or Japan as the Japan you knew of, unless you re-encountered whatever it was that to you represented the absolute essence of John and Yoko, or of Japan.”
“Whatever that was.”
“That might be an unanswerable question even without the barrier of amnesia.”
“And so probably not worth getting too worked up about.” I got to my feet again. “I’ll stick to what knots I seem to have a chance of untangling for now.”
“偉いな,” he said, and laughed. “Godspeed.”
