Living without a past - what's it like? Is that "human"?

There are many questions about what "living in now, now, now" is really like.  The video "now, now, now" and blogposts "Experiencing self vs remembering self...who is happier?  "now, now" or "blah, blah" and "Dialogues with Oskar - fewer thoughts, very still, 2D/3D perceptions, no doership" discussed this.  

A recent story in Wired, sent in Rommel de Leon, "In A Perpetual Present: The Strange Case of the Woman Who Couldn't Remember Her Past - And Can't Imagine Her Future" by Erika Hayasaki presents a scientifically-verified case of someone who has lived only in the present, as she has never stored any episodic, autobiographical memories (EAM)s.

Susie McKinnon
As far as i can determine

Susie McKinnon lives in Olympia, Washington w/her husband in a house with memorabilia from trips to the Caymans, Bermuda, Jamaica, etc., but has no EAMs of those trips, or of anything else in her life.  

Susie contacted researchers in 2006 and was the first person identified with "severely deficient autobiographical memory", which had been predicted, but not previously observed.  She knows many facts about her life, but just no EAMs.   

"I know bits and pieces of stuff that happened," McKinnon says, but "I don't remember being shorter or smaller...I have no images or impressions of myself as a kid."

McKinnon's case would qualify her, in some quarters, as "not human", as having EAMs/stories is what philosophers like John Locke argued constitutes personal identity, our "I".   As to what stories make up the "I", research has shown that EAMs are haphazardly assembled from a tiny fraction of the experiences that we were exposed to, determined by whatever long term waves were sweeping across our brain when they occurred.  Our precious "I" is just a grab-bag of random experiences.   

Erika Hayasaki
UC Irvine 

As far as Susie's personality, Erika says "She is a liberal white woman who married a black man despite her conservative father's disapproval.  A Catholic who decided somewhere along the way that religion wasn't for her.  She's bashful and sensitive.  Intuitive, curious and funny.  She has a job as a retirement specialist for the state of Washington."

She has hobbies, values, beliefs, opinions, a nucleus of friends and knows very well who she is.   She performs in a choral ensemble and lyrics and melodies stick because of her excellent, intact semantic memory.  How is Susie not "human"?

  
Susie can tell you that three months ago she sang a solo of an old English folk song onstage.  But only her husband can describe how she strolled onto the stage and took her place in front of a piano. McKinnon believes she must have felt a mixture of confidence and fear, but hasn’t the faintest idea if she did.

Susie first realized her memory was "different" in 1977, when she took a memory test.  When asked questions about her childhood, she replied “Why are you asking stuff like this? No one remembers that!”  She thought other folk made this "stuff" up—just like she did.

Endel Tulving
U of Toronto Emeritus

In 2004, she read about Endel Tulving, a Canadian psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist, who first described the difference between episodic and semantic memory.   Memory researchers previously believed there was only one kind of long-term memory. In 1972, Tulving proved that was incorrect. 

One type is semantic memory which allows us to remember facts, ideas, meaning and concepts.  The other kind was episodic memory of autobiographical events which concerns time, places, associated emotions, and who, what, when, where, why.   Autonoetic consciousness is a key component of episodic memory as it integrates time and sensory details in a cinematic, visceral way.    

Tulving studied an amnesic patient who suffered brain damage in a motorcycle accident, who could not remember any episodes in his life except experiences from the last minute or two.  He could remember math and history, and new information in experiments (semantic), but he could not recall visits to the laboratory where he was taught (episodic).

Brian Levine
University of Toronto

Tulving argued that "some perfectly intelligent and healthy people also lack the ability to remember personal experiences. These people have no episodic memory; they know but do not remember. Such people have not yet been identified", but he predicted they soon would be. 

McKinnon felt intimidated by Tulving, so in 2006 she contacted Brian Levine, at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto who had worked closely with Tulving.

Levine discovered two other healthy individuals who lacked EAMs.  Both were middle-aged men with successful jobs, one a PhD.  Levine ran they and Susie through extensive memory tests, interviews and fMRI scans.  

The fMRIs showed reduced activity in regions of the brain for "the mind's understanding of the self, the ability to mentally time travel, and the capacity to form episodic memories".

Default Mode Network

These deactivated regions, were "typical" and were basically the Default Mode network, covered in many blogposts and videos, including "Three Neural Networks Dancing...", "No Thoughts, No Time I" and "No Thoughts, No Time II".  

There was a major anomaly, however, in that the right hippocampus was much smaller than normal and than the left one.  This is important as the hippocampus is the region responsible for consolidation of information from short term memory to long term memory.     

Levine published this work in Neuropsychologia in April 2015. 

“It raises fairly large questions,” Levine says. “What exactly does recollection do for us?”  If members of our species can get by so well without episodic memories, why did we evolve to have them in the first place?  

 As Erika Hayasaki observed, "Spend enough time with McKinnon and it’s hard to escape the creeping sense that she’s not just different—she’s lucky.   Memories that would be searing to anyone else leave little impression on her."  Susie  knows the salient facts of traumatic stories in her life, but not the details and painful associations.   

If you've got to ask,
you wouldn't understand

She doesn't know what it's like to linger in a memory, to long for the past, to dwell in it.  She cries in movies, loves stories, esp. fantasy and sci fi like "Hunger Games" and "Game of Thrones".  

She does not daydream. Her mind does not wander. She uses email, but social media "just isn't interesting".  

With our current technology, Hayasaki muses, "By focusing on clicking picture after picture, I may actually be blurring away my memories of these experiences through something researchers call 'the photo-taking impairment effect'...I may be short-circuiting some part of my own process of episodic memory formation."

“What would humanity lose if they lost some of that ability?” Susie McKinnon asks. “If they had technology to replace it, what would be lost? The human experience would change, but would it be a plus? Or a minus? Or—just a change?”

As Erika concluded, "We ate, we spoke, we walked around the mall. But of course, she doesn’t remember the details, nor does she seem to mind. While most of us experience life as a story of gain and loss, McKinnon exists always and only in her own denouement. There is no inciting incident. No conflict. And no anxious sense of momentum toward the finale. She achieves effortlessly what some people spend years striving for: She lives entirely in the present. "

This is what living in the "Now" is pretty much like for persistently, nondual folk, except that we had the EAMs, but deconstructed the ego/I at their core, and consciously let go of stories with Sedona and Byron Katie techniques.  Fewer and fewer EAMs remain and few new EAMs are formed.  The semantic memories of facts remain. 

The "letting go" approaches consider if a story is helpful, how it feels, could it be let go of, etc.  Folk can decide to keep the story.  As negative stories are overweighted 5X positive ones for evolutionary reasons, they are easier to "surrender".  

Also, our memory is very poor ("How neuroscience, psychological studies, and our poor memories change the law").  It is virtually impossible to accurately remember a past event.  

IME, it is a better way to live.