Ciara Greene
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Ciara Greene’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
There was no pretending that this was a safe thing to do. I no longer believed that it was in any way a safe thing to do. So I never I still have the bike and I still want to get back on it, but I've never gotten back to being able to cycle to work, for example.
I don't think I've even really gotten to that stage. I think if I was even to think about, you know, would I do it tomorrow? Because I'd have to plan. I'd have to think, well, you know, I'll pack the bike bag and I'll pump up the tyres, you know, on the bike. And just straight away, I'm just like, no. There's always a thing. It's particularly... I live in Ireland. It rains a lot.
This is no surprise. If I look out the window and it looks like it might be wet, it might be rainy, the road might be slick... Absolutely no way. The thought of getting on the bike is really very frightening. I start to feel very anxious about it. So even if I'm driving and I see people, you know, cyclists weaving around, I get so anxious on their behalf. What if they slipped? What if they fell?
What if they got knocked down? What if they had an accident? But it's absorbing a good amount of my attention.
Yes, to a certain extent. But then I had a strange experience maybe a year and a half ago. So maybe again, about a year and a half after the accident, I had laser eye surgery. It only takes about 10 minutes and it's not painful. They put, you know, anesthetic eye drops into your eyes.
But obviously your eyes are open for the surgery and there's, you know, a laser coming in and doing things and there's a lot of pressure on your eye. And when they're doing that, you see strange things. Like it looks like kind of like a tunnel.
You know, you have that kind of vibe of things looking like things are coming away, shooting away from you or coming towards you like they're down a tunnel. And I had this almost flashback to that ketamine experience where I told you it felt like I was being compressed and squeezed down a tunnel. And it was just the visual elements of that gave me this...
And I knew that's what was happening at the time. And I didn't have a panic attack or anything. But I was aware that it was like, God, this is like that. And it made it very, very unpleasant. And it felt like a long 10 minutes.
So Jill Price is a woman who's very well known because she has an extremely rare condition that's called highly superior autobiographical memory, which is usually abbreviated as HSAM. And what it is, is a really extraordinary memory for the events of your own life.
So somebody with HSAM, like somebody like Jill, for example, will be able to tell you in enormous detail about all the incidents of their lives. Like somebody who you might be able to say, tell me what the weather was like on the 30th of September, 1998. And most of us would go, how on earth would I possibly know that? But somebody with HSAM, someone like Jill, would say, oh, yeah, I remember.
It was really sunny. But the clouds came over at about three o'clock. We thought for a while it was going to rain, but then it didn't. And I was hanging out with my friends and my friend picked me up. And then we went off down to the shopping center and we hung out outside Claire's accessories. And my friend was thinking about getting her ears pierced.
And, you know, would be able to give you this extremely detailed blow by blow account of their own personal experiences.
So she tells the story that her dad used to work as the agent for Jim Henson, who, of course, was the creator of the Muppets and the the brain behind Sesame Street. And, you know, he would tell all these kind of stories about, you know, to the family and everybody all about Sesame Street and about Jim Henson and how incredible it was. And at the time, Jill was very young.
She was in nursery school. But her dad arranged for her whole class to go on a field trip to Jim Henson's studio where all of the puppets were created. And this, you know, they've talked it up for ages. And this is something, of course, that they were all really, really looking forward to it. But when the day came around for the field trip, Jill was sick. She had tonsillitis.
So she wasn't able to go. And of course, being very, very young, she didn't understand that, you know, her father had already committed to this and had already committed to take the whole class with her. So they had to go ahead without his own daughter. They had to go ahead and run the trip. And she was devastated.
couldn't understand why he was doing this, taking all of her friends, leaving her behind. And even though she had tonsillitis, so she had a really sore throat, she stood there screaming at the top of her lungs, screaming at her parents so they were not letting them go.
And she says, you know, that it was a small thing in retrospect, but that when every time she thinks about it, she still feels this overwhelming sense of disappointment every time she sees the Muppets.
So every time you see a Muppets Christmas Carol, you're brought back to this moment of not just a rose-tinted view of, oh, ha ha, this is a funny thing that happened to me as a child, but really like almost being right back there again and feeling it as though she's right there in the moment again.
No, so it's actually, it is very unusual. Whereas, say, my memory of a childhood event might be very, very fuzzy, very foggy. I might remember kind of a core detail of that event, but I might not remember how I got there or what happened afterwards or what I was wearing. All of those really, really clear details, those are still very vivid in Jill's memory.
Yeah, exactly. So like she's, a lot of the time really what's happening here is that she's constantly reliving these same experiences and kind of perseverating on them and thinking about them. And then it does mean then that you're not able to let some of these things go.
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