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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So we often tend to think of this kind of really extraordinary memory as being an extra gift, that it's this extra like wonderful thing that you have, this skill that you have. And in some ways, of course, it is. And a lot of people who have this condition or, you know, who have this ability think of it as being wonderful. But there are significant downsides.
And one other way of thinking about this is that it's not so much a great ability to remember as it is an inability to forget.
So, yeah, so in the book, Jill talks a lot, firstly talks a lot about how she met her husband, Jim. And, you know, they had been, had a kind of a long distance relationship at first. And then when they met, they had this really, really strong connection and, you know, fell very deeply in love and got married and, you know, lived together forever.
had this, you know, from her recollection, had this wonderful marriage. But there is this extremely tragic end to it, which is that after only two years of marriage, when Jim was only 42, he died. He had very severe diabetes and he suffered a stroke as a result of that and died as a result after several days in the hospital.
Yes, exactly. I mean, of course, many people listening might be saying, well, I remember my wedding day as well. But I think the thing is that it's not just these big key events that she remembers. It's also just everyday things. And she will remember not just our first date was great, but every detail of it in extraordinary clarity. But yes, towards the end then as well, she also cannot...
allow those terrible memories of Jim's illness and death to fade.
So she describes in really great detail how when her father came home and told her that Jim had collapsed at work and then they're driving to the hospital and she goes through in this just exhaustive detail every phone call she made to the nurse and then the nurse is telling her this and then all these details of the drive to the hospital.
And then, you know, what the doctors were, you know, this horrible situation where he was in critical care for days and then eventually the doctors had to tell her they had to turn off the life support machines. The fact of this terrible thing happening is something that everyone would remember and nobody's going to have forgotten that their husband died so tragically.
But it's every little detail of it. And she says that even like every time now, years and years later, she can't drive down that road where they drove to the hospital because every vivid little detail of that drive to the hospital is there, it comes back and they don't fade with time. You know, we have that cliche that time is a great healer.
And we do tend to see that, that over time, our negative memories tend to fade and we tend to hold on more to the positive memories. There are exceptions, but Jill's memory really doesn't seem to discriminate. She holds on to all of those details, whether or not they're still relevant, whether or not they're useful to her. She's still holding on to all of them.
Yeah, so I think the first thing to note is that forgetting is actually a fundamental component of memory. We tend to think of forgetting almost as the flip side of memory, and that memory is the positive of what we're supposed to do, and then forgetting is the accidental thing that happens. But that's really not the case.
Forgetting is a fundamental element of what happens in our memory processes. I think a lot of the problem here comes in that when we tend to make the mistake of thinking that our memories act like a computer system, that we should be able to just file away information and then it will stay in that same place.
And then later on, we should be able to retrieve that information and we pull it back exactly the same way it was before. And if we had a computer where we went to go and retrieve a file and the file wasn't there, it had been accidentally deleted, we'd be disgusted. That's not what a computer is supposed to do, right?
A computer is supposed to retain this perfect record of information as we recorded it. But that's not what our memories do. That's not how our memories work. rather than thinking of memory as being this kind of passive process where we just file information away and then it just stays there, memory is actually this really active process where we're kind of actively engaging in our memories.
We engage in actively constructing and reconstructing our memories and we change the way our memories are stored in our brains. And part of that process is that forgetting is a kind of a natural sort of digestion process in memory, that we have lots and lots of different events in our lives and
One of the really key things that our memories do and that forgetting helps us do essentially is to identify the gist of those memories. So for example, right, like imagine every day probably you eat breakfast, okay, and probably most days you eat more or less the same thing for breakfast.
Maybe you eat something different on the weekends than you do the weekdays, okay, but probably you eat the same thing more or less every morning.
And you could, if you think of that computer metaphor, you could imagine that for every single day of your life, you should have a perfect, veridical recollection of exactly what you ate for breakfast, how you poured out the cornflakes, how you poured out the milk, how you sat down at the table, picked up your spoon, how many bites you ate, how many times you chewed each bite.
But honestly, what a waste of time to remember all of these things in such detail. Really, all you really need to know is to sort of condense all of that information into Usually I eat cornflakes for breakfast. Okay. And then sometimes when something a little bit different happens, then we need to be able to remember that. Like, well, we ran out of milk this morning, so I had toast instead.
I must remember to go to the shop and buy milk. But most of the time, remembering all of these very repetitive events in our lives in this perfect individual detail is actually a really inefficient way of storing information. Instead, we kind of condense that information down and we pull out the gist of those kind of repeated continuous events.
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