The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana   ::   Эко Умберто

It’s interesting to feel bristles going between two teeth, from now on I think I will brush my teeth every day, it feels nice. I also ran the bristles over my tongue. You feel a sort of shudder, but in the end if you don’t press down too hard it’s okay. That was a good idea, because my mouth was quite pasty. Now, I said to myself, you rinse. I ran some water from the tap into a glass and swirled it around in my mouth, happily amazed at the sound it made. And it gets even better if you toss your head back and make it-gurgle? Gurgling is good. I puffed up my cheeks, and then it all came out. I spit it out. Sfroosh … a cataract. You can do anything with lips, they are extremely flexible. I turned around, Gratarolo was standing there watching me like I was a circus freak , and I asked him if it was going well.

Perfectly, he said. My automatisms, he explained, were in good shape.

"It seems we have an almost normal person on our hands," I remarked, "except that he might not be me."

"Very witty, and that’s a good sign too. Now lie back down-here, I’ll help you. Tell me: what did you just do?"

"I brushed my teeth; you asked me to."

"Absolutely, and before you brushed your teeth?"

"I was in this bed and you were talking to me. You said it’s April 1991."

"Right. Your short-term memory is working. Tell me, do you by any chance recall the brand of the toothpaste?"

"No. Should I?"

"Not at all. You certainly saw the brand when you picked up the tube, but if we had to record and store all the stimuli we encounter, our memory would be a bedlam. So we choose, we filter. You did what we all do. But now try to remember the most significant thing that happened while you were brushing your teeth."

"When I ran the brush over my tongue."

"Why?"

"Because my mouth was pasty, and after I did that I felt better."

"You see? You recorded the element most directly associated with your emotions, your desires, your goals. You have emotions again."

"It’s a nice emotion, brushing your tongue. But I don’t recall having ever brushed it before."

"We’ll get there. Now, Signor Bodoni, I’ll try to explain all this in plain language, but it’s clear that the incident has affected certain regions of your brain. And even though a new study comes out every day, we don’t yet know as much as we’d like to know about cerebral localizations, especially as regards the various forms of memory. I’d dare say that if what has happened to you had happened ten years from now, we’d have a better idea how to manage the situation. Don’t interrupt, I understand, if it had happened to you a hundred years ago you’d already be in a madhouse, end of story. We know more today than we did then, but not enough. For example, if you were unable to talk, I could tell you exactly which area had been affected…"

"Broca’s area."

"Bravo. But we’ve known about Broca’s area for more than a hundred years. Where the brain stores memories, however, is still a matter of debate, and more than one area is certainly involved. I don’t want to bore you with scientific terms, which in any case might add to the confusion you feel-you know how, when the dentist has done something to one of your teeth, for a few days afterward you keep touching it with your tongue? Well, if I were to say, just for instance, that I’m not as concerned about your hippocampus as I am about your frontal lobes, and perhaps the right orbital frontal cortex, you would try to touch yourself there, and it’s not like exploring your mouth with your tongue. Endless frustration. So forget what I just said. And besides, every brain is different from every other, and all brains have extraordinary plasticity, so that over the course of time yours may be able to assign the tasks that the injured area can no longer perform to some other area. Do you follow, am I being clear enough?"

"Crystal clear, keep going. But first are you going to tell me that I’m the Collegno amnesiac?"

"You see? You remember the Collegno amnesiac, which is a classic case. It’s only your own, which isn’t classic, that you don’t remember."

"I’d rather have forgotten about Collegno and remembered where I was born."

"That would be more unusual. You see, you identified the toothpaste tube immediately, but you don’t recall being married-and indeed, remembering your own wedding and identifying the toothpaste tube depend on two different cerebral networks. We have different types of memory. One is called implicit, and it allows us to do with ease various things we’ve learned, like brushing our teeth, turning on the radio, or tying a tie. After the toothbrushing experiment, I’m willing to bet that you know how to write, perhaps even how to drive a car. When our implicit memory is assisting us, we’re not even conscious of remembering, we act automatically. And then there’s something called explicit memory, by which we remember things and know we’re remembering them. But this explicit memory is twofold. One part tends nowadays to be called semantic memory, or public memory-the one that tells us a swallow is a kind of bird, and that birds fly and have feathers, but also that Napoleon died in… whenever you said. And this type seems to be working fine in your case. Indeed, I might even say too well, since all I have to do is give you a single input and you begin stringing together memories that I would describe as scholastic, or else you fall back on stock phrases. But this is the first type to form even in children. The child quickly learns to recognize a car or a dog, and to form general categories, so that if he once saw a German shepherd and was told it was a dog, then he’ll also say ‘dog’ when he sees a Labrador. It takes the child longer, however, to develop the second type of explicit memory, which we call episodic, or autobiographical. He isn’t immediately capable of remembering, when he sees a dog, say, that a month earlier he saw a dog in his grandmother’s yard, and that he’s the person who has had both experiences. It’s episodic memory that establishes a link between who we are today and who we have been, and without it, when we say I , we’re referring only to what we’re feeling now, not to what we felt before, which gets lost, as you say, in the fog. You haven’t lost your semantic memory, you’ve lost your episodic memory, which is to say the episodes of your life. In short, I’d say you know all the things other people know, and I imagine that if I were to ask you to tell me the capital of Japan…"

"Tokyo. Atom bomb on Hiroshima. General MacArthur…"

"Whoa, whoa.