Shulman summarizes the consensus in memory research: вЂњScience has firmly established that memory is unstable and unreliable, that whenever you summon up a recollection of the past you are liable to change it slightly until, with the passage of time, it may no longer represent what actually happened.вЂќ The mysteries of memory complicate her relationship with Scott-and inform her moving account of contemplating his death and doing what she can to honor his wishes. This history of research is where Shulman turns as she struggles to adapt to ScottвЂ™s amnesia. Shulman writes with an urgent need to understand memory research after her husband Scott suffers memory loss due to a head injury. Alix Kates Shulman, To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed (2009) In a poignant moment, he observes Jimmy in chapel and notes the degree to which his identity is expressed when he experiences moments outside time.ДҐ. Sacks's portrait of Jimmy challenges BuГ±uel's equation. Nonetheless, in his memoir the surrealist is careful to acknowledge that memory blends with imagination-and that identity is a composition of вЂњmy errors and doubts as well as my certainties.вЂќ When BuГ±uel adds imagination to the equation, he hints at the idea that memory is not singular. The fragility of memory is terrifying to BuГ±uel. Without it, we are nothing.вЂќ The epigraph is a narrative foil. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Sacks opens his essay with an epigraph from My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis BuГ±uel (1983): вЂњYou have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives.

Jimmy, his subject, suffers from retrograde amnesia, a result of KorsakovвЂ™s syndrome. In вЂњThe Lost Mariner,вЂќ Sacks establishes a narrative pattern that reflects cultural assumptions about the equation of identity and memory. Even with memory loss as severe as Molaison's, intimacy and connection are possible, traces of continuity and recognition detectable.ДЈ. Memory, she reminds us, is composed of many brain functions. Each time I told him how special he was, he could momentarily grasp, but not retain, what I had said.вЂќ While Molaison did not retain explicit memory, Corkin maintains that вЂњhe gradually built up a sense of familiarity for me.вЂќ In other words, some kind of implicit memory shaped their relationship-and Molaison's identity. For decades I received requests from the media to interview and videotape him. His striking condition had made him the subject of scientific research and public fascination. For half a century, Molaison was a neurological celebrity: вЂњHenry was famous, but did not know it. Ramachandran and Larry Squire and philosophers Patricia and Paul Churchland, watch as MolaisonвЂ™s brain is dissected into 2,401 very thin slices, photographed with meticulous care and preserved for future research. Corkin, along with neuroscience luminaries V.S. in the scientific literature-ends with a remarkable scene. (2013)-the much-studied amnesiac known as H.M. Suzanne CorkinвЂ™s Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesiac Patient, H. Susanna Corkin, Permanent Present Tense (2013) Borges documents the torment of remembering too much-and, conversely, reminds readers that forgetting is an essential component of memory.Дў. Sacks explores questions about elements of identity preserved and destroyed with memory loss. Jackson's story reads like an episode of The Twilight Zone, an eery philosophical commentary on amnesia as a tool for exposing the mutability of identity-and culture's attempts to insist we pretend to be and feel static- a common theme of soap operas, comic books, and superhero movies. These stories represent the range of literary experiments with memory. As he tells it, he looked for вЂњfiction that, more than just presenting a character whoвЂ™d suffered memory loss, entered into an amnesiac state at some level of the narrative itself-and invited the reader to do the same.вЂќ In other words, these are stories that explore amnesia to experiment with storytelling, including fiction and nonfiction by Shirley Jackson, Oliver Sacks, and Jorge Luis Borges. Lethem's anthology collects amnesia stories that do more than use it as a plot device.

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