Placing Voices - Voicing Places: Project Blog

[From: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/06/08]

According to the latest research, remembering is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process. It’s easy come, easy go as we learn how true memories can be obliterated and false ones added. And Oliver Sacks joins us to tell the story of an amnesiac whose love for his wife and music transcend his 7 second memory.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Rat

What is a memory? Science writer Jonah Lehrer tells us is it’s a physical thing in the brain… not some ephemeral flash. It’s a concrete thing made of matter. And NYU neuroscientist Joe LeDoux, who studies fear memories in rats, tells us how with a one shock, one tone, and one drug injection, you can bust up this piece of matter, and prevent a rat from every making a memory. LeDoux’s research goes sci-fi, when he and his colleague Karim Nader start trying to erase memories. And Nader applies this research to humans suffering from PTSD.

Adding Memory

We start this section off with a question from writer Andrei Codrescu: "where do computers get their extra memory from?" And then we take it literally. Can you add memories? Dr. Elizabeth Loftus says yes. She’s a psychologist in the department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California at Irvine, and her research shows that you can implant memories—wholly false memories—pretty easily into the brains of humans. Her work challenges the reliability of eye-witness testimony, and is so controversial that she once had to call the bomb squad. Then, producer Neda Pourang brings us the story of finding a lost memory. Painter Joe Andoe incessantly paints huge canvasses of seemingly random images: horses, pastures, and - more recently - a girl with a particular about-to-say-something look on her face. He didn't realize until recently that he'd been painting a day from his past, a fragment of an afternoon 30 years earlier.

Clive

The story of a man who’s lost everything. Clive Wearing has what Oliver Sacks calls “the most severe case of amnesia ever documented.” Clive’s wife, Deborah Wearing, tells us the story along with Oliver Sacks. And they try to understand why, amidst so much forgetting, Clive remembers two things: Music and Love.

Thanks to Uden Associates Productions for excerpts from the 1986 film about Clive Wearing, "Equinox: Prisoner of Consciousness."

IRISH WAKES have gone online. Ireland’s first online memorial site [www.inlovingmemory.ie], launched in recent weeks, offers families and friends of dead people an opportunity to record the life stories and their memories of loved ones in words, pictures and video.

The site is the brainchild of business partners Hugh O’Donnell and Joe McGuiggan.

Contributors can tell the story of their nearest and dearest by uploading anecdotes, shared memories, photos, music and video clips.

Mr O’Donnell, a restaurant and bar owner in Killybegs, Co Donegal, said: “The site continues online the tradition of the Irish wake where stories are told and memories shared.”

Co-director Mr McGuiggan, a Derry-based Library Service Executive, said: “Irish people have a strong love for remembering their dead as seen by attendance at wakes, putting memorials into newspapers and by sending out memorial cards.

“They now have the opportunity to tell the life story of their loved one in a very visual and interactive way, and record it for future generations to appreciate.”

The website allows the person who creates the tribute to have editorial control of all shared memories which come in from friends and family. Nothing can be added without being screened by the tribute controller. One of the first tributes on the site commemorates the life of Killybegs fisherman Noble Morrow, a father of four who died in 1986 at the age of 39.

His brother Norman uploaded this memory: “On one occasion, he came off his motorbike on the way back from the shop. While our parents fretted over his cut knee and what might have happened, all that bothered Noble was that I didn’t open the Coke until it had settled after bouncing all over the road.

“Coming off the bike was history, drinking the Coke was more important. Noble was talented in many ways but I suppose Noble’s greatest gift was that he never had a bad word to say about anyone.

“Wherever he is now, I’m sure the front yard is cluttered with bits of engines, a few buoys, a few battered air tanks and the compressor will be humming away doing its job!

“Noble, we miss you.”

Anne Keeney-Amir who lives in New York was devastated on hearing of the sudden death of her sister Bernie in Killybegs in 2005.

“When a friend submits a photo I have never seen before or a shared memory I hadn’t heard about,” she said, “I feel I am part of a community that remembers what a wonderful person my sister was.” The website can be visited at www.inlovingmemory.ie