Woman earns college degree two decades after complete memory loss | Hacker News Reader

Woman earns college degree two decades after complete memory loss

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131 pointsGiraffeNecktie25 comments

“It was literally like she had died,” Jim said. “Her personality was gone.”

This is a great example of how modern medicine has made "death" a very vague term. More and more often, we can keep bodies alive but we can't recover the memories and personality in the brain. For most practical purposes, Su Meck died in 1988. Fortunately in this case the damage wasn't completely permanent, and a new Su Meck made a life for herself. Still, the law doesn't recognize this and Su Meck 2.0 is beholden to contracts and commitments made by Su Meck 1.0. The law is slow to react to technological advances, so I think this problem will only get worse as medicine gets better.

Yeah, but the law also allowed her husband and children to stay by her side.

Also a great example of how abuse of the word has made "literally" a very vague term!

The law, regardless of what it aspires to, is designed to accommodate the many, and deal with exceptions on a case by case basis.

The things that have happened to Su Meck are a rarity in every sense of the word. Her circumstances are so exceptional that it seems weird to carve out exceptions in the law, and really should be accommodated by the parties which she would have previously formed contracts with.

On top of that, the law is supposed to draw up distinctions and standards that can be used as yardsticks and metrics, and where there is genuine confusion and vagueness, the law may not have enough clarity from societal standards, or agreement from the medical establishment to be able to draw up reasonable measures.

I think the OP's point is that Su Mecks are rare today, but they will happen more often as technology can save more people. Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death seems to have fewer edge-cases than our current criteria for declaring death.

Thats true, but for common law countries at least we can start having judges work out precedent for how to deal with this stuff when it starts to become an issue. In a certain sense its inelegant to rely on the entities executing the law being Turing complete, but thats what we do.

It's not just a problem of law vs. technology. For example, what if there was a law that she wasn't still bound by old contracts... suddenly anyone in debt could just fake memory loss?

Now, clearly in this example it wasn't faked, and it would be hard to fake in such a realistic way, but... impossible? Seems very unlikely.

Wow, incredible. If anyone interested in learning more about these types of situations, I recommend "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by Oliver Sacks: http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949

Incredible collection of stories like this one, from the point-of-view of a neurologist.

Also, of course, the brilliant movie Memento.

Yes, that's an incredible book.

Here's a story by the same author about a blind man who had a procedure done restoring his sight: http://web.archive.org/web/20060831124229/http://www.newyork...

(It's long, here's an abridged version: http://www.sfu.ca/media-lab/archive/2007/387/Resources/Readi...)

It can help set the tone for the rest of his books. He has written some fascinating things about human experience. I also highly recommend reading his work if you're into this.

Thanks for the link, I had never seen that one before. Through link jumping, I managed to find a blog written by a guy who had a similar experience: http://web.archive.org/web/20040401192741/www.senderogroup.c...

also: blindsight by peter watts. free online and amazing. http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

She barely recognized her family and friends or where she put the milk, yet she was able to drive a car which implies both skills and knowledge of some laws?

P.S. The article doesn't mention a big gap between her return home and the moment she started driving again:

To complicate matters, for weeks after the injury Su could not make new memories. She would awaken each day to a house full of strangers.

It would be years before she could remember where she had parked the car at the mall.

This text implies that remembering where she parked took years, not driving itself.

she spent another 22 years learning how to do the things that she knew before. At first she could barely ride a bike, after that she was growing up.

1. The article actually says she lost the ability to drive.

2. Different sorts of memories are represented in different ways and in different parts of the brain. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear of a case of brain damage that destroyed huge amounts of "factual" memories without depriving the victim of the ability to drive. Or vice versa.

The second point makes sense, but given the scale of the damage I'm still surprised.

It sounds like she lost a cognitive faculty called "object permanence." This is something children develop 8-12 months after birth. Before developing it, if they can't see an object, as far as they are concerned it doesn't exist.

I imagine it would be a pretty frightening way to live.

Baillargeon's study was able to detect object permanence as early as 3.5 months.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence

As we've gotten cleverer at constructing methodology, we've found that babies acquire knowledge faster than Piaget thought in almost all areas.

Interesting. Perhaps she was lacking something else, then, or perhaps the time it took for her to develop object permanence was a testament to her brain damage.

Different memory types resides in different parts of the brain. Driving is a classic example - when you first start, you're trying to keep it all in your mind at once, and it's living mostly in your short term / working memory, which tends to be in your frontal lobe (bit above your eyes). The more you use a physical skill, the more it gets into your "muscle memory" and this is in effect transferring to the cerebellum, the small plum-like 'add-on' at the base of the brain (below the knobbly bit at the back of the skull). It's quite common for memory damage to spare things like 'muscle memory', partly because it lives somewhere else. Another curiosity is that vocabulary is resistant to damage - if the person can still speak (which in turn can be prevented by a huge variety of neural injury), you can get an idea of the level of their pre-event education by listening to the level of words they use.

Neurology is fascinatingly complex and we've really only scratched the surface of what we can learn about the brain. It is very unlikely that you would hear anyone that worked in neurology flat-out refute any combination of symptoms. I used to work in a seizure clinic and heard of a guy that had a seizure when he saw orange circles. No other colour circle or other shape orange, just specifically orange circles. This was confirmed through EEG testing. Never heard of another case like it, but you get unique things like this reasonably often in neurology.

Incredible and remarkable story.

Quite honestly, I am amazed/impressed that her husband also persevered and stuck through what must have been a very trying and long recovery process.

Also, imagine what it must've been like for the kids.

The oldest was two years old at the time and likely would not remember it ever being any different. Not to say it wouldn't have been a bit awkward seeing the difference between mom and dad or comparing to other kids' parents as they grew older, but kids are resilient and I imagine they did quite fine.

Me too, he's also the hero of this story. I had a brother with a sever traumatic brain injury and his marriage didn't last, it wasn't an easy decision on her part but she couldn't invest into his rehab. Su's husband is a true hero too!

Damn it's good to have family.

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