I FIRST met KC when he was in his late thirties. He had lost his memory after sustaining serious brain damage in a motorcycle accident. I had signed up for a lab course in the psychology department at the University of Toronto with the memory expert Endel Tulving. Endel had showed us some taped footage of KC, whom he had studied extensively.
KC couldn鈥檛 remember anything autobiographical from before his accident, nor could he form new autobiographical memories, though his memory for factual information was better: he still knew how to play chess. I couldn鈥檛 believe that someone could live without memory, as if his life was a total blank. He couldn鈥檛 even write a new life story for himself.
Later, KC came to the lab for a test session. He was a quiet man. I said hello and introduced myself and that was it, but I got to watch some of the session. Endel asked him if he remembered coming to the lab before, and though KC had been there many times he answered no. He had no recollection of anything he had done, even earlier that day. He was polite, but what was absent was that warm spark of recognition. His behaviour towards his family must have been the same. And the fascinating thing to me was that it didn鈥檛 seem to bother him.
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Seeing that footage and later meeting KC was a revelation for me, perhaps because memory had played such a crucial part in my previous life. I was an opera singer, a lyric soprano. I sang with the Canadian Opera Company for four years. I knew operas from beginning to end; I still do. Music was my passion, but I hated living from contract to contract and getting gigs more through schmoozing than through actual talent. So at the age of 27 I left and went back to university to take more science courses. Science had been my other passion at school and I鈥檇 always thought I might be a doctor.
It was in my first year back at university that I met KC, and it made me think about memory in a completely different way. It highlighted for me how important memory is to identity, to day-to-day functioning, to every aspect of life. When you meet someone like that you start thinking: what would it be like to have no continuity in your life, to simply be living in this moment?
After that I changed my mind about medical school and decided to be a memory researcher. Now I study autobiographical memory: how the brain lets us recollect episodes from our past, and how memory changes with ageing. I work with amnesiacs. It鈥檚 very different to life in opera. I鈥檓 very happy with my choice.
