Memory is a weird thing, isn’t it? Who was it that was deemed a maverick when I was in the midst of my pathology degree in 1985 for saying that disease could be transmitted by protein, yet had been proven right by BSE and awarded a Nobel prize just 12 years later? His name was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t retrieve it. That is, not until five minutes later when the topic of conversation had moved on and Stanley Prusiner just popped up in my mind, unbidden.
Somewhere in my cortex there is a little circuit of nerves with that name stored, together with a picture of Prusiner and his crazy mop of greying hair, while close by a virtual video clip of the ataxic cow I so clearly remember as the first case of mad cow disease we saw in vet school in 1987 is also stored. Close to that lies a memory of Dr Tony Palmer who taught us neurology – imagine having a lecturer with the initials “ACP” who didn’t sedate us, but rather kept us awake with 16mm cine films of cataleptic cows and Dachshunds with degenerate discs but no deep pain.
Neighbouring those memory circuits is a recollection of Dr David Sainsbury teaching us pig husbandry in the draughty cold barn of Merton Hall Farm, which served as our lecture theatre in my fourth year of vet school. “Stop – listen!” Sainsbury commanded at the beginning of his first lecture. There was silence. “Remember that,” he said. Weird! Then four weeks later at the beginning of the last lecture, we were told to listen again: cough, sneeze, splutter, wheeze. “That’s what happens when you put too many individuals together too close for too long, without adequate ventilation,” he remarked. Years later I met Sainsbury again and confessed that this was the only thing I could remember from all those lectures. “Good,” he said. “That was the most important thing to remember!”
Truth be told, this wasn’t where I was planning this perambulation to go at all. But, as I began, memory is a strange beast. Recently, I came home and my mobile rang with a colleague wanting the reference for a paper on retinal changes in canine distemper. Now, the researcher was H. B. Parry, I was sure, and it’s in the British Journal of Ophthalmology from 1954, I thought, but for the life of me I couldn’t recall the exact volume or page numbers. How annoying. Then Jennie, my long-suffering wife, asked if I’d remembered to buy the pint of milk she’d asked for on the phone before I left the vet school. Well, I could remember that paper from the mid-1950s, but a shopping request from half an hour ago – not a chance!
It’s strange how memory works, or sometimes doesn’t, isn’t it? I was telling a nurse this while operating in a veterinary practice a few days ago, and she pointed me to a fascinating paper demonstrating that an aversive behaviour of moth larvae to a noxious odour was retained during metamorphosis and could be elicited in the adult moth – quite remarkable. (This was Blackiston et al., “Can a moth remember what it learned as a caterpillar?”, if you fancy cluttering up your memory with useful references as I do!)
Thirty years ago, I was knocked off my bike on the one day I had forgotten my helmet (note to self – never do that again!) and sustained a severe head injury. For four weeks after that, I can remember nothing, until I suddenly “woke up”, as it were, in a bright yellow bathroom at St George’s Hospital in Tooting. From that moment on, I can remember everything… but nothing of that preceding month. Useful really – did my skull fracture, broken clavicle and ribs hurt as they healed? Was I frustrated at having to learn to walk again and not being able to tie my bowtie? I’ll never know as those four weeks are forever blotted out of my memory – rather like Jennie’s request for that pint of milk!
Apparently, in an attempt to assess my neurological impairment as I recovered from the head injury, my speech therapist, knowing I was a vet, asked me to name as many animals in a minute as I could. How many do you think you could manage? Well, I could only recall two – aardvark and Chihuahua, neither of which she could spell! It just shows what was, or not, you might say, going on in my brain. A little later into my recovery but still in those four weeks of post-traumatic amnesia, I was at least able to remember that my fiancée, as she was then, was a neurosurgical sister. When she brought her two friends, also neurosurgical nurses, to see me as I recovered in that first month, I obviously knew who they were and what they did as I feigned a grand mal seizure in front of them. At least I hadn’t lost my sense of humour! I still do wonder why she went on and married me, as I know she often does too!
