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CONVERSATION LESSON

LIFE ON A LOOP

Dan: Okay. This month the topic is memory. Did you see the movie that this month’s Core Audio was based on?

Aaron: No, I actually haven’t seen the movie yet.

Dan: Okay. It’s actually not that great of a movie but it’s a great story.

Aaron: It’s a comedy, right?

Dan: Yeah. Actually, I haven’t seen the whole thing. I saw part of it on the airplane. It’s a kind of movie that you watch when there’s nothing else on. But it’s interesting because it’s based on a true story.

Aaron: Yeah, the premise itself is quite interesting.

Dan: Right. The character in the movie, she has a car accident, her mother dies. And when she wakes up, she can’t remember anything after that accident. So every day she wakes up and she thinks it’s the same day over and over again. Then she meets a guy that she really likes. The next day of course she doesn’t remember him. He’s really drawn to her so he keeps going back and he won’t give up. His family tries to keep him away, but there’s this true love thread going through the story that penetrates deeper than her memory problem.

Aaron: But hang on, I have a question about that. The guy that she meets, had they known each other before her accident?

Dan: No.

Aaron: Okay, so this is someone new that she meets?

Dan: Right.

Aaron: I see. Okay.

Dan: So that’s why the movie is called 50 First Dates because every day is a new first day for them.

And every day she doesn’t remember him, but he does. I mean on one hand, you can make a case that he’s really in love with her, going after her day after day after day. But on the other hand, there is something kind of creepy that he knows all the stuff about her and she doesn’t know anything about him.

Aaron: It kind of makes you wonder what his motives are, and staying in that relationship.

Dan: Yeah. So in the movie, it’s called 50 First Dates because each day he thinks of a unique way to woo her, a unique way to have an exciting date with her. But really, one thing they don’t talk about in the movie is they can just be doing the same thing every day because she wouldn’t know.

Aaron: Yeah. She wouldn’t know, it wouldn’t matter.

Dan: But that would probably make a really boring movie. Fifty Same Dates.

Aaron: Yeah, Fifty Same Dates. Right. And it would probably be boring for him because he’s just doing the same thing over and over.

Dan: But he knows that it works, so he’s probably going to think it’s nothing really unique to… Aaron: But this was based on an actual true story, though, right?

Dan: I mean, can you imagine if this was your wife before the first time you met her, and for 50 days, you had to think of a unique way to approach her that would work? You’d probably just do the same thing.

Aaron: Yeah, maybe. And maybe it was just true love. Maybe he just felt so drawn to this person and vice versa.

Dan: Right.

Aaron: But this was based on a true story though, wasn’t it?

Dan: Yeah, it was based on a true story, Michelle Philpots, and I think she’s British. And similar, she also had a car accident and she doesn’t remember anything past that point in time. A little bit different from the movie is she eventually married the man that she was with before the accident.

Every morning she wakes up and she looks over at this guy who she must think is her boyfriend, but in reality, though, it’s her husband. I mean, she does know who he is. She was dating him before the accident.

Aaron: Oh I see. But she just doesn’t remember anything after the accident Dan: Yeah. She doesn’t remember that they dated for another 7 years and they eventually got married. I don’t know if they had kids or not but that would be even stranger.

Aaron: If they had kids.

Dan: Yeah. So you would imagine every day it’s like, “Who is this 3-year old? Who is this 4-year old? Who is this 18-year old?”

Aaron: Right. So the day would have to obviously begin with some kind of review.

Dan: Yeah. So it begins with him opening a photo album. He shows a photo album, pictures of them dating, pictures of their wedding. He actually says if he didn’t have those photos, it would obviously be much more difficult. I mean, imagine if you woke up next to somebody, you had no memory of who they are and they had nothing, no proof, and they just wanted to tell you that, “I’m your wife.

We’ve been together for three years.”

Aaron: Really? I mean I would think that would be pretty strange from my subjective experience of that moment. Here I am with this strange person and they’re telling me things that, “We’ve been together for three years.” I mean, that would just seem hard to believe!

Dan: Yeah. And especially if it… I imagine like what must to be like after 10 years or 20 years.

Because then, clearly, once you get convinced, “Okay, this is real. This person isn’t lying to me.

They have some proof. They have some pictures,” then you would have so many questions. “What happened to this person? Is my mother still alive? Is my father still alive? Is my brother still alive?” Aaron: And then you would forget the very next day anyway.

Dan: Yeah, but it wouldn’t stop you from wanting to know. And as the span of time that you’re trying to catch up on increases–

Aaron: Yeah. It’ll be harder and harder.

Dan: You’d probably spend all morning.

Aaron: Eventually all day! And you’ll just fall asleep and then wake up again. It’s almost like a rebirth every day. I just wonder how that would affect your quality of life. Maybe it wouldn’t be any more or less difficult than what we go through. It’s just that from our perspective, we’re comparing it with our experience of reality and we’re saying how difficult that must be. But from that perspective, maybe it’s just, it becomes normal life. It depends on the attitude that you take and your outlook on things. It can be positive or it can be negative. You deal with the reality you’re given.

Dan: I suppose the most effective way would be to have a video of yourself and every morning you can hear yourself talk to you about what had happened. Give you the clip notes, you would probably get really good at telling that to yourself. But then can you imagine if you woke up and you were 20 years older?

Aaron: Right. You saw this young person, the young you talking to you.

Dan: While the young person, that’s what you think you look like.

Aaron: Right, because that’s what you remember. That would be pretty odd. It would be a pretty odd experience.

Dan: If it happened to you when you were really young, you would be stuck in this childlike state, you would never develop fully. But I wonder if there– I mean she, Michelle Philpots, she talks about the benefits, is she can watch the same TV show over and over again and still laugh like it’s the first time. I wonder if she approaches life in general that way, if almost she has a Zen Buddhist sort of perspective on things where everything is new and she embraces the space in her life, not being encumbered by all of the recent memories that most people are going through.

Aaron: Yeah, it may have a positive effect on that.

Dan: Because surely she remembers what happened before the accident, but if you know that’s 10 years ago. As soon as I accept the fact that this is 10 years later, am I really going to dwell on that argument I had with somebody even if it felt like it was yesterday? If I know it’s 10 years, okay that’s done. So maybe you’re left with this spacious feeling where everything is new. What’s the—You ever read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Minds?

Aaron: Yes, by Suzuki.

Dan: There’s a great first sentence in that… Something along the lines of…

Aaron: You can’t remember it, can you? I think we have a memory problem here, Dan.

Dan: Maybe I was making something up because now I don’t know.

Aaron: I don’t remember it either.

Dan: It’s “In the expert’s mind, there are a few possibilities. In the beginner’s mind, there are many.” You’re open to so many things, you accept so many more things if you can approach things as a beginner. I wonder if Michelle experiences that in some way.

Aaron: Yeah, I wonder. I wonder what that would be like. It’s so hard to imagine because we’re just so used to an existence where the moment that we’re conscious, we have an identity that’s constructed upon mostly memories. And I think what’s really interesting about memories is that they’re different for each person.

If we experience the same event, you and I, and 10 years later we haven’t talked about that event at all and then suddenly it comes up, your experience of it, your memory of it would be much more different than mine, perhaps. Perhaps I would think, “Wow that was kind of a negative experience, and I know Dan was having a negative time, and I was having a negative time.” But then 10 years later, I remember it that way, but you remember it as being positive, and I’m certain you had a negative experience but you felt something positive. It may be the way– You have to remember a memory is also a construct. We’re also constructing that in the moment, and so every time we construct it, we may color it with our own biases, our own values, and I think its really interesting.

Dan: I think the answer to whose would be more accurate would probably be mine, but that aside, that judgement aside, the person who had thought about it more over those 10 years would probably be the one who remembered it works her more inaccurately.

Aaron: Perhaps, because they’ve reconstructed it so many times.

Dan: Yes. So every time you remembered something, you’re kind of recreating that memory and photographic memory gets changed with each reproduction. And if one of us has only thought about it once, it’s probably much closer…

Aaron: Maybe it’s more pure. It’s a more pure form. I don’t know… Dan: I mean they’ve done some research studies on that. They’ve been able to isolate how strong an event something was, how so that they’ve remembered it very often or people who at least reported that they had never thought about it since. They were able to somehow determine that they are more accurate when they were being recalled less frequently.

Aaron: That makes sense. The condition that this woman had where she could only remember up to the accident, is that the same condition that the man in that movie Memento had, or is that a different one? Do you remember the movie Memento?

Dan: I do. The one where the guy also, I think he got hit over the head. He got involved in something in the underworld and he got beat up or hit in the head. And when he came to, he wasn’t able to form any new memories. So it sounds like the same thing but it’s a long time since I’ve seen the movie. But that was a great movie because

Aaron: I see. The story was in reverse chronological order, a lot of the scenes.

Dan: For Michelle Philpots, the way she remembers things is by putting post-it notes everywhere. I think the guy in the movie also would write things down. He would wake up in the morning, he would pull out all his little notes from his pockets. But he had also tattooed on his arms to make sure, he would have some messages.

Aaron: I vaguely remember the movie but it just seem like he was always very stressed out in the movie.

Dan: Yeah. I think he was trying to unravel some mystery. That’s a much better movie than 50 First Dates.

Aaron: But actually this problem with memory is not limited just to people who have accidents or brain trauma, that kind of thing. It’s actually a natural sort of progression as we get older, we start aging that we become more and more forgetful, and in some cases we become senile. We lose most of our memories. With people with Alzheimer’s disease, they lose memory of everything and don’t even know who they are. So it’s something that all of us, at some point, will have to deal with either as the son or daughter of parents who are going through this or eventually ourselves as we get older, if we even live that long.

Dan: I was listening to this really interesting interview with this woman whose mother had lost all memory of any connection to her. Her dementia was fairly, it was pretty deep. She had no memory of her family at all. The psychiatrist advised her you can’t… She would always try to set her straight like, “I’m your daughter and this is your granddaughter,” and that would just make her mother feel more upset because she just couldn’t understand anything and it just didn’t make any sense to her.

The psychiatrist said, “In these kind of cases, the best thing to do is just to roll with it. Don’t try to correct her. Just be with her and wherever she’s going, go with it.” She was actually an improv comedian, so was her husband. So all of a sudden it just clicked, it was like, “Of course, that’s what I do. That’s what my husband does, too.” It’s like, “Okay yeah, there’s flying monkeys outside. How many are there? I wonder if we can get them to come up on to the porch.”

Aaron: “For lunch?”

Dan: And all of a sudden her mother’s quality of life just increased. She’s laughing and enjoying things

Aaron: That makes a lot of sense. That’s a good story.

Dan: But actually she got quite upset because she started to talk about it more deeply that she started on that path. She did feel it was the right decision. But her husband, for some reason, was much better at it than her, connecting with her mother. Maybe because she still had this longing to have her mother recognize her as her daughter. She couldn’t let go completely, but her husband could. So the mother started to just love her son-in-law and started to just question, “Who is this woman living in my house. You better toe the line or I’m going to kick you out because you’re just like some homeless lady that I took in.”

Aaron: Gosh, really? Oh, how terrible for her.

Dan: Then she started feeling jealous of her husband because her husband had this great relationship with her mother. Then she would just talk about the longing of wanting to connect with her mother based on memories. She just wanted to say, “Remember the time we went to the beach and dad did that crazy thing and dumped ice cream on his head?”

Aaron: It plays such an important role in our whole creation of who we are and what the reality is.

Dan: Yeah, bonding and relationship, so much of it is based on retelling the good times and the bad times that you share with people.

Aaron: Memory is a very precious thing.

Dan: The chances are none of us will ever experience this kind of amnesia but we will probably see that with our parents at one point. Whether they’ll get to the point where they don’t remember who we are or not, I’m not sure what the chances of that are but it’s definitely a possibility. Thinking about how you would deal with somebody that you love who doesn’t remember who you are anymore, who you can’t share those kinds of stories with.

Aaron: You have to be pretty committed to that relationship to keep it going because it’s really in your hands at that point. You could walk away and let someone else deal with it or you could make a commitment to staying there even though that person doesn’t even know who you are. You know who they are. Interesting.

Dan: I would do that for you. I would come visit you in the hospital every Christmas and on your birthday.

Aaron: You better write that down so you don’t forget because I’m going to show it to you.

Dan: I would at least call the nurse and tell her to bring you some candles.

Aaron: Thank you, Dan. It’s very nice of you. I’ll do the same for you.