What you forget

[resonant]

A co-worker of mine recently, for no reason anyone has been able to identify, lost four hours of his life with a brief bout of what they call Transient Global Amnesia.

He can't tell me anything about what it was like, because he says it was like a bubble: while he was inside it, he apparently couldn't remember anything outside it; once he was out of it, he couldn't remember any of it happening at all.

His wife tells him he was very sweet and loving while it was happening, and in a very docile way cooperated with everything she asked him to do and believed everything she told him -- with one exception: he refused to believe her when she told him how old he was. He wasn't sure how old he actually was, but, damn it, he was quite sure he wasn't 68!

Comments

[resonant]

I went to bed last night thinking about this comment and about my experience of time passing when I sleep, and it left me wondering how much of what I experience of that is real, and how much if it is just that I have bedtime and waketime habits and rituals that confirm to me what time of day it is. Like, if I routinely fell asleep at random times of day and slept for random periods of time, would I really be able to say I was aware time had passed?

I passed out once in my life, for maybe five minutes, and it did feel to me as if no time passed between standing at the sink washing my hands and thinking, "I feel very strange," and opening my eyes on the floor with a black eye and my lip bleeding.

Your wording suggests that you've had amnesia more than once? or that it's ongoing? I'd be very interested in anything you'd care to share about the experience.

[isilya]

My periods of amnesia were drug-induced, most significantly when I had been given Midazolam as a pre-med prior to surgery, and prior to my pre-op consult with my surgeon. I woke up from my GA shouting that I couldn't go in for my surgery yet because I hadn't had my pre-op consult. It is still extremely strange to me that I had a 15 minute conversation with my surgeon and consented to the specifics of my procedure and yet have no memory whatsoever of this consult. It's made me more careful as a physician to ensure that my patients are capable of consenting.

You would be able to feel that time had passed, even if you randomly napped during the day. You may initially be slightly confused as to how much time had passed or what day it was, but you would be aware that that you had been sleeping. This varies among people but many people mark time so accurately while sleeping that they do not need to set alarms (whether or not the alarm is routine).

[resonant]

Returning belatedly to say that this is really interesting! I'm guessing that you must have behaved in pretty much the expected way during that 15 minute conversation, or else someone would have noticed that you were already going under.

Once when I was in college I woke up on the phone with my father. As I came back to consciousness, I was saying, "OK, I'll do that, love you, bye." I had to call him back and ask him to tell me what I'd been promising to do!

[erika]

if I routinely fell asleep at random times of day and slept for random periods of time, would I really be able to say I was aware time had passed?

This is me. I'm always aware of the fact that some amount of time has passed, but I depend on external cues to tell me how MUCH time has passed. And we're not talking "exactly" how much time, I'm talking chunks of 8+ hours or more. In winter when the house is quiet, I routinely assume it's morning when it's actually evening, or vice versa. I've done it three times this winter, once for three hours after I woke up.