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

[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.