Chris Moody’s Blog

Absent Memories

Just finished reading the book Absent Memories: Moving forward when you can’t look back. A fascinating first hand account of a 47 year-old women who lost all of her memories, and the 9 years since. A college graduate, a black belt, and former member of the National Guard, Beki Propst struggles to re-learn the most basic rules of social interaction, much less the skills to keep a steady job. Her view of life through new eyes sheds light on the things we take for granted.

The author loses all of her “declarative memory”.  After her loss, she still remembers how to do many of the ingrained daily rituals, like driving a car, but she couldn’t describe the rules of the road.  As she describes it in the book, “A computer geek might have said that I’d lost lost some data from my hard drive, but my operating system was apparently unaffected.”

Checking in at 117 pages, this book is a quick read, but well worth it.  You find it at Amazon.com here (or I’m sure anywhere else books are sold or borrowed).