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10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
18 Terrible Portrayals Of Disabilities Onscreen
Recently, Reddit user Stocklit asked about the worst onscreen portrayals of characters with disabilities — and they're really bad. Here are 18 times neurotypical actors played autistic or intellectually disabled characters…and did NOT do a good job. Freddie Highmore plays Dr. Shaun Murphy, a surgical resident with autism, on The Good Doctor. While the show was wildly popular, lasting seven seasons, many people felt the show fed into stereotypes about autism — especially autistic people being savants with special skills. Murphy also exhibits problematic behaviors and comments that are blamed on his autism, like the time he does not respect pronouns. People with autism, in particular, found the portrayal problematic. As Sarah Kurchak writes for Time, the character "struck me as more of an amalgamation of non-autistic people's misconceptions, fears, and fantasies about autism than a nuanced exploration of what it's actually like to be someone like me." Oh, and none of the writers or cast members on the show were autistic until the seventh season. Elizabeth Shue's performance as the titular character in Molly is borderline unwatchable. In the film, she plays an autistic woman who acts like a child. She pees her pants, shouts "NO!" a lot, and gets naked surgery to literally fix her autism, placing this movie in the "disabilities need to be fixed" trope. Oh, and she has super hearing, for some reason, in case you forgot the "autistic people=savants" trope. They threw in some incest vibes and the r–slur for good measure. Gigli was filled with problems — don't get me started on Jennifer Lopez's character asking for oral sex with "gobble gobble" — but one of the worst parts was Justin Bartha's portrayal of a man with an unspecified disability. Bartha gave what was referred to as a "cringe-y" and "wildly offensive performance" of the character Brian, relying on an overly exaggerated, stereotypical portrayal. The Guardian wrote, "The character (and the performance) came off as a slapdash Rain Man riff when the film came out, and time has certainly not improved it." The character was also little more than a plot device. The Blind Side doesn't really assign a specific disability to Michael Oher, but it portrays him as having an extremely low IQ and apparent cognitive issues. Oher himself criticized this portrayal, saying, "I felt like it portrayed me as dumb instead of as a kid who never had consistent academic instruction and ended up thriving once he got it." Portraying Oher as potentially having cognitive impairments just fed into the white savior narrative of the film. Oh, and there was the wildly dumb part about Oher scoring low on everything but "protective instinct." John Travolta's portrayal of an autistic man who is obsessed with an actor in The Fanatic was called "too scatter-shot and offensive to be funny" and a "woefully misguided, over-the-top, fence swinging performance delivered packed with equal parts actorly indulgence and ignorance." Other critics called Travolta's performance "cringe-worthy" and said Travolta "comes across like a grown man trying to imitate a first-grader." Another said the film was "a brainless, exploitative folly which gives John Travolta free rein to mine the history of cringe-worthy autism portrayals for an offensively garish Frankenstein pantomime of unhinged obsession." The film also suggests autistic people are obsessive and dangerous, explaining Travolta's messed-up behavior away with his autism. The very premise of The Lawnmower Man is offensive. In the film, a scientist experiments on a man with an intellectual disability to make him smarter (and, in the process, more aggressive). Not only does this perpetuate the idea that people with disabilities need to be "fixed," it also makes use of the r–slur. Jeff Fahey, who played the main character, also played him as a "cringe-worthy" caricature, according to this review, "with his over‑the‑top mannerisms and wooden delivery robbing the character of any shred of credibility or humanity." IMDB reviewers called Rosie O'Donnell's portrayal of a woman named Beth with a disability in Riding the Bus With My Sister a "grotesque caricature" and "insulting." This review from That Film Guy wrote, "O'Donnell's performance is all comedic gurning, overly-affected gesturing and unintentionally silly voices. ... Her entire performance is constantly one or two notches too high. It feels like an offensive impersonation of somebody with Beth's condition, rather than a believable or moving representation." Sia casting neurotypical dancer Maddie Ziegler as a nonverbal autistic girl in her film Music a choice. The movie was panned and called ableist, with reviews noting Ziegler's performance was like a caricature of an autistic person. It also faced criticism for its portrayal of the use of restraint on autistic people, which is not recommended and can be dangerous and even fatal. This example is also especially bad due to the way Sia handled the criticism. Backlash to the film was strong even before it came out, and Sia only made things worse during the film's promotion. At one point, when an autistic actor called her out for not casting someone like her, Sia replied, "Maybe you're just a bad actor." Sia also stated she "actually tried working with a beautiful young girl, nonverbal on the spectrum, and she found it unpleasant and stressful." Sia later apologized for her problematic depiction and then deleted her Twitter account. It wasn't so much that Jacob Tremblay's portrayal of an autistic child in Predator was problematic (though he is another example of a neurotypical actor being cast in a neurodivergent role), but the film did play into other problematic autism tropes. Namely, it reinforced the notion that autistic people are savants – but it did this to an extreme, suggesting they're evolutionarily advanced. One writer called this depiction a "regressive, ill-conceived catastrophe." A Salon review more diplomatically called it "strange," asking, "Does it really help members of the autistic community to be reduced to a broad stereotype — even a positive one — instead of depicted as individuals with their own unique quirks and foibles? If a movie perpetuates a stereotype with the best intentions, does that make it any less problematic? And if an autistic person is viewed as a prize to be won because of his or her autism, is that not still a form of objectification?" The Accountant also paints autistic people as savants, with an Inverse review stating it "quickly devolves into the kind of glib savant stereotype that has plagued the autism community since Rain Man." The review also points out that at one point, "a neurologist running a school for kids with mental disorders that Wolff attended as a child tells a new couple that their son could grow up to be special as well, positing some kind of X-Men-like academy that preps new generations of autistic super-agents." Suggested by u/CatDaddy1135 "Anything truly progressive the movie tried to convey about the disorder is meaningless, because the conclusion you draw from it is that autism is what helped him and others like him to become superhuman killing machines," the review continues. The film also reinforces the idea that people with disabilities, and autism in particular, are dangerous. Both Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribis were criticized for their roles in the rom-com The Other Sister, where they played two people with intellectual disabilities who fall in love. Famed critic Rober Ebert wrote in his one-star review that the "offensive" film was "shameless" in its use of their disabilities as "a gimmick, a prop and a plot device." He continued, "It treats the characters like cute little performing seals" who spout dialogue meant to display their disability, "with perfect timing and an edge of irony and drama. Their zingers slide out with the precision of sitcom punch lines." Shaun Cassidy and Linda Purl's performances as two people with disabilities who fall in love in Like Normal People are also not great, particularly Purl's. As one Letterboxd user points out, Purl "is a cartoon with her whiny voice and her deeply offensive display of over-the-top mannerisms. It's the very worst performance I have ever seen from her." The film also reinforces the notion that people with disabilities don't or shouldn't have autonomy, especially when it comes to romantic relationships. Adam Sandler never actually played a character with a specific disability, but many of his characters are implied to have low social and intellectual prowess. His character in The Waterboy was specifically referred to as "slow", which is often understood as an ableist reference to possessing an intellectual or learning disability. The character was even called the r–slur. His character's "slowness" is played for laughs, as is his stutter. There's Something about Mary also makes use of the r–slur and plays Warren's disability for laughs, as well as a plot device to impart Mary's "goodness" on the viewer. Warren is very much played as a stereotype, and even co-director Peter Farrelly stated there was one thing he'd change about the character. "I would have used an actor with an intellectual disability instead of another actor. Even though, by the way, the actor in it was incredible, there's too many actors out there with intellectual disabilities who don't get those opportunities," Farrelly said, reflecting on his decision to cast an actor, W. Earl Brown, without a disability. Suggested by u/Upset_Bowler_8820 Technically, Duddits (portrayed by Donnie Wahlberg) from Dreamcatcher is an alien, but he is portrayed at least at first as having a in itself seems to call people with disabilities "alien." The r–slur is used multiple times, and Wahlberg's portrayal is less than favorable — he also has, for no real reason, a lisp. Kevin Bacon's portrayal of a man with a disability who befriends a young Evan Rachel Wood in Digging to China was also less than ideal. The Seattle Times wrote in its review, "Bacon is a gifted actor, and it would be nice to report that he pulls it off, but in too much of Digging to China, his twitching and posturing is transparently the work of an actor trying too hard." While perhaps not the worst example on this list, Bacon is a neurotypical actor, and his performance fails to live up to anything resembling reality for people with disabilities. Suggested by u/Apt_5 Team America: World Police parodied a bunch of celebs, but its portrayal of Matt Damon felt extra problematic. In the film, they portrayed Damon as wildly dumb, only able to say his own name. According to Damon, the reason for this was: "The puppet came in looking kind of mentally deficient and they didn't have time to change it, so they just made me someone who could really only say his own name." This reasoning reveals that the joke of Damon's character was not just that he was dumb — they were clearly trying to paint him as having a disability (suggesting that people with disabilities are dumb), and playing it for laughs. Suggested by u/Shot_Bison1140 And finally, while Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of an autistic man in Rain Man was, at the time, near-universally praised, in the ensuing years, fans have found some problems — namely that Kim Peek, on whom Hoffman was based, did not have autism. He was a savant, but not all savants are people with autism (and vice versa), as we've established in this post. Though it's worth noting the character was also based on Bill Sackter, who was diagnosed as having a disability.
Daily Mirror
08-07-2025
- Health
- Daily Mirror
'Broken system only gave my autistic daughter EHCP after missing year of school'
I first applied for an Education Health Care Plan (EHCP) for my autistic daughter in 2010. Five years later – two weeks before her GCSEs last month – Jesse was finally awarded one. My teenager had to miss almost a year of school before anyone actually took any notice. You only get an EHC Plan when the proverbial has already hit the fan. A bit like Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) will only help children when they have already tried to take their own life. My daughter renamed CAMHS 'Can't Actually Help Mate' and EHCP 'Er Help Coming… Possibly'. These services are designed to go so slowly, that desperately unwell or disabled children just age out and disappear from the system. Help came too late for Jesse and she spent a year off school at the most critical point in her education, but at least our little bit of paper now means I won't get sent to prison. Although at times I often wished I could, just for a break from the constant battle with my daughter, NHS services and her school. I always knew Jesse was different, but I just thought she was quirky and had a thing for soft toys – half our family wealth is held in Jelly Cats. But I didn't know about her sensory issues then. The little primary school she attended was a home-from-home, and Jesse flourished in the happy, family atmosphere. But the day came when she had to leave that safe place and go to 'Big School'. Within months, she had tried to burn down the school's stationery cupboard, ran away several times, and refused to go back. However they did have her tested for autism, and suddenly everything made sense. I had to take my local authority to court to get a local school place for Jesse. And meltdowns meant her attendance at one point got as low as 7% (I've framed the letter). However her teachers were magnificent and did their very best to make sure she could catch up with missed lessons. Being autistic is not a super power – I did ask Jesse if she could at least be Rain Man or something useful like that – but it did explain so much of my daughter's random behaviour (at best) and risky dangerous behaviour (at worst). Not to make too much light of it, but I did get to know my local constabulary quite well at our lowest point. The meltdowns rarely happen now as we have adapted to her normal, and I hope reasonable adjustments will be made for her in the future at college. Now we're waiting for the GCSE results, so maybe she will turn out to be a genius after all, but all I want is for her to get a Grade 9 in Happiness.
The Irish Sun
04-07-2025
- The Irish Sun
Plot to nail Irish mobsters ‘higher up chain' in mega €157m coke swoop amid new suspect details after 8 underlings caged
GARDAI are working to nail the Irish gangsters involved in the attempt to smuggle €157 million of cocaine into the country as their underlings were locked up for a combined 129 years. The eight men involved in the massive botched drug trafficking operation were handed down sentences of 13.5 to 20 years at the 7 The MV Matthew was stormed leading to Ireland's record seizure of the drug Credit: Alamy Live News 7 Some €157 million of cocaine was found Credit: Gardai 7 The major operation took place in September 2023 Credit: Irish Defence Forces This includes an Irish suspect who helped acquire the second ship which was planned to meet He also issued the two men in charge of this 'sistership', named The Castlemore, with instructions using the handle 'Rain Man' on messaging groups. It's understood that this man fled to READ MORE IN NEWS A source told The Irish Sun: 'There are a number of individuals involved who worked higher up in the operation. 'A cell structure was used to specifically protect those people. But the gardai's investigations into them are very much ongoing.' The 2.2 tonnes of coke were intercepted and seized in September 2023 by a joint garda, Revenue and The six men onboard the MV Matthew, a Panamanian cargo ship, were hired in Dubai by a transnational organised Most read in Irish News They then flew to The MV Matthew ignored instructions from the LE William Butler Yeats naval vessel five times before it was stormed by Irish Navy Rangers on September 26 that year. Moment MV Matthew is lead to shore to be impounded after Irish Army Rangers storm container ship The original plan was that the MV Matthew would deliver the drugs to the second ship, the Castlemore. But rough seas and a number of difficulties caused the vessel to miss the connection and later to run aground on the coast of Wexford. The six on the MV Matthew all pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine for sale or supply between 24 and 26 September 2023. At sentencing, He was in communication with his bosses in the UAE every two to three days and was set to get a €50,000 bonus if they were successful. 7 Cumali Ozgen was caged for 20 years Credit: ProVision 7 Soheil Jelveh was handed down a 17.5 year sentence Credit: Journalist Collect Filipino Harold Estoesta, 31, was caged for 18 years after he engaged with the coast guard on the MV Matthew saying they would comply with orders to head towards He also ordered for the The Iranian captain of the ship and qualified maritime engineer Soheil Jelveh was He feigned an injury and was winched by the He had two suitcases, four phones including a satellite mobile and $53,298 in cash when taken away. 'VIGOROUS ATTEMPTS TO EVADE' Ukrainian Vitaliy Vlasoi, 33, who made 'vigorous attempts to evade' authorities on the boat as well as destroy drugs for criminal organisation was His fellow countryman Mykhailo Gavryk, 32, received 14 years' imprisonment after he admitted to moving the drugs on board the ship as he claimed he was 'following instructions', but cops accept he knew the least about the overall operation. Saeid Hassani, 40, who was the third officer, received a 15-year sentence. Two other men, who were on the boat the Castlemore that had been purchased in Castletownbere to collect drugs from the main vessel, were also sentenced for attempting to possess cocaine for sale or supply. 'MESSAGE IS CLEAR' Ukrainian national Vitaliy Lapa, 62, with an address at Rudenka, Repina Str in Berdyansk, received a sentence of 14.5 years while Jamie Harbron, 31, from Billingham in the UK, got 13.5 years. Detective Superintendent Joe O'Reilly from the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau said: 'To those involved in drug trafficking the message is clear, the full force of the Irish State supported by our international partners is against you. 'The reality facing you is security interdictions, special investigations, the Special Criminal Court, lengthy sentences and asset seizure.' 7 Vitaliy Vlasoi made vigorous attempts to evade authorities 7 Mykhalio Gavryk was jailed for 14 years Credit: 2023 PA Media, All Rights Reserved
Daily Record
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Tom Cruise's all time best movies ranked including 'breathtaking and moving' 80s classic
A full list of Tom Cruise's movies has been ranked from best to worst, according to their Rotten Tomatoes scores, with some surprise entries doing better than you might expect Tom Cruise, the quintessential '80s Hollywood heartthrob, has been dazzling audiences for decades, and now we've got the definitive list of his best and worst films. Rotten Tomatoes, the esteemed review aggregator, has crunched the numbers, using authentic critiques to sort through Cruise's extensive filmography. The rankings may throw up a few surprises, with some of Cruise's more obscure roles securing spots in the top 10, while others are expected entries thanks to widespread critical praise. Topping the charts as the actor's most celebrated work, according to viewer ratings, is the high-octane Mission: Impossible-Fallout. The 2018 blockbuster, which is the sixth instalment in the Mission: Impossible saga, has garnered an outstanding 98% rating, making it a clear fan favourite. One critic said: "Mission: Impossible - Fallout is hands down one of the best action movies I've seen in a while. The stunts are absolutely wild, and knowing Tom Cruise actually did them makes it even crazier." They added: "The pacing keeps you locked in from start to finish-there's never a dull moment. The story ties in nicely with the previous films but still stands strong on its own." Cruise's reputation for performing his own death-defying stunts has certainly paid off, influencing the high ranking of his stunt-laden features, with the recent hit Top Gun: Maverick soaring into second place in the 2022 charts. Unexpected entries have climbed the rankings out of 44 films, with the 2002 Steven Spielberg hit Minority Report making a notable appearance. It's closely tailed by Spielberg's 1988 classic Rain Man, which is just a whisker behind with an 88% rating, followed by The Color of Money in tenth place. Discussing Rain Man, the Mirror US reports that one film enthusiast remarked it is a "comedy that brings you to tears when the credits role". They added: "A breathtaking and moving film with such fantastic acting from both lead roles, with Tom Cruise showcasing that he can be more than a blockbuster protagonist who runs and jumps. It is a lost gem, and I hope it gains more attention as years go on." Languishing at the bottom of the pile, in 44th place with a mere 9% score, is the romantic comedy Cocktail. In this early Tom Cruise vehicle, he plays a New York bartender with grand ambitions that take him to Jamaica to open his own bar. The general view labels the film as rather "average," though some critics are more scathing. A review stated: "Yes, Tom Cruise has charisma. All that doesn't change the fact that this film isn't that good. Much like Cruise's character, Brian, this story drifts along without any real purpose." It continued: "And while the acting isn't terrible, the writing is watered down, and the characters are one-dimensional. It seems that the filmmakers didn't get the mix right when it comes to Cocktail." The Top 10 Rotten Tomatoes ranking Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) Top Gun: Maverick (2022) Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) Risky Business (1983) Edge of Tomorrow (2014) Minority Report (2002) Rain Man (1988) The Color of Money (1986)
National Geographic
17-06-2025
- General
- National Geographic
He remembers nothing. She remembers everything
There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as "AJ," who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called "EP," who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst. "My memory flows like a movie—nonstop and uncontrollable," says AJ. She remembers that at 12:34 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a young man she had a crush on called her on the telephone. She remembers what happened on Murphy Brown on December 12, 1988. And she remembers that on March 28, 1992, she had lunch with her father at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store, the weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is there. She's not easily stumped. In the sea of memory Elly Chovel found purpose. At 14 she was a frightened refugee from Castro's Cuba. At 43 she helped create an organization to aid children in need, and to preserve the history of 14,000 Cuban children who fled to the U.S. without parents between 1960 and 1962. 'From memories of suffering comes compassion,' she says. There have been a handful of people over the years with uncommonly good memories. Kim Peek, the 56-year-old savant who inspired the movie Rain Man, is said to have memorized nearly 12,000 books (he reads a page in 8 to 10 seconds). "S," a Russian journalist studied for three decades by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, could remember impossibly long strings of words, numbers, and nonsense syllables years after he'd first heard them. But AJ is unique. Her extraordinary memory is not for facts or figures, but for her own life. Indeed, her inexhaustible memory for autobiographical details is so unprecedented and so poorly understood that James McGaugh, Elizabeth Parker, and Larry Cahill, the neuroscientists at the University of California, Irvine, who have been studying her for the past seven years, had to coin a new medical term to describe her condition: hyperthymestic syndrome. EP is six-foot-two, with perfectly parted white hair and unusually long ears. He's personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot. He seems at first like your average genial grandfather. But 15 years ago, the herpes simplex virus chewed its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in the medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of EP's memory. The virus struck with freakish precision. The medial temporal lobes—there's one on each side of the brain—include a curved structure called the hippocampus and several adjacent regions that together perform the magical feat of turning our perceptions into long-term memories. The memories aren't actually stored in the hippocampus—they reside elsewhere, in the brain's corrugated outer layers, the neocortex—but the hippocampal area is the part of the brain that makes them stick. EP's hippocampus was destroyed, and without it he is like a camcorder without a working tape head. He sees, but he doesn't record. The 85-year-old California man researchers call 'EP' dwells almost entirely in the present tense. A brain infection wiped out decades of memories, along with the capacity to create new ones. EP has two types of amnesia—anterograde, which means he can't form new memories, and retrograde, which means he can't remember old memories either, at least not since 1960. His childhood, his service in the merchant marine, World War II—all that is perfectly vivid. But as far as he knows, gas costs less than a dollar a gallon, and the moon landing never happened. AJ and EP are extremes on the spectrum of human memory. And their cases say more than any brain scan about the extent to which our memories make us who we are. Though the rest of us are somewhere between those two poles of remembering everything and nothing, we've all experienced some small taste of the promise of AJ and dreaded the fate of EP. Those three pounds or so of wrinkled flesh balanced atop our spines can retain the most trivial details about childhood experiences for a lifetime but often can't hold on to even the most important telephone number for just two minutes. Memory is strange like that. What is a memory? The best that neuroscientists can do for the moment is this: A memory is a stored pattern of connections between neurons in the brain. There are about a hundred billion of those neurons, each of which can make perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 synaptic connections with other neurons, which makes a total of about five hundred trillion to a thousand trillion synapses in the average adult brain. By comparison there are only about 32 trillion bytes of information in the entire Library of Congress's print collection. Every sensation we remember, every thought we think, alters the connections within that vast network. Synapses are strengthened or weakened or formed anew. Our physical substance changes. Indeed, it is always changing, every moment, even as we sleep. I met EP at his home, a bright bungalow in suburban San Diego, on a warm spring day. I drove there with Larry Squire, a neuroscientist and memory researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego VA Medical Center, and Jen Frascino, the research coordinator in Squire's lab who visits EP regularly to administer cognitive tests. Even though Frascino has been to EP's home some 200 times, he always greets her as a stranger. Frascino sits down opposite EP at his dining room table and asks a series of questions that gauge his common sense. She quizzes him about what continent Brazil is on, the number of weeks in a year, the temperature water boils at. She wants to demonstrate what IQ tests have already proved: EP is no dummy. He patiently answers the questions—all correctly—with roughly the same sense of bemusement I imagine I would have if a total stranger walked into my house, sat down at my table, and very earnestly asked me if I knew the boiling point of water. Mary Farnham loves green. When memory loss made it unsafe for her to live alone, she moved to Oatfield Estates, a residential-care facility near Portland, Oregon, and promptly began putting her stamp on her surroundings. 'Mary didn't just pick the color,' explains staff member Nancy Wolske, 'she picked up a brush.' The 83-year-old artist continues to paint, draw, and show her work. Intellectual and social engagement, many researchers believe, helps slow mental decline. 'We have to rethink every single component of how we're caring for our elders,' says Wolske, because 'the people they were are still there.' "What is the thing to do if you find an envelope in the street that is sealed, addressed, and has a stamp on it?" Frascino asks. "Well, you'd put it in the mailbox. What else?" He chuckles and shoots me a sidelong and knowing glance, as if to say, Do these people think I'm an idiot? But sensing that the situation calls for politeness, he turns back to Frascino and adds, "But that's a really interesting question you've got there. Really interesting." He has no idea he's heard it many times before. "Why do we cook food?" "Because it's raw?" The word raw carries his voice clear across the tonal register, his bemusement giving way to incredulity. "Why do we study history?" "Well, we study history to know what happened in the past." "But why do we want to know what happened in the past?" "Because, it's just interesting, frankly." EP wears a metal medical alert bracelet around his left wrist. Even though it's obvious what it's for, I ask him anyway. He turns his wrist over and casually reads it. "Hmm. It says memory loss." EP doesn't even remember that he has a memory problem. That is something he discovers anew every moment. And since he forgets that he always forgets, every lost thought seems like just a casual slip—an annoyance and nothing more—the same way it would to you or me. Ever since his sickness, space for EP has existed only as far as he can see it. His social universe is only as large as the people in the room. He lives under a narrow spotlight, surrounded by darkness. On a typical morning, EP wakes up, has breakfast, and returns to bed to listen to the radio. But back in bed, it's not always clear whether he's just had breakfast or just woken up. Often he'll have breakfast again, and return to bed to listen to some more radio. Some mornings he'll have breakfast a third time. He watches TV, which can be very exciting from second to second, though shows with a clear beginning, middle, and end can pose a problem. He prefers the History Channel, or anything about World War II. He takes walks around the neighborhood, usually several times before lunch, and sometimes for as long as three-quarters of an hour. He sits in the yard. He reads the newspaper, which one can only imagine must feel like stepping out of a time machine. Bush who? Iraq what? Computers when? By the time EP gets to the end of a headline, he's usually forgotten how it began. Most of the time, after reading the weather, he just doodles on the paper, drawing mustaches on the photographs or tracing his spoon. When he sees home prices in the real estate section, he invariably announces his shock. Words no longer come easily to Francis Zetterberg (at left), but he can still summon a lifetime of farming know-how. The 91-year-old puts his expertise to work at the side of his friend Melissa Richmond, Oatfield's gardening coordinator. Fruits and vegetables they grow together help supply residents' kitchens. Without a memory, EP has fallen completely out of time. He has no stream of consciousness, just droplets that immediately evaporate. If you were to take the watch off his wrist—or, more cruelly, change the time—he'd be completely lost. Trapped in this limbo of an eternal present, between a past he can't remember and a future he can't contemplate, he lives a sedentary life, completely free from worry. "He's happy all the time. Very happy. I guess it's because he doesn't have any stress in his life," says his daughter, Carol, who lives nearby. "How old are you now?" Squire asks him. "Let's see, 59 or 60. You got me. My memory is not that perfect. It's pretty good, but some times people ask me questions that I just don't get. I'm sure you have that sometimes." "Sure, I do," says Squire, kindly, even though EP is almost a quarter of a century off. An enormous amount of what science knows about memory was learned from a damaged brain that is remarkably similar to EP's. It belongs to an 81-year-old man known as "HM," an amnesiac who lives in a nursing home in Connecticut. HM suffered from epilepsy that began at age ten after a bike accident. By the time he was 27, he was blacking out several times a week and unable to do much of anything. A neurosurgeon named William Beecher Scoville thought he could relieve HM's symptoms with an experimental surgery that would excise the part of the brain that he suspected was causing the problem. In 1953, while HM lay awake on the operating table, his scalp anesthetized, Scoville drilled a pair of holes just above the patient's eyes. The surgeon lifted the front of HM's brain with a small metal spatula while a metal straw sucked out most of the hippocampus, along with much of the surrounding medial temporal lobes. The surgery reduced the frequency of HM's seizures, but it soon became clear that it also robbed him of his memory. Over the next five decades, HM was the subject of countless experiments and became the most studied patient in the history of brain science. Given the tragic outcome of Scoville's surgery, everyone assumed HM would be a singular case study. A disease-free brain (top) shows intact temporal lobes along its lower flanks and, in the center, slender ventricles filled in life with cerebrospinal fluid. In a brain battered by Alzheimer's disease, the temporal lobes—a seat of memory and language—have been ravaged, and ventricles gape into voids left by cell death. EP shattered that assumption. What Scoville did to HM with a metal straw, nature did to EP with herpes simplex. Side by side, the grainy black-and-white MRIs of their brains are uncannily similar, though EP's damage is a bit more extensive. Even if you have no idea what a normal brain ought to look like, the gaping symmetrical holes stare back at you like eyes. Like EP, HM was able to hold on to memories just long enough to think about them, but once his brain moved to something else, he could never bring them back. In one famous experiment, Brenda Milner, a Canadian psychologist, asked HM to remember the number 584 for as long as possible. To keep the number on the tip of his tongue, he used a complicated system, which he recounted to Milner: "It's easy. You just remember 8. You see 5, 8, and 4 add to 17. You remember 8, subtract it from 17, and it leaves 9. Divide 9 in half and you get 5 and 4 and there you are: 584. Easy." He concentrated on this elaborate mantra for several minutes. But as soon as he was distracted, the number dissolved. He couldn't even remember that he'd been asked to remember something. Though scientists had known that there was a difference between long- and short-term memory since the late 19th century, they now had evidence in HM that the two types of memory happened in different parts of the brain, and that without most of the hippocampal area, HM could not turn a short-term memory into a long-term one. Researchers also learned more about another kind of remembering from HM. Even though he couldn't say what he'd had for breakfast or name the current President, there were some things that he could remember. Milner found that he was capable of learning complicated tasks without even realizing it. In one study, she showed that HM could learn how to trace inside a five-pointed star on a piece of paper while looking at its reflection in a mirror. Each time Milner gave HM the task, he claimed never to have tried it before. And yet, each day his brain got better at guiding his hand to work in reverse. Despite his amnesia, he was remembering. Though there is disagreement about just how many memory systems there are, scientists generally divide memories into two types: declarative and nondeclarative (sometimes referred to as explicit and implicit). Declarative memories are things you know you remember, like the color of your car or what happened yesterday afternoon. EP and HM have lost the ability to make new declarative memories. Non-declarative memories are the things you know without consciously thinking about them, like how to ride a bike or how to draw a shape while looking at it in a mirror. Those unconscious memories don't rely on the hippocampal region to be consolidated and stored. They happen in completely different parts of the brain. Motor skill learning takes place at the base of the brain in the cerebellum, perceptual learning in the neocortex, habit learning at the brain's center. As EP and HM so strikingly demonstrate, you can damage one part of the brain, and the rest will keep on working. The metaphors we most often use to describe memory—the photograph, the tape recorder, the mirror, the hard drive—all suggest mechanical accuracy, as if the mind were some sort of meticulous transcriber of our experiences. And for a long time it was a commonly held view that our brains function as perfect recorders—that a lifetime of memories are socked away somewhere in the cerebral attic, and if they can't be found it isn't because they've disappeared, but only because we've lost access to them. In the chirps and twitters of pocket-size birds, Fernando Nottebohm heard the anthem of a brain-science revolution. The Rockefeller University biologist discovered that adult canaries do something a cen-tury of neuroscience dogma declared impossible: They gen-erate new neurons to replace lost brain cells. Replacement peaks during peak memory load—when birds learn new songs, find new food sources, or meet new social partners. Other researchers have extended Nottebohm's findings, confirm-ing that mammals, including humans, also make new neurons. 'With luck and much effort,' Nottebohm says, 'the simple insight I got from studying how birds learn their songs will help us find the means to repair broken brains.' A Canadian neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield thought he'd proved that theory by the 1940s. Penfield used electrical probes to stimulate the brains of epileptic patients while they were lying conscious on the operating table. He was trying to pinpoint the source of their epilepsy, but he found that when his probe touched certain parts of the temporal lobe, the patients started describing vivid experiences. When he touched the same spot again, he often elicited the same descriptions. Penfield came to believe that the brain records everything to which it pays any degree of conscious attention, and that this recording is permanent. Most scientists now agree that the strange recollections triggered by Penfield were closer to fantasies or hallucinations than to memories, but the sudden reappearance of long-lost episodes from one's past is an experience surely familiar to everyone. Still, as a recorder, the brain does a notoriously wretched job. Tragedies and humiliations seem to be etched most sharply, often with the most unbearable exactitude, while those memories we think we really need—the name of the acquaintance, the time of the appointment, the location of the car keys—have a habit of evaporating. Michael Anderson, a memory researcher at the University of Oregon in Eugene, has tried to estimate the cost of all that evaporation. According to a decade's worth of "forgetting diaries" kept by his undergraduate students (the amount of time it takes to find the car keys, for example), Anderson calculates that people squander more than a month of every year just compensating for things they've forgotten. AJ remembers when she first realized that her memory was not the same as everyone else's. She was in the seventh grade, studying for finals. "I was not happy because I hated school," she says. Her mother was helping her with her homework, but her mind had wandered elsewhere. "I started thinking about the year before, when I was in sixth grade and how I loved sixth grade. But then I started realizing that I was remembering the exact date, exactly what I was doing a year ago that day." At first she didn't think much of it. But a few weeks later, playing with a friend, she remembered that they had also spent the day together precisely one year earlier. "Each year has a certain feeling, and then each time of year has a certain feeling. The spring of 1981 feels completely different from the winter of 1981," she says. Dates for AJ are like the petite madeleine that sent Marcel Proust's mind hurtling back in time in Remembrance of Things Past. Their mere mention starts her reminiscing involuntarily. "You know when you smell something, it brings you back? I'm like ten levels deeper and more intense than that. "My brother used to say, 'Oh, she's the Rain Man.' And I was like, 'No I'm not!' But I thought, what if I really ... Am I? Is there something wrong with me?" At one point AJ considered setting up shop on the nearby boardwalk as the Human Calendar and charging people five bucks to let them try to stump her with dates. She decided against it. "I don't want to be a sideshow." It would seem as though having a memory like AJ's would make life qualitatively different and better. Our culture inundates us with new information, yet so little of it is captured and cataloged in a way that it can be retrieved later. What would it mean to have all that otherwise lost knowledge at our fingertips? Would it make us more persuasive, more confident? Would it make us, in some fundamental sense, smarter? To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about oneself. How many worthwhile ideas have gone unthought and connections unmade because of our memory's shortcomings? The dream that AJ embodies, the perfection of memory, has been with us since at least the fifth century B.C. and the supposed invention of a technique known as the "art of memory" by the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos. Simonides had been the sole survivor of a catastrophic roof collapse at a banquet hall in Thessaly. According to Cicero, who wrote an account of the incident four centuries later, the bodies were mangled beyond recognition. But Simonides was able to close his eyes to the chaos and see in his mind each of the guests at his seat around the table. He'd discovered the loci method. If you can convert whatever it is you're trying to remember into vivid mental images and then arrange them in some sort of imagined architectural space, known as a memory palace, memories can be made virtually indelible. Peter of Ravenna, a noted Italian jurist and author of a renowned memory textbook of the 15th century, was said to have used the loci method to memorize the Bible, the entire legal canon, 200 of Cicero's speeches, and 1,000 verses of Ovid. For leisure, he would reread books cached away in his memory palaces. "When I left my country to visit as a pilgrim the cities of Italy, I can truly say I carry everything I own with me," he wrote. It's hard for us to imagine what it must have been like to live in a culture before the advent of printed books or before you could carry around a ballpoint pen and paper to jot notes. "In a world of few books, and those mostly in communal libraries, one's education had to be remembered, for one could never depend on having continuing access to specific material," writes Mary Carruthers, author of The Book of Memory, a study of the role of memory techniques in medieval culture. "Ancient and medieval people reserved their awe for memory. Their greatest geniuses they describe as people of superior memories." Thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, for example, was celebrated for composing his Summa Theologica entirely in his head and dictating it from memory with no more than a few notes. Roman philosopher Seneca the Elder could repeat 2,000 names in the order they'd been given to him. Another Roman named Simplicius could recite Virgil by heart—backward. A strong memory was seen as the greatest of virtues since it represented the internalization of a universe of external knowledge. Indeed, a common theme in the lives of the saints was that they had extraordinary memories. Jeanne Boylan recovers fragmented impressions of shapes and textures etched deep in memory by trauma. The veteran forensic artist, who has helped solve some of the most notorious crimes of the past 30 years, says her crucial skill is not drawing, but simply listening—often for hours. 'Witnesses surprise themselves,' she says, 'with what they remember.' After Simonides' discovery, the art of memory was codified with an extensive set of rules and instructions by the likes of Cicero and Quintilian and in countless medieval memory treatises. Students were taught not only what to remember but also techniques for how to remember it. In fact, there are long traditions of memory training in many cultures. The Jewish Talmud, embedded with mnemonics—techniques for preserving memories—was passed down orally for centuries. Koranic memorization is still considered a supreme achievement among devout Muslims. Traditional West African griots and South Slavic bards recount colossal epics entirely from memory. But over the past millennium, many of us have undergone a profound shift. We've gradually replaced our internal memory with what psychologists refer to as external memory, a vast superstructure of technological crutches that we've invented so that we don't have to store information in our brains. We've gone, you might say, from remembering everything to remembering awfully little. We have photographs to record our experiences, calendars to keep track of our schedules, books (and now the Internet) to store our collective knowledge, and Post-it notes for our scribbles. What have the implications of this outsourcing of memory been for ourselves and for our society? Has something been lost? To supplement the memories in her mind, AJ also stores a trove of external memories. In addition to the detailed diary she's kept since childhood, she has a library of close to a thousand videotapes copied off TV, a trunk full of radio recordings, and a "research library" consisting of 50 notebooks filled with facts she's found on the Internet that relate to events in her memory. "I just want to keep it all," she says. Preserving her past has become the central compulsion of AJ's life. "When I'm blow-drying my hair in the morning, I'll think of whatever day it is. And to pass the time, I'll just run through that day in my head over the last 20-something years-like flipping through a Rolodex." AJ traces the origins of her unusual memory to a move from New Jersey to California that her family made when she was just eight years old. Life in New Jersey had been comfortable and familiar, and California was foreign and strange. It was the first time she understood that growing up and moving on necessarily meant forgetting and leaving behind. "Because I hate change so much, after that it was like I wanted to be able to capture everything. Because I know, eventually, nothing will ever be the same," she says. K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, believes that at bottom, AJ might not be all that different from the rest of us. After the initial announcement of AJ's condition in the journal Neurocase, Ericsson suggested that what needs to be explained about AJ is not some extraordinary, unprecedented innate memory but rather her extraordinary obsession with her past. People always remember things that are important to them. Baseball fanatics have an encyclopedic knowledge for statistics, chess masters remember tricky gambits that took place years ago, actors remember scripts long after performing them. Everyone has got a memory for something. Ericsson believes that if anyone cared about holding on to the past as much as AJ does, the feat of memorizing one's life would be well within reach. I mention Ericsson's theory to AJ, and she becomes visibly upset. "I just want to call him on the phone and yell at him. If I spent that much time memorizing my life, then I really would be a boring person," she says. "I don't sit around and memorize it. I just know it." Remembering everything is both maddening and lonely for AJ. "I remember good, which is very comforting. But I also remember bad—and every bad choice," she says. "And I really don't give myself a break. There are all these forks in the road, moments you have to make a choice, and then it's ten years later, and I'm still beating myself up over them. I don't forgive myself for a lot of things. Your memory is the way it is to protect you. I feel like it just hasn't protected me. I would love just for five minutes to be a simple person and not have all this stuff in my head. Most people have called what I have a gift," AJ says, "but I call it a burden." Memorizing sequences of playing cards, a classic mental exercise, helps Raemon Matthews's students at Samuel Gompers High School in New York's South Bronx hone their skills for tougher academic challenges. Almost a fourth of the com-petitors in this year's USA Memory Championships were Matthews's pupils. The whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the massive glob of neurons that interpret it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what is about to happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Our brains are fundamentally prediction machines, and to work they have to find order in the chaos of possible memories. Most of the things that pass through our brains don't need to be remembered any longer than they need to be thought about. Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has developed a taxonomy of forgetting to catalog what he calls the seven sins of memory. The sin of absentmindedness: Yo-Yo Ma forgetting his 2.5-million-dollar cello in the back of a taxi. The Vietnam War veteran still haunted by the battlefield suffers from the sin of persistence. The politician who loses a word on the tip of his tongue during a stump speech is experiencing the sin of blocking. Though we curse these failures of memory on an almost daily basis, Schacter says, that's only because we don't see their benefits. Each sin is really the flip side of a virtue, "a price we pay for processes and functions that serve us well in many respects." There are good evolutionary reasons why our memories fail us in the specific ways they do. If everything we looked at, smelled, heard, or thought about was immediately filed away in the enormous database that is our long-term memory, we'd be drowning in irrelevant information. In his short story "Funes the Memorious," Jorge Luis Borges describes a man crippled by an inability to forget. He remembers every detail of his life, but he can't distinguish between the trivial and the important. He can't prioritize, he can't generalize. He is "virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas." Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget." To age is to forget, also. Roughly five million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, and even more suffer from mild cognitive impairment, or lesser degrees of memory loss. When asked to recall a list of 15 words read 20 minutes earlier, octogenarians in one study recalled fewer than 60 percent, while the twenty-somethings could remember close to 90 percent. Not surprisingly, people have been searching a long time for chemicals that might halt that tide of forgetting. According to Franciscan Bernardo de Lavinheta, writing in the early 1500s, "Artificial memory is twofold: the first part consists in medicines and poultices." The second part, of course, is the art of memory, which Lavinheta deemed both safer and more effective (since memory medicines can sometimes have the unfortunate side effect of "drying up the brain"). Today ginkgo biloba is sold as an over-the-counter supplement, or added to fruit smoothies and "smart" soft drinks, even without conclusive evidence that it either boosts memory—or dries up the brain. In winter sunlight, Sister Loretta Semposki meditates. An avid reader, the 94-year-old scores very high on annual memory tests conducted by the Univer-sity of Kentucky's Nun Study. She's one of 678 Roman Catholic School Sisters of Notre Dame, all born before 1917, who have volunteered their life histories—and their brains, after they die—to this long-term study of healthy aging and mental decline. The archive of test data and tissue samples assembled over nearly 20 years is helping scientists figure out why some people's memories dim and others—like Sister Loretta's—remain crystal bright for a lifetime. Within the past decades, drug companies have elevated the search to brave new heights. Armed with a sophisticated understanding of memory's molecular underpinnings, they've sought to create new drugs that amplify the brain's natural capacity to remember. In recent years, at least three companies have been formed with the express purpose of developing memory drugs. One of those companies, Cortex Pharmaceuticals, is attempting to develop a class of molecules known as ampakines, which facilitate the transmission of the neurotransmitter glutamate. Glutamate is one of the primary excitatory chemicals passed across the synapses between neurons. By amplifying its effects, Cortex hopes to improve the brain's underlying ability to form and retrieve memories. When administered to middle-age rats, one ampakine was able to fully reverse their age-related decline in the cellular mechanism of memory. It may not be long before drugs such as ampakines begin to reach the market; when they do, they could have an enormous impact on society. Though the pharmaceutical companies are searching for therapeutic treatments to stave off Alzheimer's and combat dementia, it seems inevitable that their pills will end up in the hands of students cramming for exams and probably a whole lot of other people who just want to enhance their brains. Already psycho-stimulants designed to treat ADHD, like Adderall and Ritalin, are used as "study buddies" by as many as one in four students at some colleges trying to increase their concentration and improve their memories. All of this raises some troubling ethical questions. Would we choose to live in a society where people have vastly better memories? In fact, what would it even mean to have a better memory? Would it mean remembering things only exactly as they happened, free from the revisions and exaggerations that our mind naturally creates? Would it mean having a memory that forgets traumas? Would it mean having a memory that remembers only those things we want it to remember? Would it mean becoming AJ? I want to see EP's unconscious, nondeclarative memory at work, so I ask him if he's interested in taking me on a walk around his neighborhood. He says, "not really," so I wait and ask him again a couple minutes later. This time he agrees. We walk out the front door into the high afternoon sun and turn right. I ask EP why we're not turning to the left instead. "I'd just rather not go that way. This is just the way I go. I don't know why," he says. If I asked him to draw a map of the route he takes at least three times a day, he'd never be able to do it. He doesn't even know his own address, or (almost as improbably for someone from San Diego) which way the ocean is. But after so many years of taking the same walk, the journey has etched itself on his unconscious. His wife, Beverly, now lets him go out alone, even though a single wrong turn would leave him completely lost. Sometimes he comes back from his walks with objects he's picked up along the way: a stack of round stones, a puppy, somebody's wallet. He's never able to explain how they came into his possession. "Our neighbors love him because he'll come up to them and just start talking to them," Beverly says. Even though he thinks he's meeting them for the first time, he's learned through habit that these are people he should feel comfortable around, and he interprets those unconscious feelings of comfort as a good reason to stop and say hello. We cross the street and I'm alone with EP for the first time. He doesn't know who I am or what I'm doing at his side, although he seems to sense that I'm there for some good reason. He is trapped in the ultimate existential nightmare, blind to the reality in which he lives. The impulse strikes me to help him escape, at least for a second. I want to take him by the arm and shake him. "You have a rare and debilitating memory disorder," I want to tell him. "The last 50 years have been lost to you. In less than a minute, you're going to forget that this conversation ever even happened." I imagine the sheer horror that would befall him, the momentary clarity, the gaping emptiness that would open up in front of him, and close just as quickly. And then the passing car or the singing bird that would snap him back into his oblivious bubble. We turn around and walk back down the street whose name he's forgotten, past the waving neighbors he doesn't recognize, to a home he doesn't know. In front of the house, there is a car parked with tinted windows. We turn to look at our reflections. I ask EP what he sees. "An old man," he says. "That's all." This article is part of Your Memory, Rewired, a National Geographic exploration into the fuzzy, fascinating frontiers of memory science—including advice on how to make your own memory more powerful. Learn more. This article first appeared in National Geographic magazine in November 2007.
