Free Elephants on Acid by Alex Boese Page A

time.”
    Penfield was poking around in these brains to orient himself during the surgical procedure—because everyone’s neurons are wired a little differently—as well as to locate damaged regions. He would touch his electrode directly to a region, such as a wrinkle on the temporal lobe, and ask the patient what sensation, if any, she felt. Then he would stick a numbered piece of paper on that spot. When he was finished he took a picture of all the little pieces of paper. The resulting photo served as a convenient map of the patient’s brain he could then refer to as he worked. Kind of like surgery by numbers.
    The first time one of his patients reported spontaneous memory recall was in 1931. He was operating on a thirty-seven-year-old housewife. When he stimulated her temporal lobe with an electrode, she suddenly said that she “seemed to see herself giving birth to her baby girl.”
    Penfield was sure he had stumbled upon evidence of a memory library within the brain. He imagined it as “a permanent record of the stream of consciousness; a record that is much more complete and detailed than the memories that any man can recall by voluntary effort.” He began a systematic search for this memory library in other patients. Over a period of more than twenty years, he touched his electrode to hundreds of exposed brains, prompting subjects to report a variety of memories. These memories included “watching a guy crawl through a hole in the fence at a baseball game”; “standing on the corner of Jacob and Washington, South Bend, Indiana”; “grabbing a stick out of a dog’s mouth”; “watching a man fighting”; “standing in the bathroom at school”; and “watching circus wagons one night years ago in childhood.”
    It was as though Penfield were Albus Dumbledore of Harry Potter fame, dipping his magic wand into a Pensieve and pulling out stray, glittering thoughts. The science fiction quality of all this was not lost on author Philip K. Dick. In his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? , later adapted for the screen as Blade Runner, characters use a device called a Penfield Mood Organ to dial up emotions on command. (Dick also wrote the novel on which the movie Total Recall was based.)
    Penfield’s discovery generated excitement during the 1950s, when he first publicly revealed his findings. Some hailed it as clinical confirmation of the psychoanalytic concept of repressed memories. But as time wore on, the scientific community grew more skeptical. Other neurosurgeons failed to replicate Penfield’s results. In 1971 doctors Paul Fedio and John Van Buren of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke in Maryland stated bluntly that, in their extensive work with epileptic patients, they had never witnessed the phenomenon Penfield had reported. Brain researchers noted that it was definitely possible to provoke brief hallucinations by means of electrical stimulation of the brain, and experimenters such as Elizabeth Loftus of UC Irvine, whom we shall meet again in a few pages, built on this observation to argue that Penfield must have mistaken such hallucinations for memories. Basically, not many brain scientists today take seriously Penfield’s idea of a complete memory library hidden in our brain.
    Still, it would be cool if Penfield were right and we could access everything we had ever seen or heard. We could press 20 a button on a remote control and remember where we parked our car, or what we were supposed to buy at the supermarket. The only problem is that we’d still end up forgetting where we put the remote.

Elephants Never Forget

    An elephant walks into a bar and challenges the bartender to a memory contest. “Loser pays for the drinks,” says the elephant. What should the bartender do?

    Before answering, the bartender might want to consider the elephant-memory experiments of Bernhard Rensch. During the 1950s Rensch explored the relationship between brain size and intelligence