Do memories get lost permanently when we forget?
In: Biology
There was a story of a 88 year old woman who kept hearing this humming tune in her head and of a woman singing to her. The doctor who was treating her determined it was an Irish lullaby popular when she would have been an infant. She never knew her mother for reasons but she was Irish. The doctor believed it was a memory of her mother singing to her when she was an infant. So the first time she remembers hearing her mother’s voice was when she was 88years old being sung lullabies. He diagnosed her with a minor stroke deep in her brain, not the kind that causes paralysis since it was in the wrong spot. As the treatment for the stroke progressed and she got better she was slowly unable to hear her mother sing to her anymore.
Here’s a link to npr about it with some audio that I heard on Radiolab originally.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17261330
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