Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common?
Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common? The protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, Scott Bakula’s character in Star Trek: Enterprise and Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders of Apple Computers?
Answer: they have all suffered, at one time or another, from anterograde amnesia, an unusual form of memory loss which can follow a traumatic brain injury. To their number may now be added the central character of Yoko Ogawa’s new novel, a professor of advanced mathematics whose memory ‘stopped’ in 1975 when he was involved in a car accident. Since then, the professor — whose name we never learn — can recall at any moment only the last 80 minutes of his life.
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