She's ecstatic to finally have answers and to know that there are other people like her. You'd probably go to somebody who works with him to see if they thought you were crazy or not,"' McKinnon says. "Well, if you were living back in the time of Freud and you had interesting dreams, you wouldn't go right to Freud. She eventually reached out by email to another neuroscientist at Baycrest, Brian Levine, who has since studied McKinnon. Tulving opined that there were probably people who don't have episodic memory - in other words, people just like McKinnon. But nearly 10 years ago, she happened upon an article on Endel Tulving, a giant in memory studies who is a scientist emeritus at Baycrest. McKinnon spent years, off and on, trying to find references to her type of memory issue. But that's different from remembering anything about that," she says. "If you ask me about prom, I know that I didn't go to prom and I know that I decorated for prom. Asking if she remembers her high school prom illustrates the difference between the two types of memory. Her semantic memory - the part that allows her to learn facts - is fine.
"You just think up funny little stories and just keep telling them over and over again. "I just assumed everyone was making up stories, because I certainly was," she says, adding she thought this was an accepted part of social interaction. McKinnon's responses struck her as unusual, prompting McKinnon to start asking others if they actually remembered episodes of their past. Because she couldn't replay mental movies of her past, she made up stories, often embroidering details - some erroneous - on tales she had heard her parents or her brothers tell, or using family photos as a jumping off point.Ī friend who was studying to be a physician's assistant had an assignment to devise a quiz to detect early signs of dementia and needed someone to test it on. In an interview, she says she only realized her memory was different when she was 21 or so. McKinnon knows these facts about herself only because she's been told them and has committed them to memory. McKinnon has been told she was a bit of an eccentric kid - a tomboy who read the encyclopedia for fun. The Baycrest team recently published on the newly described condition in the medical journal Neuropsychologia. The condition is called severely deficient autobiographical memory, or SDAM, a name devised by researchers at the Rotman Research Institute at Toronto's Baycrest Health Sciences Centre, who have studied McKinnon and two other people with similar memory deficits. She can't form memories about events in her life, or relive her past by calling up images of bygone times. "Not really," McKinnon, now 60, would reply. TORONTO - When Susie McKinnon was a child, she had a stock answer when anyone asked if she remembered an event in her life.
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