I’m wondering if anyone remembers either of the following documentaries:
1) Man with 15-minute memory (not the name, but what I’m calling it).
I saw this while I was in Cambridge with mom & Roger, and don’t remember the name of the guy. He had a *total* memory of about 15 minutes. He could play piano, but didn’t know he could until he started. He didn’t remember anyone or anything that had happened more than 15 minutes ago, and would spend most of the documentary in this seemingly endless mantra of “I’ve never seen anything before, never touched anything before, never existed before this moment…” etc. It was heartbreaking, but not because of the man (he’d had an accident of some sort, or perhaps a disease, and lost his ability to recall anything, or to create new memories. What broke my heart was his wife.
She would leave the room for a few minutes to go do something, laundry, whatever, and when she came back, he would burst into tears, and throw his arm around her, sobbing that he was so happy to see her. When she was gone, he wouldn’t mention her, or anyone else, but when she came back, it was like the arrivals gate at the airport. Every ten minutes or so. Guh.
I seem to recall that it was part of a much larger documentary about people who had no discernable brain matter. Like, literally. Nothing in their heads, and yet most of them were normal (or gifted) even though they didn’t show up on a standard MRI as having anything upstairs but some connective tissue.
Wow, huh? This is why I wanna see it again. To see if my 13-yo brain was just making stuff up.
2) The guy who was looking for the piece of land for himself & his wife, and once he found it, went about defying the bejeesus out of all known laws of architecture and physics.
Sorry for the run-on name of this one, but that’s the fastest way I can think of to describe it. This drifter wanders into a smallish town somewhere in the States, and does odd jobs for folks to make money/food/shelter and would spend part of each day wandering around looking for “the right piece of land.” One day, he comes back to wherever it is he’s staying, and is freaking out that he found “the spot” and that he needs to buy it so he can start building. The folks in town help put together a collection or whatever, and he buys the land. Empty, and then starts building fencing around it. High fencing, like 8′ kinda stuff.
Folks from time to time would drop by to see if they could help (and what he was up to back there, and he would chase them off in a friendly way, and go back to his work. He disappeared at some point, and when the folks went to check up on him, he was gone. What was cool though, was that they were looking around his house, and there was all this totally weird furniture and stuff in there that he’d made from solid stone, but they couldn’t figure out how he’d done it with the tools they knew he had access to (or how he would’ve moved the stuff he’d made once he’d carved it). Notebooks were found, and they contained math that seemed like gibberish, but the results were right there in front of them. Furniture they couldn’t reassemble once taken apart, and odd things like stairways that went up into nowhere (or into walls).
Now, maybe I’m making some of that last bit up, but I seem to recall weirdness beyond the standard “and then one day he was gone,” variety.
Anyone?
Hullo?
Posted on October 14th 2007 in
People
