But what if you forgot everything?
Your own name, your own family, entire years of your own life.
That's what happens in the puzzling condition known as amnesia.
It's not just something you see in the movies.
For the people you're about to meet, it's painfully real.
They've suddenly found themselves strangers in their own lives.
Here's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Bob Arnott.
It mixes me up.
I can't remember anything.
How can a man lose his memory, his name, everything he's ever known, and still talk like this?
It's a classic Hollywood scenario.
In the movie Spellbound, the character played by Gregory Peck loses his memory after witnessing
a murder.
Amnesia.
The trick of the mind for remaining sane.
You remain sane by forgetting something too horrible to remember.
But by the end of the movie, he's got his memory back and the girl.
A miraculous recovery.
Suffering a long forgotten memory.
But in real life, it doesn't work that way.
Amnesia is a debilitating condition that is as confusing to doctors as life is to those
living with it.
Experts say that the kind of amnesia in Spellbound resulting from severe psychological trauma
is possible but extremely rare.
Or often the causes lack of oxygen to the brain, head injury, or the virus that causes
encephalitis.
And unlike the movies, in real life, there are no Hollywood endings.
When Cricket Carpenter walked down the aisle in September 1993, it was the happiest day
of her life.
A day she thought she'd never forget.
You may kiss your bride.
But just two months later, as the newlyweds were driving to Cricket's parents' home in
Phoenix to celebrate Thanksgiving, the unthinkable happened.
You just never know.
I mean, in a split second, your life can change.
Just like that.
Cricket was at the wheel, her husband, Ken, asleep in the backseat.
I heard watch out and the most blood-curdling scream.
Cricket had swerved to miss a flatbed truck, but another truck plowed into them from behind.
They never saw what hit them, but the impact literally sent their car flipping through
the air.
It landed upside down.
I heard Cricket just gasp, and I thought, oh my gosh, she died.
Cricket was just barely hanging on to life.
She had to be cut out of the car and airlifted to a hospital, all the while suffering seizures,
head injury, and lapsing into coma.
Ten days later, Cricket woke up, but she wasn't the same person.
She would have to go through extensive rehabilitation to relearn everything from how to walk to
eating and even getting dressed.
But more frightening to Kim was what his wife couldn't remember.
While she knew her name and her parents' names, she gave the year as 1965.
Kim painfully recalls what happened next.
They said, well, who's your husband?
She didn't say anything.
I said, who's your husband, Cricket?
She said, I'm not married.
Cricket was suffering from amnesia.
While she could remember parts of her past, her recent memory, including her wedding,
was gone.
She didn't even know who Kim was and accepted only on blind faith that they, in fact, were
married.
No matter what Kim did, showing his wife pictures, their wedding program, even their video, nothing
brought Cricket's memory back.
So why is it that Cricket can't remember her own wedding?
The answer has to do with how our brains process and store information, which is the foundation
of memory.
Say you met me for the first time.
Here's what your brain would do.
My face would be stored in your occipital lobe, my name in the temporal lobe, how you
know me in the frontal lobe, and how you feel about me in the limbic system.
But what makes you remember?
That's where this comes in.
It's called the hippocampus, and it acts as a sort of switchboard that connects all the
different pieces and then binds them together, allowing you to recall a memory.
But in amnesia, the hippocampus is damaged, so the various pieces of a memory cannot be
bound together.
It's unlikely that somebody ever comes back to be completely normal, and that's certainly
different than the typical Hollywood portrayal of amnesia.
Dr. Jordan Grafman is chief of a cognitive neuroscience program at the National Institutes
of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
The hippocampi, the structures that are most important for memory, are in the temporal
lobe.
He is also a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives and specializes in the recovery
of function after brain damage, including amnesia.
Patient with amnesia still has the memories in their brain and can even lay down new memories,
but simply can't get at them.
Can't look at them and can't tie the various memories together to give us a sense of an
episode.
So for Cricket Carpenter, that means her wedding is truly a bygone memory.
So what's the chance that given many months or years of recovery that Cricket would ever
remember her marriage?
Well I think at this point, since it's been a substantial period of time since her head
injury and her recovery, she's not likely to remember much more about her marriage than
she can remember now.
Dr. Grafman's research specifically focuses on how the hippocampus contributes to remembering
and has shown that in amnesia patients, the hippocampus has actually shrunk.
What is it that would cause the hippocampus to shrink?
Everything from Alzheimer's disease to head injury.
And in all those cases, the key factor is that cells die in the hippocampus.
When those cells die, the hippocampus will shrink in size.
That's just what an MRI showed in this young woman, Dr. Grafman's patient Tiffany Larson.
My memory right now is just what's going on around me now.
I don't remember yesterday.
I don't remember what I did earlier today.
Tiffany, now 22, was just 13 when her family went on a cross country trip.
She'd always been healthy until one day during that vacation when she suddenly felt ill.
I think we were all in a swimming pool.
I remember just sinking down to the bottom of the pool.
I just got stiff and my parents dove in the pool and got me out and stuff.
Right then I was in seizures.
She was in a coma for 21 days.
When she woke up, she didn't recognize her own parents or know who she was.
After I got out of the coma, my memory was completely wiped out.
Doctors never determined the exact cause of her illness.
Calling it an unknown virus, it was probably encephalitis.
Like Cricket Carpenter, Tiffany went through months of rehabilitation to relearn life's
basics, but nothing has brought back her memory.
Tiffany has had amnesia for nine years now and can't remember her past or even things
that happened the very same day.
I turned around and I didn't know what the heck I was.
She lives at home with her parents.
If it weren't for the note her mother leaves her each morning, she says she wouldn't know
what day it was or what she had to do.
We wanted to see what it's like to live with amnesia, so we sent a Dateline crew to spend
the day with Tiffany in her hometown of New Bern, North Carolina.
We were with Tiffany for more than 10 hours, filming every aspect of her day.
She introduced us to her dogs.
We stopped for lunch at one of Tiffany's favorite spots, the Cow Cafe.
In the afternoon, Tiffany and her mom took a walk near a local river, fed the ducks,
and showed us a special landmark, a brick inscribed with her name.
At the end of the day, she baked us cookies, her favorite activity.
Four days later, we met up with Tiffany again.
We sent the same producer and camera crews that she had met just a few days before.
What happened next was as surprising to us as it was to her.
Can you look around and tell me if there's anyone you recognize behind you maybe?
No.
Now, do you recognize either of them?
The man with the camera?
Uh-uh.
The little lady with the blonde hair?
No, who are they?
You were with them last Friday.
I was.
They came down to New Bern, North Carolina to visit with you for the day.
Oh, yeah?
I don't remember them.
Do you remember their names?
Don't remember their faces?
Don't remember anything about them.
Do you remember a television crew coming to town?
Uh-uh.
Not at all.
We brought along the video we shot with Tiffany just four days before, hoping it might help
her remember the visit.
Now that you see this, do you remember any of it?
Not at all?
Uh-uh.
Nothing?
I remember being there.
Anything about it?
No.
Terrible.
It's pretty sad, actually, because you don't know what happened afterwards or what happened
before.
There it is.
Which is exactly what happened when we showed her the rest of the tape.
Do you know what these are here?
I don't know what these are.
Oh, there's my name.
And do you know where that brick is?
I have no idea where it's at.
Tiffany says the only way she can get through life is to write things down.
And even though she's baked cookies hundreds of times, the steps are not in her memory.
So each time, she has to figure out how to do it all over again, reading directions as
though she had never done it before.
Without a note to remind her, she'll forget she's already taken a shower or eaten a meal.
Otherwise, she may do them again.
Despite her condition, Tiffany managed to graduate from high school, but college and
a career are out of the question.
Are you able to hold down any kind of a job?
No, I did work at a retirement home.
I did a lot of painting and maintenance work.
How would you remember what you were supposed to do?
I stayed with somebody all the time.
And they would tell you, do this or do that?
I wanted to be around the old people.
They're a lot like me, too.
Most of them don't remember anything either.
While she laughs at herself for forgetting, privately, Tiffany's amnesia is painful.
Do you lead a pretty lonely life?
Very lonely.
No girlfriends or guy friends or anything.
They don't understand how difficult it is for me to remember their names sometimes.
If I turn around and I get lost, I'll forget who I'm with or what their names are.
They just treat me like, oh man, you're stupid.
Like I'm just useless then.
She does have a boyfriend, someone she's been dating for more than nine months, someone
we had to remind her about.
Do you remember his name?
Um, jeez, mom.
Um, Frank, I think is his name.
I think that's it.
Do you remember what he looks like?
He's tall and skinny.
I think he has hair on his face.
That's all I remember about him.
She did get his name right.
But in reality, Frank is 5'10", 180 pounds, medium build, and only has a five o'clock
shadow.
There is no drug, no treatment, no operation to help Tiffany and others like her cope with
each day.
And no cure anywhere on the horizon that would allow her to dream about her future.
So what kind of a future do you have in store?
I guess not really any.
None?
I guess I'll just come, as the future rolls on, I guess I'll just deal with it then.
But till then, I just deal day by day.
Cricket and Kim Carpenter take their life one day at a time as well.
But their story does have a Hollywood ending of sorts.
Since it's unlikely that Cricket will ever remember the day she and Kim got married,
they decided to make new memories.
The two fell in love all over again and didn't have a moment of doubt when Kim asked Cricket
to marry him a second time around.
Only one thing can surpass forever the painful events that we have felt.
That is the love I have for you.
This time they hope it's a day that neither of them will ever forget.
I finally have a memory of marrying this man and that it wasn't just a story anymore.
It was our new beginning.
And Tiffany Larson now has something new in her life.
A job.
She's working part time at a local bagel shop accompanied by a coach who helps her remember
her tasks.
Tiffany has since broken up with her boyfriend though, maintaining a social life she says
is still too difficult.
Here it goes again.
Have you had the check-sperience?
It's all about crunching squares, basically.
Squares?
We're square people.
Well, we're square people.
The squares go crunch.
Squares make a good crunch.
It's the check-splosion of milk and crunch you only get from checks.