1.

My memory is legendary in the family, and though it’s wearing thin now, getting patchy in places, I still remember when the legend began.

It was the fall of 1959, when I was five, and we had just gotten home from a year of travel in Italy, with stays in Perugia, Florence, and Rome. My father was a scientist at Columbia back then, and the trip was his first sabbatical. He was finishing a book he was writing with his friend and colleague Bruno Boley, Theory of Thermal Stresses, which would become a bible for the kinds of engineers who designed NASA rockets, satellites, and heat shields.

Now we were back in Hillsdale, New Jersey. One evening, my father brought out a brand-new Kodak slide projector and set it up on a footstool in the living room. I remember the room, can still hear the whir of the projector’s fan and smell again the hot, sourish smell from the projector bulb. I remember where my father stood (by the new projector), where my mother sat (in the armchair next to it), and where I sat or lay (on the rug). My little brother, Eric, was already asleep, I think.

Slide.

It was a scene from months before. In the picture I was crouched in the middle of a dusty path, under the hot sun, digging in the dirt with my bare hands.

“That’s Monte Testaccio!” I said. “That was the first thing we did in Rome. There was a stone in the middle of the road, and I was trying to dig it out. You and Mom and Eric kept on walking,” I told my father. “Then you stopped and turned around and called me to catch up. You said we would find much better things up ahead.”

Monte Testaccio was a lonesome, scruffy hill, the remains of an ancient Roman garbage dump. In those days there weren’t as many tourists in Rome, and we had the hill to ourselves. My father told us to wander around, and we went rambling as if we were picking up shells and pebbles at the beach. My brother and I found little bits of broken pots. Sitting there in our darkened living room, I could still see each one. “You found the best piece,” I said to my father. I saw his find in my mind’s eye, and I can almost see it now, a brown, neatly turned terracotta jug handle.

Slide.

“That was also our first day in Rome!” I said. We had gone for a family walk down a broad avenue. I remembered the row of blinkered horses and carriages that stood and waited at the curb, and just beyond them, the crazy Roman traffic. “A man threw his cigarette into the street,” I said. “I ran into the street to put it out. You ran after me,” I told my father. “You got me back to the sidewalk. You shouted, ‘You don’t run out into the street!’ ”

As I sat there on the living room rug, the whole scene was still right there before me.

“I said, ‘There was a cigarette. I was afraid it would start a fire.’ You shouted, ‘That cigarette will go out by itself!’ ”

“What a memory you have, Giannetto!” my father said.

2.

I also remember writing my first line. It was that same year—1959—the first week of September, midafternoon. Again, I can bring back the whole scene: where I sat at the kitchen table, the precise angle of the light on the leaves of the maple trees outside the picture window, the awkwardness of driving the pencil, even the smell of the paper.

(Mimeograph paper, which smelled like pineapples.)

I’m not like Funes the Memorious, in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Funes could remember (in the translation of Anthony Kerrigan) “the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho.” I couldn’t tell you what I had for dinner, say, on the night of Tuesday, October 2, 1962.

However, I am memorious enough that scenes from the past are always present, always ready to be summoned up. I time-travel all the time, voluntarily and involuntarily. I remember doing this even at the age of five or six. In one memory, I’m lying in the driveway—for some reason—and looking up at the sky while remembering scene after scene from the year before, and I can still recall a few of the scenes that came to me as I lay there.

While walking my dog in the park not long ago, listening to an interview with the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan, I recognized a fellow traveler. The interviewer, Max Linsky, asked him about his relationship to memory. Sullivan replied, “As I come up on 50, I find myself wishing that my memory weren’t as good as it is, you know?”

This was the gist of their conversation:

ML: You want it to be worse?

JJS: Sometimes I just feel like I don’t forget anything. And I’m constantly replaying everything. And you feel it start to swallow you, sometimes.

ML: That’s freaky shit, man!

JJS: Yeah. Yeah.

ML: You just remember it all?

JJS: I don’t want to overstate it. If my memory were that good, I’d probably be useful in some way for, like, NASA. But it’s just relentless, and it’s just so vivid all the time. I feel like my heat shield wore off or something.

Well, yes, I thought. Of course. Exactly.

3.

Psychologists have a term for a certain kind of relentless remembering: hyperthymesia. The syndrome was discovered and named two decades ago by a team of psychologists at the University of California, Irvine. One of them, James L. McGaugh, had received this slightly frantic letter:

Dear Dr. McGaugh,

As I sit here trying to figure out where to begin explaining why I am writing you. … I just hope somehow you can help me.

I am thirty-four years old and since I was eleven I have had this unbelievable ability to recall my past. … Whenever I see a date flash on the television (or anywhere else for that matter) I automatically go back to that day and remember where I was, what I was doing, what day it fell on and on and on and on and on. It is non-stop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting.

Some people call me the human calendar while others run out of the room in complete fear but the one reaction I get from everyone who eventually finds out about this “gift” is total amazement. Then they start throwing dates at me to try to stump me. … I haven’t been stumped yet. Most have called it a gift but I call it a burden. I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!!!

In other words, the author of the letter, whose name was Jill Price, had no heat shield whatsoever.

McGaugh and his colleagues gave Price a series of tests. In one, they asked her to write all the dates of Easter Sunday from 1980 onward. In just 10 minutes she wrote out the 24 dates almost perfectly (one date was off by two days). And Price is Jewish.

“My memory has ruled my life,” she told the psychologists. And: “It’s like a running movie that never stops. It’s like a split screen. … Like we’re sitting here talking and I’m talking to you and in my head I’m thinking about something that happened to me in December 1982—December 17, 1982, it was a Friday.”

Famous cases of remarkable memory had been documented in the scientific literature, but those involved mnemonists: professional and amateur memory athletes who train like marathoners to remember random numbers thousands of digits long. They are the kinds of people who compete in the annual World Memory Championship. The most celebrated mnemonist in history is Solomon Shereshevsky, who was the subject of a decades-long case study by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria in Moscow. Shereshevsky was an extraordinary memorizer, but he didn’t have his whole life running through his head, with every day neatly time-stamped; according to Luria, he seemed to exist “as in a haze.”

McGaugh and his colleagues published a study of Jill Price’s memory in the journal Neurocase in 2006. They wrote, “We know of no other reported case of someone who recalls personal memories over and over again, who is both the warden and the prisoner of her memories.” The paper received a lot of publicity, and the psychologists were swamped with emails from people who claimed that they were hyperthymestic, too. Today there are about 100 well-documented sufferers of the syndrome, which is now called “highly superior autobiographical memory” (HSAM).

That same year, Brian Levine, a neuropsychologist at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, encountered a case that was Jill Price’s mirror image. A woman named Susie McKinnon emailed him to say that she had no autobiographical memories whatsoever. This wasn’t dementia; McKinnon was just fine, thank you. She had lived a full life—she just couldn’t remember any of it. She and her husband loved to go on cruises. All around their house they had souvenirs from Aruba, Bermuda, Curaçao. But unlike Jill Price, who could have told you what day of the week she had left for Jamaica, and what the weather was like that day, and what she ate on the plane, McKinnon couldn’t remember a single thing about a single one of those cruises.

Levine and his colleagues wrote a paper about McKinnon’s condition, which they called “severely deficient autobiographical memory” (SDAM). Their paper got a lot of play in the news, too, and Levine set up a website to handle the public response. More than 25,000 people have filled out a survey on the website, believing that they have SDAM.

4.

On the morning of September 3, 2025, which was a Wednesday, very warm and sunny, I arrived at my brother’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, bearing bagels and cream cheese, to discuss our own relationships to memory.

Eric and I have talked about this topic many times, maybe a bit obsessively, because we seem to be somewhere near the opposite ends of the spectrum. He is not memorious. He calls me The Memory Man. Our experience of looking at a snapshot of the two of us in a family album is completely different. I see it, and I’m there. Eric studies it with a sense of estrangement, distance, dissociation. He doesn’t remember being present when the picture was taken. He doesn’t even feel that the child in the snapshot is him. He worries about this sensation of absence the way you might poke around with your tongue after a visit to the dentist, touching the place where the anesthetic is still making you numb. A part of him is missing, and he wants it back.

Walking through the streets evoked very few memories for Eric, but when we opened the door to Marsala Hardware, he sniffed the air and said, “Okay, that I remember.”

And yet, we are both writers. I write nonfiction, and he writes fiction. I’ve written half a dozen books for adults; he’s written more than 100 books for children, many of them under various pen names, as well as half a dozen children’s television shows. Eric was the head writer and co-creator of Dora the Explorer. He helped name the character “Dora.” Dora was also the name of our father’s mother, but when I pointed that out to him, Eric said it was just a coincidence because he’d forgotten our grandmother’s name; he wasn’t sure he ever knew it.

When Eric flips through an album from one of our father’s sabbaticals, he thinks, Right, we were in Italy. Or, Right, we went to England. “It’s like you go, ‘Well, I guess I was there,’ ” Eric says. “And whatever memories you do have feel sort of isolated. They don’t begin to connect with other memories.”

One of Brian Levine’s mentors in Toronto, a famous psychologist named Endel Tulving, divided autobiographical memory into two basic types. In the first type, episodic memory, you remember a scene from your past with a sensation that Tulving called “mental time travel.” In the second type, which he called semantic memory, there is zero time travel. A classic example is the color of milk. You know that milk is white. You remember this the same way you remember that the capital of France is Paris. There are vast numbers of facts and concepts that you’ve filed away in your memory as things you just know. It’s as if you picked them all up in a book somewhere.

My brother seems to remember episodes from his own childhood as if they were semantic memories, whereas I seem to have been born with a passport for mental time travel.

These days, Eric and I can’t say “highly superior” or “severely deficient” without laughing. The jargon takes us back to our years of sibling rivalry, which we’ve put behind us. Eric can tell from my expression whenever I’m about to bring up HSAM and SDAM. I get an apologetic look on my face that makes him guffaw.

After the bagels, Eric sprawled on his couch. I took an armchair. Between us on the rug we’d placed a large cardboard box. The box contained stuff that my brother and I had saved from our old family house in Providence—a big Victorian place on College Hill, where we lived after our father left Columbia for Brown. I’d stored a dozen of these cardboard boxes in my apartment. Some years back I filed almost everything in the boxes in loosely chronological order, as grist for a family memoir.

I set up my iPhone to record our conversation. Then Eric and I opened what I was calling The Last Box.

“When you say ‘The Last Box,’ what do you mean?” he asked.

“Because I’ve sorted through almost everything else from the old attics,” I said. (In the AI transcript of our conversation, “old attics” came out as “old addicts.”)

The box was full of miscellaneous junk—envelopes containing old keys, a yellowed ring-pull for a window shade with a little bit of white string attached—a random sample of the innumerable things that our mother had stashed in the two large attics and the many crawlspaces of the house on College Hill.

“Musty,” I said.

“That to me is a very third-floor smell,” Eric said. “Not in your room, but in the closet.”

I’ve noticed that smells can sometimes transport Eric back in time. Some years ago, the two of us made a day-trip pilgrimage to Hillsdale, the small town where we spent most of our childhoods. Walking through the streets evoked very few memories for Eric, but when we opened the door to Marsala Hardware, he sniffed the air and said, “Okay, that I remember.”

For me, almost every step in Hillsdale brought back memories, because so much still looked the same, right down to the 1950s aluminum scrollwork on the screen doors of the shops. Context is a powerful trigger of episodic memories. Tulving called this triggering phenomenon “synergistic ecphory.” If something in the present happens to match your memory, slam, back comes your memory. Almost anything can do it: smells and tastes, pop songs, moods, voices, sudden movements, tricks of the light. Once when my wife, Deborah, and I were strolling down a street in Bologna (or was it Florence?), I let out a little laugh out of the blue. I had just heard my mother’s voice. She was speaking in the baby-talk Italian that she used back in ’58, when I was four years old and Eric was pushing two, as we walked through Italy’s medieval streets.

She said, “Giannetto, lascia il nozzolo.” Jonnie, leave your nose alone.

Eric’s apartment is lined with bookcases, with some of the overflow stacked in tall towers on his coffee table. He collects books by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. When he and I talk about HSAM and SDAM, he sometimes quotes Winnicott’s phrase “the continuity of being,” from “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship,” a paper that Winnicott published in 1960, when Eric was not very much older than an infant himself. That is what Eric wishes he could feel when he looks back: the continuity of being.

In The Last Box, we found an album of snapshots from when we were teen-agers in Providence, and we flipped through it. Eric said, not for the first time, that he envied my sense of the continuity of being: “Mine feels like patchwork—not whole. Looking at this album, there are some nice pictures in the back yard. I seem very present and happy, but I don’t remember me then.”

One snapshot showed a sunny afternoon in the spring of ’77. He and I were both home for the weekend. I was back from Harvard, with a big mop of hippie hair. Eric was back from Exeter in an Izod alligator shirt.

Eric’s wife, Natalie, came by the living room and looked over his shoulder at his picture. “I would have had such a crush on you,” she said. “You were so cute, just my type. The preppy shirt. I love that.”

“There might have been happy times,” Eric said again, ruefully. Looking at the album made him painfully aware of his distance from his own past—his perpetual sense of discontinuity.

“It kind of taints everything,” he said.

5.

As Eric and I rummaged through the box, we were watched by a large oil painting that hangs over his living-room mantelpiece, a portrait of our parents. They commissioned the painting from a family friend, the artist Philip Pearlstein, for their 25th anniversary, in 1975.

I like seeing the portrait when I visit Eric, but I wouldn’t want to live with it. The cool eye of the painter, whom we met that first year in Italy, caught too much. Too much for me, although not for Eric.

Our father grew up in a rough part of immigrant Brooklyn in the middle of the Great Depression. His hard-luck parents lost their store and almost their house—and on and on, worse and worse. A few of those early years were so bad that my father didn’t talk about them until he was almost 90.

At Brown, he had risen to the lofty title of University Professor. He lived in suits, dined with the university president, and spoke in a very formal, old-school, WASPy style that verged on the Victorian. He liked to share little stories about his boyhood with us, but they were carefully curated. When he talked about playing stickball on his old street in Brooklyn, he pronounced it Alabahma Avenue, which is not how they said it on Alabama Avenue. When our parents went out, they went to the thee-ah-tuh.

To get beyond the Harris tweeds, to keep in touch with Dad’s warm side, Eric and I called him Abba. Father, in Hebrew.

We sometimes wonder what Abba’s relationship to memory must have been like. Once, in the fall of my junior year of college, I took a bus home, spoiling for a fight over some grievances about my childhood. My father and I faced each other across the kitchen table. He said, coolly, “All of this seems very important to you now, but it really isn’t. How often do I think about my parents?”

6.

After we grew up and left home, Eric seemed to feel as distant from our mother and father as he did from his memories. He carried grudges and grievances not only against them but also against science, which he found subzero-cold and remote.

Recently, he wrote a one-man play that he’s been performing around town. He’ll be taking it to this summer’s Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. Although it is fiction, it’s heavily autobiographical, and the hero’s father doesn’t come off too well:

He was a brilliant man, my father, a professor of inorganic chemistry at Tufts, and when I was growing up friends would say, Charlie, your father is the nicest guy. What a nice guy. And I’d be thinking, Are we talking about the same guy? Cause yes he was a nice guy but when he got angry, he would punish my mother by giving her the silent treatment for days at a time.

In the story, Charlie rebels against his father, and against the walls that his father put up, by putting up massive walls of his own. His first marriage fails, and he finds love only late in life. Like Eric.

It’s a strong play. It captures the way family secrets can warp space-time around them, assuming enormous gravity and giving out no light.

How could he write that story without mental time travel?

The difference between my brother’s relationship to memory and mine was especially intense during our father’s final years, as he slipped away into Alzheimer’s. While Abba lost his past, my own past kept racing back. Not long ago I asked Eric whether the same thing had happened to him back then—the huge upwellings and flood tides of memories, the way they arrived day and night in wave after wave. “Definitely not,” he said. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

In those sad, anxious days, I sometimes found myself drifting back in memory to our first childhood home, the one in Hillsdale. I sat in my apartment on Broadway and at the same time went wandering around like a ghost in the little house in Jersey, on the other side of the Hudson. I almost felt as if I lived on both sides of the river at once. One winter afternoon, in a particularly vivid reverie, I took a mental stroll into the bedroom that Eric and I shared in Hillsdale when we were kids. In our bureau we had two drawers that weren’t for shirts and socks. We called them our Treasure Drawers. As I sat in a state like a waking dream—the dream of a dreamer pushing 60—I decided to walk over to the bureau and try my Treasure Drawer. It slid open as smoothly as ever. Then, still in the same reverie, I took everything out of the drawer, treasure by treasure, and examined each one. The Liberty silver dollar from Aunt Helen and Uncle Sol. The fossil fern from Illinois (or Indiana?). The little mummified seahorse from a roadside gift shop.

When the drawer was empty, I looked down at the bottom. Lying there in the dust and grunge was one last long-forgotten treasure.

A bluejay feather.

Eric didn’t even remember that we had Treasure Drawers.

Not long ago I realized what was going on during that eerie ghost walk. In my reverie, I was reliving a scene from the summer of ’69, when I was 14. We were packing up the house in Hillsdale for the move to Providence. One sunny morning my mother made Eric and me empty out our Treasure Drawers and decide what we wanted to keep and what we would throw away. We both protested. We wanted to keep everything. But she said, “You can’t keep everything. You have to go through it. You have to throw things out.”

I realize now, having gone through the old attics in Providence, that she herself threw almost nothing out. Most of the furniture from Hillsdale went into the moving van; so did bunches of useless old keys, one of them wrapped in a scrap of paper on which she’d written, “Old Dodge Comet?” I remember that old gray Dodge very well. Before we left Hillsdale, my parents sold it to a teenager in town, James Ricciardi, for $1. So why on earth did Mom pack the key?

Also, judging by the vintage-car listings on the internet, it couldn’t have been a Comet. Mercury—not Dodge—made the Comet.

Anyway, on that summer morning in 1969, I really did empty my Treasure Drawer and find that bluejay feather. I must have put the feather in there at the age of six or seven. By the time I was 14 I had forgotten about it, because we’d been filling those drawers with other treasures.

During my reverie on that winter afternoon in New York, I was sitting at my writing desk, right where I am sitting now. But at that point, my desk was surrounded by stacks and stacks of unexamined boxes that Eric and I had saved from Providence; messy, musty, dusty towers of stuff. I’d barely begun to sort through it all, to choose what to throw out and what to keep.

So that’s what triggered my episodic memory. I wasn’t just wandering around in the old house like a ghost. I was remembering the time that I emptied out the Treasure Drawer. The context had triggered the memory. It was a textbook case of Tulving’s synergistic ecphory.

I hope this is clear. Tales of mental time travel can get confusing. So many decades, so many places, so many continuities.

I still have some of those treasures, actually. A few of them are right here on my desk, and a few of them are in my office at Columbia. And apparently I have all of them in my brain.

7.

With HSAM and SDAM, scientists have bracketed a mystery. What’s going on in the brain when we remember or when we forget? What does the brain do differently during episodic memories and semantic memories? The difference between them looks dramatic in brain-imaging studies, which use fMRIs. When a subject is in the middle of mental time travel, a certain pattern of brain activity lights up. Psychologists and neuroscientists call this pattern the autobiographical memory network. People with SDAM fail to engage the autobiographical memory network even when they think back to major events like weddings and funerals. They can tell you about episodes in their lives in a matter-of-fact tone, without re-experiencing them.

Other differences have shown up, too. People with SDAM often have no mental imagery, a syndrome called “aphantasia.” Brian Levine, the psychologist who coined the term SDAM, has done a case study of Nick Watkins, a British theoretical physicist. Watkins can’t see any imagery with his eyes closed; it’s as if his mind’s eye is totally blind. He has no episodic memory either; he is SDAM. In interviews, he sounds just as rueful about his poor memory as my brother does.

A week or so after my bagel brunch with Eric, I arranged a Zoom call with Levine and told him about my brother and me. Levine said he now regrets the term SDAM. “It’s pejorative, you know? It focuses on the deficiency. And the deficiency is real,” he said, “and I don’t want to sugarcoat it. But there seem to be advantages that are just as real.” People with SDAM can function brilliantly, like Watkins.

This is a surprise, a deep paradox in the science of autobiographical memory. If memory is so important to us, if memory is a matter of identity, then how can Susie McKinnon be happy, having forgotten her cruises in Jamaica and Cozumel? And how can Watkins lead such a creative life?

Levine told me that he and his colleagues have now made a sharp pivot. They’re studying the strengths of people with SDAM. “We’ve brought some of them in to do brain imaging and gotten all sorts of interesting findings,” Levine said. If  “severely deficient” is not always what it seems, then neither is “highly superior,” he added. Many people with HSAM have remarkably vivid mental imagery, and its very vividness can lead to a deficiency.

Borges makes this same point in “Funes, the Memorious,” which he published in 1942. “In effect,” Borges writes, “Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.” Funes’s memories were so intense that he found it hard to think. “To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.”

“My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal,” Funes tells the narrator.

These days, scientists who study autobiographical memory are fascinated by the resemblance between Funes the Memorious and Solomon Shereshevsky, the memory-dazed mnemonist in Moscow. Borges couldn’t have known about Shereshevsky when he wrote “Funes” because Shereshevsky’s story wasn’t published until 1968. The neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga explores the parallels between Funes and Shereshevsky in his book Borges and Memory. At one point, Shereshevsky was asked to memorize this table of numbers:

1 2 3 4
2 3 4 5
3 4 5 6
4 5 6 7…

Shereshevsky memorized the table effortlessly. However, for him it was just another vivid visual image. He didn’t think about the order of the numbers. He didn’t even notice the pattern that would have made the table so simple for the rest of us to remember.

8.

On the morning of our bagel brunch, my brother and I tried and failed to empty The Last Box.

And on the morning of Friday, September 19, a gentle, sunny, late-summer morning—it happened to be the anniversary of our father’s death—I went out on my terrace to take a set of memory tests. Eric was planning to take the same tests at his place, not many blocks away.

The tests came from Levine, who has now been studying autobiographical memory for 30 years. He was eager to explore our case, he told me. “It’s scientifically interesting for me,” he said. “You know, two brothers, and both writers. So similar, yet so different. It’s quite interesting.”

Interviewing people about their distant pasts is tricky. Often their stories have been much rehearsed. I’ve rehearsed my own stories in writing my family memoir.

I set up my laptop under one of the big market umbrellas on my terrace, in the privacy of my junipers. During the years that my wife and I have lived in this apartment building, the junipers have grown from shrubs into trees. When we sit in our garden now, the row of trees helps to screen us from the windows of the tall buildings around us. That morning I needed the privacy because I found the prospect of taking Levine’s tests surprisingly intense.

Memory matters to me. What a memory you have, Giannetto! And I know it isn’t what it used to be.

In the shelter of the junipers, I started on the tests.

For the moment, Levine wasn’t asking us to tell any stories from our childhoods. He does those kinds of examinations with many of his subjects, although interviewing people about their distant pasts is tricky. Their answers can be hard to verify, and often their stories have been much rehearsed. I’ve rehearsed my own stories in writing my family memoir. Eric rehearses his in his one-man play, in a stand-up sketch he did for the Moth Story Slam, and in short stories.

On my laptop screen, I met a succession of computer-generated cartoon characters. I tried to learn their names as if I were at a cocktail party. After a pause, I met each of them again. Now I had to remember: Was it Cloud Bob who liked the shovel and the pickax? Was it Sponge Sam who liked the books and magazines? As the timer ticked away, the cartoon characters began to look faintly horrible.

In another timed test, I saw a series of irregular three-dimensional shapes on my screen. I had to mentally rotate each of them and judge what they would look like if viewed from the right or the left, from above or below.

Next, as the sun rose over the junipers, a series of two-dimensional geometrical shapes appeared on my screen. I had to decide whether the square was bigger than the circle, and whether the triangle surrounded them both … then the same sorts of questions again, but this time, I seem to recall, with red firetrucks, gray garbage trucks, and yellow VWs instead of geometrical shapes.

The tests took me almost two hours. I finished around 11:30 a.m., schvitzing a little under the arms.

Afterward, I texted Eric:

Did the online research study this morning. Brian doesn’t want us to compare notes, so I won’t say anything more than that.

And today’s the anniversary of Abba’s death … Thinking of him, but so often do anyhow …

Eric texted back:

I’m planning to do mine today as well

Thank you for reminding me about abba’s anniversary

I miss him

9.

It took some time for Levine to process the tests. At one point, without explaining why, he asked us to take some of them all over again. Near the end of October, we Zoomed with him at last.

“Thanks for your patience,” Levine said. “I’m sure you’re eager to hear the results. Give me a second here to pull up the screen that I need. … Okay, these are Eric’s numbers.”

Eric had bombed on the tests of mental imagery. In the one where you had to imagine what an odd three-dimensional object would look like if you rotated it, he had scored two standard deviations below the mean. In another test he scored four standard deviations below the mean. That one put him below 99.99 percent of the population. The score was so low, and fit so neatly with what Levine would have predicted, that rather than simply say, “Hooray,” he had asked us to take the tests over again.

For whatever reason, Eric had done a bit better the second time around, but still badly.

“Eric is pretty impaired in terms of imagery,” Levine said. “This is getting towards aphantasia.”

As we had all expected, Eric scored somewhere on the side of the spectrum near SDAM.

“I’m sure Jonathan is waiting with bated breath here,” Levine said. “Let’s go over to Jonathan.”

He walked through my test results. To me the most interesting part was a timed test in which my penchant for mental imagery had actually gotten in my way. When the questions were strictly logical (“The dog is smarter than the ape. The ape is smarter than the bird. The dog is smarter than the bird. True or false?”), my brother and I had scored almost exactly the same. But when the questions called up pictures in my head (“The dog is cleaner than the ape …”), I was slower than Eric. Apparently it took me some extra time to picture the clean dog, the messy ape, and the muddy bird. Eric didn’t have to slow down, because he didn’t picture them. To him they were all abstractions.

All in all, our scores were “confirmatory,” Levine said. “Jonathan’s high episodic. Eric’s low.” We had scored two standard deviations apart. That put us fairly close to the opposite ends of the spectrum.

Levine wondered—although it was just speculation—whether our differences in memory might help to explain why I am drawn to nonfiction and Eric to fiction.

Naturally I thought of Eric’s play, which he performs flawlessly from memory. And I thought of the writing life. For a writer, it can be a burden as well as a blessing to carry a garbage dump like Monte Testaccio around in your head. Eric and I both like reading how-to books about storytelling. One of his favorites, From Where You Dream, by Robert Olen Butler, praises the creative power of forgetting:

The great British novelist Graham Greene said that all good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. I want you to remember that Graham Greene quotation—though in fact it’s a paraphrase because I can’t remember the quote.

When I watch Eric onstage, I’m fascinated to see how many details, characters, and plotlines he has invented without losing his play’s emotional core, its autobiographical truth. I couldn’t work that way myself. I write nonfiction. I write about science. My memories are my memories; I would no sooner try to alter a detail than an archaeologist would mess with the stratum of a dig.

Reading those how-to books about story structure, I apply their lessons to my material and give my material a narrative arc. When Eric reads the same books, he sometimes chooses an abstract structure and then creates his material to fit.

Once, I told Levine, I was scribbling a family remembrance and I found myself briefly tempted—in order to simplify a scene—to move the location of a book. My father had a paperback copy of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day in the guest room of the house in Providence. I wanted to move it to the sitting room, even though in my mind’s eye I could see the book’s spine perfectly clearly where it sat on a guest room shelf. I started to make the change. Then something in me cried out: Don’t move a single book.

Just thinking of Seize the Day threatened to stir up a series of episodic memories to which the book is connected by the indissoluble laws of the continuity of being. That copy of the novella played a part in a scene by my father’s hospital bed at a tough moment. But I didn’t get into that. I stuck to the point: Don’t move a single book.

Eric told Levine that he feels just the opposite. He described an exercise in one of his acting classes. It was one of the key moments that led him to write his one-man play. “You had to tell an autobiographically true story,” Eric said. “Had to be strictly true. But at any point that you wanted, you could start changing it, even though you’re still telling it as autobiography. And I loved that exercise from the outset. It was like, ‘Oh, I get to change it.’ ”

“Interesting,” Levine said. “But Jonathan wouldn’t be into that.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” I said. “I wouldn’t. I would have to excuse myself.”

10.

I find myself struggling to end this essay, for the same reason that Funes the Memorious struggled to think. Too many “details, almost contiguous details.”

Seize the Day, for instance, was a slim green paperback. A moment ago, seeing it there on the shelf in my mind’s eye took me back to the guest room of the old house in Providence. I could see that the shelf was part of a piece of blond Danish modern furniture that my parents had bought in the ’50s. There were shelves on top and bureau drawers below. Then it came back to me: That was our old bureau, my brother’s and mine, the one where we kept the treasures.