介绍： Susie McKinnon hasn’t lost anything. She’s never been able to remember any of her life experiences. “I don’t remember being small. I have no impressions of myself as a kid”, she says. McKinnon is the first person ever identified with a condition called severely deficient autobiographical memory. She know...

介绍： Susie McKinnon hasn’t lost anything. She’s never been able to remember any of her life experiences. “I don’t remember being small. I have no impressions of myself as a kid”, she says. McKinnon is the first person ever identified with a condition called severely deficient autobiographical memory. She knows plenty of facts about her life, but she lacks the ability to mentally relive any of it, the way you or I might meander back in our minds and evoke a particular afternoon. Our ability to do this—to be the first-person protagonist of our own memories—is part of what psychologists call autonoetic consciousness. It’s the faculty that allows us to mentally reenact past experiences. McKinnon first began to realize that her memory was not the same as everyone else’s back in 1977, when a friend from high school, asked if she would participate in a memory test as part of a school assignment. When her friend asked basic questions about her childhood as part of the test, McKinnon would reply, “Why are you asking stuff like this? No one remembers that!” She knew that other people claimed to have detailed memories, but she always thought they embellished and made stuff up. McKinnon also quickly forgets arguments, which might be the reason she and her husband have stayed together so long. She cannot hold a grudge. She is unfamiliar with the feeling of regret. Even though she doesn’t experience her own life as a narrative, McKinnon loves stories. Especially fantasy and sci-fi: Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games. She’s read all the books, seen all the movies and episodes. She can’t remember what they were about, but that just makes it better. Each time she rereads or rewatches something, it’s like experiencing it for the first time. But she cannot for the life of her make up a story. She does not daydream. Her mind does not wander. While most of us experience life as a story of gain and loss, she achieves effortlessly what some people spend years striving for: She lives entirely in the present.