The plot of many Hollywood blockbusters is based on the memory problems experienced by the characters. Scriptwriters and directors generally love to use the quirks of the human brain in their creations: when watching some films, it seems that if a person hits his head, he will have memory gaps, of course, and at the end the hero must certainly remember everything - this is the inexorable rule of happy - the end that most motion pictures follow.
In real life, interesting cases of amnesia are much less common than in films, but often they are much more interesting and sophisticated than the intention of the writers and directors. Here are some life stories that could well be the script for another thriller or comedy, and some have already become one.
1. Ansel Born
Surely many of you have watched films about Jason Bourne, a government special agent who has lost his memory. However, not everyone knows that the protagonist is named after Ansel Born, one of the first recorded amnesia patients.
Ansel Bourne was a preacher in Green, Rhode Island. On January 17, 1887, he went to the state capital, Providence, where his sister lived, after which he disappeared and did not appear until March 15 in Norristown. Bourne did not understand how he got there and why those around him call him Albert Brown. Ansel was sure that it was still January 17 in the yard and claimed that he did not remember how he arrived in the city and opened a small store.
When Bourne returned home, his phenomenon became the object of close attention of scientists. During the sessions of hypnosis, he again began to call himself Albert Brown and denied that he knew someone named Ansel Born, but after hypnotic experiments he became himself again.
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Thus, the story with Ansel Born became the first recorded case of the so-called dissociative amnesia, in which a person forgets about his own personality, but almost always the memory suddenly returns after a while, which happened to the preacher. Nothing like this happened to Ansel Born again, and he lived his life without thinking about Albert Brown.
2. Clive Wering
Many have seen the film by Christopher Nolan "Remember", the main character of which suffered from a form of anterograde amnesia, that is, he knew about his past, but new memories did not form in him.
Of course, there is little pleasant in the fact that a person is not able to remember anything, but there have been worse cases in life. British musician Clive Wering in 1985 fell ill with herpes encephalitis, which damaged his nervous system, as a result of which Wering developed two forms of amnesia - retrograde and anterograde: Clive does not remember most of the events of his past and instantly forgets everything that happens to him in real life.
The virus damaged the hippocampus - the area of the brain that is responsible for transferring information from short-term memory to long-term memory, so Wering can keep information in memory for only a few seconds and does not even remember the names of his children. With all this, the musician's procedural memory has not been disturbed, so he still, for example, can play the piano, although he is unable to memorize the sequence of notes of any piece. Clive Wering is also currently suffering from amnesia, because over the past 28 years, doctors have not found a way to help him.
3. Sivald Scade
On November 28, 1999, a young man of about 20 years old, whose nose was broken on the street by unknown persons, turned to the emergency room of one of the hospitals in the Canadian city of Toronto. The guy said that he did not know who he was and how he got to this city, but many noticed that he had a foreign accent. Doctors diagnosed the victim with post-traumatic global amnesia, information about the mysterious young man quickly leaked to newspapers, and journalists called him "Mr. Nobody."
After being discharged from the hospital, Mr. Nobody lived for several weeks in a homeless shelter before being adopted by an Ontario couple. The guy changed his names for several years and, in the end, settled on the name Civald Scade.
Police circulated photographs and fingerprints of Skeid across the country to identify him, but to no avail. Sivald refused treatment and moved to Vancouver, where he met with a lawyer to obtain Canadian citizenship, and in the end he married the daughter of a lawyer, after which the couple moved to Portugal, where they also tried to obtain citizenship.
In 2007, Sivald admitted that the whole story with amnesia was fiction. From a poor Romanian family named Ciprian Scade, he put on this "show" to end the past and obtain citizenship in another country.
4. Jody Roberts
Jodie Roberts, 26, is a resident of Tacoma, Washington, who worked as a reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune in 1985. In May of that year, friends and family members of Jody began to notice that something strange was happening to the woman - she stopped taking care of herself and began to abuse alcohol. On May 20, the journalist disappeared, and for the next 12 years, her relatives and friends did not hear anything about her. Unbeknownst to them, Roberts was discovered five days later in Aurora, Colorado, 1,600 miles from his home. She could not give her name, and from the property she had only the key to the Toyota car, which the police could not find.
The woman was taken to a Denver hospital, and doctors found in her all the signs of amnesia and the so-called dissociative fugue - a condition in which a person moves to an unfamiliar place and forgets almost all information about himself, right down to the name.
After leaving the clinic, Jody called herself Jane Dee and got a job at a fast food restaurant. The woman entered the university, and after a while moved to the city of Sitka, Alaska, married a fisherman and gave birth to two twin girls from him. Jane took up web design, and her career in this field was quite successful, but in 1997 one of her employees saw a photo of Jody Roberts in a news release and recognized his colleague as missing. In the end, Roberts returned to Takoma to her former family, however, Jody's memory still has not recovered.
5. Raymond Robins
Robins was a well-known economist working for the United States government - with his direct involvement in discussions of diplomatic relations with Russia. On September 3, 1932, Raymond was supposed to meet with US President Herbert Hoover, but the economist did not appear at the appointed hour. Robins was last seen leaving the City Club in Manhattan and then disappeared without a trace.
The mysterious disappearance of a government expert sparked a wave of kidnapping rumors, and some said they saw him wandering the streets of Chicago. On November 18, Robins was found in the small mountain town of Whittier, North Carolina, where he lived under the name Reynolds Rogers. From the stories of the townspeople, it became clear that Robins arrived here a week after his disappearance and told everyone that he was a miner from Kentucky.
By that time, the economist had grown a beard, but one 12-year-old boy, having read in the newspaper about the disappearance of Raymond Robins, recognized him from a photograph and reported to the authorities. Robins' nephew came to Whittier and identified him, but he acted as if they did not know each other - the economist remembered absolutely nothing about his past life.
After meeting with his wife and undergoing psychiatric treatment, Raymond's memory gradually began to recover. Doctors suggest that the state of dissociative fugue could have occurred in the economist due to stress and emotional stress, as a result of which his personality was replaced by another.
6. Barr Cox
Wesley Barrett Cox, a 31-year-old priest from San Antonio, had a wife and a 6-month-old daughter. On July 11, 1984, after a trip to Lubbock, Cox called his wife and said that he had decided to go to Abilene to see friends. The next day, his car was found abandoned and looted on a rural road in Jones County, with the contents of Barr's wallet scattered around the car. Early in the morning the priest was seen in one of the nearby shops buying two cans of fuel. He claimed that his car ran out of gas, and one of the police took him to the abandoned car, after which Cox disappeared.
Until 2000, nothing was heard about him, until one of the parishioners of a gay church in Dallas recognized Barr Cox, who disappeared 16 years ago, from the priest. According to the preacher, he was beaten unconscious and dumped in a car dump in Memphis. The man was found and taken to the hospital, after two weeks of being in a coma, Barr woke up, but could not remember his name and past. He started a new life as James Simmons and became a preacher in a gay church.
Cox did not provide any evidence of the veracity of this story, and the policeman who drove the priest to the car said that he saw a motorcycle in the trunk, which was not there when the car was found. Later, a man similar to Barr was seen riding this motorcycle, so there are suspicions that the man deliberately broke off all relations with his family and moved, as he learned that he was gay.
7. Michelle Philpots
In the comedy film 50 First Kisses, Drew Barrymore plays a woman who has suffered a severe head injury in a car accident, which causes her memory to be "zeroed" when she goes to bed. Every morning a woman starts her life anew, since she does not have any memories of yesterday.
A similar story happened in real life to the Englishwoman Michelle Philpots: in 1985, she had an accident that turned into a head injury for her, and five years later she again became a participant in an accident, as a result of which she again hit her head hard. After the second incident, Michelle showed signs of epilepsy and anterograde amnesia.
The deviations intensified, and by 1994, the woman had completely lost the ability to remember anything. Philpots currently believes that he is living in 1994, and the husband they married in 1997 shows her wedding photos every day to remind her that they are married. Philpots underwent surgery, during which some of the damaged brain cells were removed, but so far there has been no significant improvement in her condition.
8. Doug Bruce
On the morning of July 3, 2003, in New York, an unknown man entered a police station and said that he did not know who he was. According to a stranger who spoke with a British accent, he woke up on the subway, not remembering his name and where he came from. The police sent the man to a nearby hospital, and a few days later, in his backpack, they found a phone number belonging to a woman who claimed that the name of the lost memory was Doug Bruce.
Bruce was a British citizen but lived in Paris working as a banker. Having made a fortune, Doug moved to New York to study the art of photography, but even after he was told all this and taken to the apartment in Manhattan where he lived, the poor man could not remember anything.
Bruce is believed to be suffering from a very rare form of retrograde amnesia. His story served as the basis for the feature film "Unknown", which was released in screens in 2011. The picture caused a lot of controversy, as it claims that the case with Doug is a hoax. Experts still cannot determine what triggered the development of amnesia, so some of them expressed doubts about the veracity of Bruce's words. Shortly before the incident in New York, one of the man's friends experienced short-term amnesia, perhaps this is what inspired Bruce to deceive. One way or another, so far, no signs of memory recovery have been observed in Doug Bruce.
9. Anthelm Manzhin
On February 4, 1918, at one of the train stations in the French city of Lyon, a soldier was found suffering from memory gaps. He could not say where he had come from and where he was going; they did not find any documents with him, however, during interrogations, the young man said that his name was presumably Anthelm Manzhin. Since the serviceman did not say anything more specific, he was sent for examination to a psychiatric clinic, then to another, and so on. For many years he was transported from one medical institution to another, and they could not help him anywhere.
Antelma's photo was published in the newspapers, and about 300 families responded to the ad, claiming that he was their relative, but Manzhin did not recognize any of the potential family members, so it was impossible to check whether they were wrong or not. In 1930, a family from the commune of Saint-Maur declared that the soldier found 12 years ago was none other than the waiter Octave Montjuan, who went to the front during the First World War and did not return.
As it turned out, in August 1914, Montjuan was wounded and taken prisoner. He spent 3.5 years in prisoner of war camps, and in January 1918 he was sent to France. His documents were lost, so none of his relatives found out that he had returned home. Presumably, the loss of memory was provoked by the upheavals that Octave had to endure during the war years.
10. Agatha Christie
This name is familiar to almost everyone - the English writer became famous for her detective novels all over the world, so it is quite natural that secrets found a place not only in her books, but also in life.
On the evening of December 3, 1926, Agatha, then 36 years old, disappeared from her home in Sunningdale. The next morning, her car was found near Newlands Corner, but no trace of Christie herself was found in the area.
It was rumored that her own husband, Archibald, killed her, as he allegedly was going to file for divorce shortly before. Fortunately, on December 14, Agatha was found alive and well at one of Harrogate's hotels, where she checked in as Teresa Neele. The writer said she had no idea how she got there.
For 11 days, while Agatha Christie was absent, her readers put forward a variety of versions of what happened: someone said that she had set everything up to take revenge on her unfaithful husband, especially since Teresa Neal is the name of his mistress; others believed the "mysterious disappearance" was intended to attract attention. Nevertheless, there is indirect evidence of the truth of her words: on the morning of December 4, the writer was seen walking along the road, and, despite the cold weather, Agatha was in one dress. According to the witness, Christie looked upset, confused and clearly not herself.
As doctors later argued, quarrels with her husband and the recent death of a beloved mother could provoke an attack of amnesia. Agatha Christie herself never told what happened to her in those 11 days, so, contrary to all the canons of the detective genre, no one knows the solution to this mysterious story.