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Johnson is not the first person whose dramatically damaged brain has served as such a keyhole into the workings of memory. As long ago as the 1950s, a man named Henry Molaison, known in the medical literature only as H.M. until his death in 2008, received similar attention. Molaison's condition was a result of surgery to relieve severe epilepsy. After the operation, his seizures went away, but his memory did too--dooming him to spend the rest of his life in a perpetual now.
But Molaison was very different from Johnson. He had been an assembly-line worker with higher-than-average intelligence but no unusual talents. Johnson, by contrast, was a hugely successful commercial artist who drew covers for the New Yorker and supplied illustrations to TIME, the New York Times and dozens of other high-profile clients. She was an accomplished amateur violist and a private pilot, who bought a farm in upstate New York so she'd have her own landing strip.
Her musical ability is especially significant and serendipitous, gathering in multiple skills that rely on memory--the ability to practice and improve, to learn a composition by heart, to recognize musical themes that recur from song to song. Music is the subject of the upcoming paper and is an area of Johnson's mind that investigators have only lately begun to address.
And Johnson has one other advantage over Molaison. She grew ill not in 1953--when Molaison had his surgery--but in 2007, the era of CT and PET scans and fMRIs, imaging technologies that allow scientists to observe the state and function of complex brain structures rather than just guessing at them from the outside.
With the help of the hardware and Johnson's willingness to sit still for so much study, science may be able to answer one other, more abstract question: What is it like to have lost so many memories about your life and the world? If who you are is an amalgamation, at least in part, of the things you've experienced--the people you've loved, the places you've lived, the tragedies you've endured--are you actually you at all when those things are wiped away? The self is ineffable, but it's also material, the product of neurochemicals sparking their way through living tissue. How we draw the line between those two dimensions--the biological and the experiential, the brain and the far less knowable mind--has kept philosophers awake for millennia. Johnson, with her profound damage to the material self, may help us better understand the immaterial one.
Fever in the Dark
Johnson's plunge through the memory rabbit hole began on New Year's Eve 2007, when her mother Maggi, now 95, and her sister Aline, 59, received an early-morning phone call telling them she had been rushed to the hospital and was at the brink of death. Aline and Maggi jumped in the car and drove more than 200 miles (320 km) just as a major snowstorm was winding down.
By the time they reached her, Johnson, then 57, had drifted off to sleep. When she awoke, her mother and sister were in the room. Says Maggi: "She looked around, her mouth gaping, as if she were wondering, 'What am I looking at?'" It was a week before they could be sure Johnson recognized her mother and another few days before she spoke her sister's name.