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. She has no episodic memories—none of those impressionistic recollections that feel a bit like scenes from a movie, always filmed from your perspective. To switch metaphors: Think of memory as a favorite book with pages that you return to again and again. Now imagine having access only to the index. Or the Wikipedia entry.
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In years past, travelers could plan around “fire season,” steering clear of the hottest, driest times of year. But climate change is warming up the spring, lengthening the summer and drying out soil and vegetation, leading to more frequent, destructive wildfires.
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“You cannot die without losing consciousness,” Dr. James Whinnery observed in a paper titled “Psychophysiologic Correlates of Unconsciousness and Near-Death Experiences.” Winnery goes on to write: “Everyone should, therefore, have some interest in loss of consciousness since he or she will experience it at least once
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What doctors, nurses, and family members take to be a tragic end point, the dying often experience as an infinite expansion. The dying often say that they reentered their bodies only because the living still needed them.
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