No one likes going to the dentist, but it’s essential for the health of your teeth.
The worst most people encounter in the dental chair is the pain of that novocain injection,
the irritating sound of the drill, and the annoying numbness after it.
But for one British soldier,
a visit to the dentist for root canal surgery had shocking consequences.
It was 2005, and William was a member of the British Armed Forces
stationed in Germany. His Grandfather had recently passed away, so he flew back to
Britain to pay his regards before returning to his base. Life was good. He was serving his country,
he was happily married and the father of an 11-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son,
and was an active man in good health who frequented the gym and played volleyball.
But he had a nagging tooth issue, and needed a root canal. So he made an appointment for the
Dentist on March 14th, sat down in that chair, and let the dentist inject him with local anesthetic.
It was the last thing he would ever remember.
William’s case has become one of the greatest medical mysteries in modern British history.
Because after he was injected with the anesthetic, his mind goes blank.
What little we know of the day of the procedure is from William’s dentist. The injection seemed to go
fine and William seemed healthy as he came into the office. It was only after the surgery, when
the dentist asked him to remove his glasses, that everything went wrong. William was unusually pale,
and couldn’t stand up easily. He needed to lie down while the office called his wife to pick
him up, and when she arrived he stared blankly at her. He didn’t recognize her, and seemed to
be in a mental fog. It was clear something was very wrong, and he was taken to the hospital.
It took a while for the mental fog to disappear, but what followed was even stranger.
Interviews with William revealed he remembered everything up to his surgery with perfect clarity.
But roughly every ninety minutes, his mind reset - and the last thing he
could remember was sitting down in that dentist’s chair to get the anesthetic.
Not exactly a pleasant memory to look back on, and also a condition with no clear medical cause.
The first suspicion was that he had a negative reaction to the anesthetic, possibly due to an
allergy. This could cause a brain hemorrhage, and the brain bleed could damage the memory center
of the brain. Tests were ordered - and quickly came up blank, with no evidence of brain injury.
The doctors knew what was wrong with William - but the why was a mystery.
With no way to treat William and no physical cause,
he was soon discharged into the care of his family. They moved back to England,
where they sought out the help of an expert - Clinical psychologist Gerald Burgess,
who was experienced in amnesia disorders. While amnesia is a common condition often related to
brain injury, William’s symptoms didn’t match the more common retrograde amnesia - where people
lose past memories. He had anterograde amnesia, where all or most past memories are preserved,
but new ones are constantly erased. It’s usually caused by benzodiazepine drug use or
brain injury that damages the hippocampus caused by trauma, illness, or surgery. It
can also be caused in a milder form by alcohol intoxication, which causes people to black out.
But William’s case didn’t match any of these factors.
There were relatively few cases of anterograde amnesia as serious as William’s, but Burgess was
able to study the strange case of Henry Molaison. A young man who suffered from severe epilepsy,
he underwent an experimental and radical surgery to remove the lobes from his brain
to try to control the seizures. The removed areas included the hippocampi, two curved regions at the
center of the brain that control the recording of episodic memories. While it worked and made his
epilepsy more manageable, it removed the part of his brain that allowed him to form new memories.
While his cognitive abilities seemed intact, anything he learned was quickly erased
and he lived in a care home until his death almost fifty years after his surgery. His case
was heavily debated, and his brain was studied post-death for insights into how memory works.
But activity in William’s brain seemed normal - sending Burgess seeking other answers.
It soon became clear that William’s case was different from Henry’s. Henry couldn’t
remember new things that happened to him, but the areas of his brain that stored knowledge
of skills were intact. Researchers would teach him things, and he would maintain those skills
even as his memories vanished. But when Burgess asked William to master a complex maze,
he seemed able to do it - only for the skill to then vanish like chalk being erased from a
chalkboard. Every time he tried, he would make the same errors and progress at the same rate.
This raises the question - is it all in his head?
Well, the answer is probably yes, given that the brain is in the head. But in the absence of any
obvious trauma that would cause William’s amnesia, Burgess turned to psychological possibilities.
Psychogenic amnesia is a common memory disorder that causes memory loss from a period ranging from
hours to years, and usually involves suppressing information that’s particularly traumatic.
It usually involves retrograde amnesia, where people can’t remember past trauma. But cases of
anterograde amnesia with this cause are virtually unheard of. Burgess wasn’t ready to rule it out,
and interviewed William’s wife Samantha and others to see if he had experienced any trauma.
Aside from the recent death of his grandfather - which he still remembered - William didn’t
seem to have anything that would explain this bizarre memory loss,
and current interviews with him seemed to show an overall emotionally healthy person.
So what’s the answer to this medical mystery?
To this day, Burgess still doesn’t know exactly - but the doctor has
theories. While the brain is full of critical regions like the hippocampi,
it depends on something much smaller to keep functioning - the synapses. These microscopic
neural connections carry memories from the short term to the long term via millions of tiny paths.
To send memories into our long term memory and ensure we can look back on critical memories
for years to come, there needs to be a supply of proteins to keep the synapses in shape.
If the brain isn’t producing enough of this protein, the memories all fade away
just like more insignificant memories. Can you remember exactly what you ate for lunch on June
1st, 2007? Probably not, and that’s because your brain is selective about what it keeps.
The brain wouldn’t be capable of storing every bit of information we encounter every
day, so it sorts through them in the short-term memory and ensures only the important ones stay.
But a study with rats indicates this critical connection may be more tenuous than we know.
It’s common to do experiments with rats to test how they learn new skills. So common,
in fact, that “rats in a maze” and “the rat race” have become basic euphemisms. But an experiment
that introduced a compound that would block these proteins in the synapses from forming
proved that the rats would learn new skills - and then forget them soon,
puzzling over the same mazes and tasks they had just learned. This was the closest comparison
to what William seemed to be experiencing. While Henry Molaison no longer had the physical parts
of his brain he needed to form new memories, William seemed to have lost the connection he
needed to make memories permanent. Think of the brain as a printer. It was as if someone
had taken a hammer to Henry’s printer - but William’s may have simply ran out of ink.
The question is - why? And has it ever happened before?
Burgess combed the history of medicine to find similar cases to William’s, hoping to find an
answer for his patient. The pickings were slim. He found five cases where patients had suffered
a mysterious memory loss without a physical or drug-related trauma associated with it.
But if there was a direct connection to undergoing a dental procedure, it wasn’t found here. While
none of the other five had been to the dentist or had a root canal, they all seemed to undergo
serious stress due to a medical emergency. Could the stress of medical intervention
trigger a strange chemical reaction in the brain? Burgess can’t say yes - but he also can’t say no.
Oddly, the most helpful case study may come from fiction.
In a crazy coincidence, a year before William’s case began, a popular Hollywood movie gave us
a case study with shocking similarities to William’s. And it just happened to star...Adam
Sandler. 50 First Dates also starred Drew Barrymore as an unfortunate young woman whose
car accident left her with a brain injury and a ticking 24-hour clock on her memory - resetting
to the day before her accident every morning. That made it tricky for Sandler’s character to
win her heart - over and over and over again. While the movie was a romantic comedy and not
a medical study, it did illustrate a potential solution to the problem of anterograde memory
loss - creating reminders to “catch up” the person with amnesia when they wake up each morning.
So has Hollywood given us the answers to William’s strange case?
In a word...no. Despite Gerald Burgess’ many theories about the case,
William’s condition has remained unchanged and his memory is still frozen on March 14th,
2005. But he and his wife have figured out a system that works similarly to the one in
the movie - writing notes on his smartphone that tell him to read them as soon as he sees the file.
This catches him up and lets him know why he can’t remember anything - at least for ninety
minutes. Burgess continued to study William’s case and published an acclaimed paper in the
Neurocase journal with his theories in 2015, wondering if the wiring around the hippocampi
and other areas responsible for processing memories may be the culprit. This brought
new attention to William’s case and allowed similar cases around the world to be discovered,
including an English woman who hit her head on a pole and developed the same type of amnesia.
But one area of William’s memory proved more durable than expected - emotions.
It was shortly before his memory loss that his grandfather died, becoming one of his
last formative memories. And during his long amnesia, he suffered another devastating loss
when his father passed away. But unlike every other memory from this period that faded into the
ether as easily as long-forgotten lunches, this one stayed. Today, he remembers that his father
passed away even as his memory mysteriously resets. But all other key details continue
to fade away. When interviewed, he still remembers his kids only as young children,
even as they’ve grown into adulthood. And despite the research of some of the world’s
foremost experts on the human brain, the secrets of William’s mystery remain just that - a secret.
For more on bizarre memory conditions,