The Awakening of H. K. Derryberry

by Jim Bradford

  Fortunately our friend Gary Waller came along and offered just the right help at the perfect time. He sat Pearl down and firmly told her straight up, “You have been presented with a golden opportunity. You can rebuild this place, Pearl, in any way you want—and I will help you get it done.” Gary’s words and no-nonsense demeanor helped to get her moving forward again.

  He contacted FEMA officials and persuaded them to hasten payments by cutting through red tape. Qualified construction crews were scarce throughout Nashville, but Gary located one and began supervising the six-month rebuilding process. Substantial improvements to Pearl’s aging house included larger closets, a laundry room, a kitchen easily accessible to HK, and a ramp at the front of the house and out back. She also had the house raised onto a new foundation that was three feet higher. Both occupants would sleep much better now.

  By this time I had known HK for almost eleven years. In so many ways our friend and buddy relationship had evolved into something more like that of a father and son. Memories of Nashville’s 2010 flood will always stick with me, not only for its physical impact on my slice of Harpeth River Drive but also for the emotional toll I endured on HK’s behalf. I have never felt more helpless than when he and Pearl needed me and the floodwaters kept me away. Gratefully our families escaped without loss of life. In a backhanded sort of way, I guess you could say that the aftermath of the flood actually did us a favor. Weekends staying out of our respective construction zones provided us with even more time with HK at the lake. This episode undoubtedly solidified my heartfelt, emotional connection with this special young boy. I loved him like a son.

  CHAPTER 32

  A Gift of Memory

  In 2010, after years of observing HK’s extraordinary ability to vividly recall dates and events, the mystery of his memory was unlocked by the same Vanderbilt medical professionals responsible for his survival miracle. He had been a patient of Dr. Tom Davis, MD, a Vanderbilt professor of neurology with a specialty in movement disorders, since his early teenage years due to his spasticity from cerebral palsy. Dr. Davis had always been fascinated by his young patient’s ability to remember his medical history. He never needed reference notes of previous visits. HK could recite his medical history, including blood pressure, pulse rate, and other exam details, along with the temperature and weather conditions on the day of each visit. At the time Dr. Davis thought of these recitations as merely cute and interesting.

  One day while in the hospital clinic with Dr. Brandon Ally, a Vanderbilt memory researcher and assistant professor of neurology, psychiatry, and psychology, Dr. Davis decided to share the story of HK and his remarkable memory. “I have a patient I think you might really be interested in meeting. It seems that he can remember everything. He simply does not forget any detail that enters his brain.”

  The wiry, bespectacled memory specialist had just arrived at the medical school earlier that year. Along the way he had received postgraduate training at Harvard’s Geriatric Psychology Lab and completed a three-year research fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Boston University. Married with three small children, he was well prepared and ready for a medical researcher’s life at the world-renowned Vanderbilt medical complex.

  Dr. Ally focused his professional career on the human memory and discovering causes for why it breaks down with age and disease. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, he and his assistant used the vast array of Vanderbilt’s substantial resources to conduct neuroscience studies focused on the brain. Medical science has confirmed that human memory peaks at age twenty-two. Dr. Ally wanted to understand how and why after that age the memory slopes gradually downward in some while free-falling in others.

  Upon hearing Dr. Davis’s revelation about his young patient, Dr. Ally was highly skeptical. One of a researcher’s greatest attributes is a healthy dose of skepticism. It’s a key tenet of the scientific profession and central to the quality control of research. Dr. Ally knew that everyone had anecdotes about his or her own memory. It was either great or awful, usually depending on one’s age. He had lost count of the number of people who claimed to have a near-perfect memory. Only after hearing stories similar to those relayed by Dr. Davis from HK’s longtime pediatric neurologist did Dr. Ally realize that there might be something to those phenomenal accounts.

  Later, during one of HK’s follow-up visits, Dr. Davis asked Pearl if she would be interested in discussing his memory with Dr. Ally. She said yes, and HK was beyond excited. He could finally showcase his attention-grabbing talent to a qualified memory expert who might help unlock the mystery inside his head.

  Dr. Ally didn’t remember the date of their first meeting, but HK did. It was Friday, January 28, 2011. Right away he performed his entertaining birthday trick, but the memory researcher was not impressed. “Everybody thinks the calendar-date thing is the coolest,” he explained, “but it is not memory-related at all. It’s more of a computational, mathematical process that his mind performs in seconds.”

  He explained to Pearl that this savant-like ability usually accompanied either Asperger’s syndrome or elevated autism. HK’s superior ability to recall minute details from years before was in neither of these categories. And this, Dr. Ally knew, made HK an exceptional subject for his memory research project.

  Throughout the memory-testing sessions, Pearl learned that much of what is known about the brain today came from exceptional cases like that of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker from the 1850s who survived a metal rod through the brain. Resulting changes in his personality gave doctors the idea that different areas of the brain had very distinct functions.

  The most-cited case in medical literature arose in the 1950s in the case of Henry (H. M.) Molaison. Doctors removed entire portions of H. M.’s brain, the hippocampus and amygdala, in an attempt to prevent severe epileptic seizures. The seizures stopped, but he lost the ability to create new memories. His surgery confirmed that these two areas of the brain were vitally important memory structures.

  Though no one paid much attention to it, HK’s memory had been on display from an early age. He could remember every detail of his medical history as recorded on each doctor’s visit from age five. Despite his blindness, he knew his exact location at any point along the twenty-mile drive from Pearl’s house to his school. He loved to remember things, whether significant or trivial. He recalled winning second place in the sixty-meter dash during the Junior Special Olympics on October 13, 1999, along with the fact that the temperature was seventy degrees that day. He vividly replayed the time he ate spinach Alfredo before watching Star Search on March 19, 2003.

  He could remember every waking moment since around age three. Stockpiling the minutiae of everyday life, his heightened sensory receptors cataloged details from television, radio, and conversations—even those dreadful life events that most people would just as soon forget. As he explained, “I remember the negative things, but I don’t dwell on them because they are just history. I think about all the good stuff.”

  Multiple visits with Dr. Ally and his lab manager helped confirm their diagnosis of HK’s hyperthymesia, or highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). The doctor explained two types of long-term memory. The first type, semantic memory, is a structured record of facts, meanings, concepts, and knowledge about the external world that we have acquired from sources other than firsthand experience. An example would be things learned from a textbook that become part of our general encyclopedia of what we know to be true.

  The second type is episodic memory, which refers to our ability to reconstruct images of experiences and specific events (episodes) that took place at any given point in our lives. Remembering intricate, specific details from your wedding day, memorizing a piece of music or a poem, or recalling exactly where you were and what you were doing when you learned that the second airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center would be examples of episodic memory. All normal people experience such incidents of episodic memory, especially in relation to extrem
ely happy or traumatic occurrences that impress our minds profoundly. But highly superior autobiographical memory goes much deeper than this.

  Part of the definition, and a distinguishing factor of HSAM, is the ability to perform some sort of mental time travel, in which the mind effortlessly goes back in time to relive the distant episode just as it happened. If this element is absent, the experience remains as just an incident of ordinary episodic memory.

  As Dr. Ally explained it, “If I gave him a list of ten words to remember and asked him about them twenty minutes from now (episodic memory), or if I asked him who was the twentieth president of the United States (semantic memory), HK’s memory for this type of information would be little different than ours because it’s more about memorizing than remembering. But if I asked what he had for dinner or what he watched on television on a specific day two years ago, he could remember it exactly. That’s autobiographical memory.” HK says going back in his memory is natural, it just happens. He is transported back to the scene, reliving the memory exactly as the incident happened originally, as if a videotape of it were replaying in his mind.

  Because of his superior autobiographical memory, life is never dull when you are around HK. It’s like always having a live Google search engine next to you.

  “Monday will be the ninth anniversary of the tornado that struck downtown Nashville, Wednesday will be the third anniversary of the death of President Ronald Reagan, Thursday will be the sixth anniversary of the first time I spent the night at your house, and Sunday will be the thirty-ninth anniversary of the day man first landed on the moon.”

  One personal benefit of his memory is that he continually reminds me about anniversaries of memorable events. Thanks to HK, I’m one man who will never get in trouble because I forgot my wife’s birthday or our wedding anniversary. On the other hand, there are many opportunities for unintended comments to come back and cause extreme embarrassment when your best friend remembers everything.

  HK and I were listening once to a Vanderbilt football radio broadcast when the Commodores were losing 37–0. Unfortunately for me, I innocently commented that college coaches are paid lots of money to win and often get fired if they lose too many games. I concluded my thought, saying, “And that just might happen to the Vanderbilt coach.” HK replied, “That’s so sad about coaches getting fired for not winning a lot of games.”

  Fast-forward two years when I had the opportunity to meet Kevin Stallings, Vanderbilt’s head basketball coach. Upon hearing about my young companion and huge Vanderbilt fan, he invited us to a workout session at Memorial Gym. Coach Stallings spied us as we entered the practice facility and motioned toward seats just off courtside. Then he came over to greet us.

  “Hi, HK.”

  “Hi. What’s your name?”

  “I’m Kevin Stallings.”

  “What’s your job?”

  “I’m the head basketball coach at Vanderbilt.”

  “Kevin, Kevin, let me tell you what Mr. Bradford said. He said if you don’t win many games this year, you’re going to get fired.”

  I stared a hole in the floor, wishing I could crawl into it while the coach assured HK that at the moment his job was on a solid foundation. Coach Stallings remains firmly at the helm of Vanderbilt’s basketball program while I’ve not been invited back to Memorial Gym since then.

  Dr. Ally’s study showed that HK’s extraordinary memory is not related to intelligence. While research confirmed his HSAM, it also showed that he had a normal IQ of 97. It was his accuracy of recollection that was off the charts. When I met HK as a nine-year-old, he had an extraordinary gift of memory—but no one knew about it. His superior memory had not yet developed to the point of attracting attention. After exercising his newfound gift for a few years, tests revealed his recollection ability at age eleven had risen to 90 percent. Today it is nearly perfect.

  Using the latest structural MRI technology available at that time, Dr. Ally and his associates discovered two major factors that could help explain HK’s HSAM: an amygdala four times larger than normal, with connections to the hippocampus that were ten times greater than normal. They concluded that his exceptionally large amygdala was charging every personal experience with self-relevance and emotion, turning ordinary, everyday occurrences into seminal life events. You can see from the descriptions of HK’s emotional responses in this book that this diagnosis fits observed reality exactly. Every incident is elevated to the level of a grand experience.

  Dr. Ally’s research study on HK was published in the journal Neurocase in April 2012, the same journal that published the first known case of hyperthymesia in a woman named Jill Price in 2006. After the condition was named, a handful of people who possessed it were identified, including Taxi actress Marilu Henner. HK was only the second case to be presented in scientific literature and the first to include structural imaging data from brain examinations.

  Dr. Ally and his team believe that what they learned from HK’s case has the potential to change the way scientists think about autobiographical memory. A hallmark of this type of memory is imagery that the brain processes through the visual domain. HK’s imaging studies indicated that regions of his brain ordinarily involved in vision were working and well connected to other brain regions despite his blindness.

  In other words, the parts of the brain assigned to vision remained healthy and active, even in the absence of functioning optical apparatus. With no vision to occupy them, these parts may have turned their attention to other brain functions, such as memory, thus providing superior memory enhancement. Dr. Ally hopes one day to conduct a functional imaging study on other individuals who have been blind since birth to learn what role this region of the brain actually plays in memory.

  Dr. Ally’s continuing research has important implications for Alzheimer’s disease. One of the first things to disappear in Alzheimer’s patients is autobiographical memory, and HK’s case could point to potential brain targets for deep brain stimulation or breakthrough drug therapies.

  Dr. Brandon Ally moved his family to Nashville with no inkling that someone with perfect autobiographical memory lived just seven miles from the Vanderbilt campus. With wonder in his voice, he commented on this happy coincidence, saying, “Given that only a handful of people in the world have hyperthymesia, this was most definitely a once-in-a-career opportunity.”

  CHAPTER 33

  King of the Prom

  As HK began his middle school years, he struggled mightily. His autobiographical memory did not give him advantage with more advanced subjects, and he found it difficult to maintain the normal achievement level required by the State of Tennessee in order to graduate. Beginning with the 2006–2007 school year, he entered the seventh grade, studying the same curriculum as every other seventh grader statewide. After only a month he was floundering, frustrating teachers, and slowing the learning pace of his classmates. This time teachers had no choice; he was moved back one grade.

  But Bill Schenk and a small handful of educators never stopped believing in HK’s ability to learn. They spent the extra effort required to encourage him while he buckled down and wrestled through hard subjects every day, fully aware of what was at stake. Studying became top priority during his time at our house. Occasionally he played a radio in the background, but it never seemed to distract him. I offered as much assistance as possible, but my help was limited to little more than placing the correct textbook on his desk or loading paper into his braille machine. He knew exactly where his homework assignments began and rarely needed anything more than my eyes and hands.

  HK realized the danger of being moved back a grade. It jeopardized his only chance of completing high school like a normal kid. He pushed his study time into overdrive, hitting the books for up to six solid hours each weekend, only breaking long enough for me to load paper or deliver a glass of chocolate milk. He was stubbornly persistent, determined, and obsessed with tackling his work in a way that would compensate for his academic shortcomings.
He never gave up and worked only harder to prove the doubters wrong.

  By the end of that school year, HK had surpassed even his own expectations. His indomitable efforts resulted in achieving honor roll status, but the best news came on the school’s final day: he was told that he had met all qualifications not only for seventh grade but also for eighth grade as well. This same steady progress continued throughout his high school career. When he officially became a senior in 2011, he was academically ranked near the middle of his class.

  The positive results of HK’s hard work boosted his self-confidence. He took pride in his schoolwork and was thrilled when his efforts resulted in high marks. As a high school senior, his most difficult, most frustrating, and least enjoyable subject was algebra. I identified fully with that feeling. Ever since I had escaped my own high school algebra class, I had studiously avoided ever touching an x = y equation again, so I was no help whatsoever. But I marveled at his remarkable ability to solve complex algebra problems using his braille computer and transferring the final answer to a braille writer.

  He was not content merely to get through high school academically; he was also determined to participate in extracurricular activities. He had always dreamed of playing team sports but was realistic enough to know that it would never happen. So he compensated by becoming a wrestling team cheerleader. He also loved to sing, so he joined the school chorus.