Chapter Three
My drive to understand human memory goes all the way back to a ski trip my family went on during my senior year of high school, when a snowboarder drove into Karo.
Although her concussion was minor and she was otherwise fine enough to be released from the hospital after a few days, her memory got wonky.
We would sit with her and recount the accident, but her memory reset whenever we left the hospital room.
I’d get back with a glass of water, a bag of chips, or after a visit to the bathroom, and she’d be confused about who I was and why she was stuck in a hospital bed.
It was scary, disconcerting, and worrisome—until I started looking into it back home, on the bulky desktop computer we shared as a family.
Googling concussions brought me to amnesia, to a structure in the brain called the hippocampus.
I didn’t get half of what I was reading, but I was eager to understand everything, even after Karo recovered.
So instead of studying computer science in college, like I’d planned to, I applied for psychology with a minor in computer science.
Undergrad taught me that despite decades of advances in uncovering the mechanisms of the brain, we still couldn’t draw clear conclusions about how any of these structures really worked.
More studies were needed. Neuroscience was lagging behind the older sciences like physics and chemistry and it didn’t have the clarity of medicine.
As a species we’d been on the moon, but we didn’t understand the tiny universe right inside our skulls.
Over and over again, I read about how future research should study this and examine that, and I decided then that I would be the one to fill these gaps in knowledge.
At this point, Karo had long recovered from her temporary amnesia, but I knew there were countless people who weren’t as lucky.
Helping those people became my objective.
To get there, I studied harder, went for a semester abroad to Edinburgh, landed a summer placement in Denmark, and finally asked two professors to write me outstanding recommendation letters, which got me an international grant for grad school in the States.
Now, my battered suitcase carries stickers of all my stops from the past decade: six years of grad school at Columbia, a postdoc in Zurich for eighteen months, then a year in Singapore, six months at my old lab in Denmark, a year in Phoenix, and then another in the Netherlands.
Thanks to the unstable funding academia is based on, I’ve completed more international moves than first dates.
It’s not just that dating is hard, but even friendships are hard to build if your time in a place has a clear expiration date from the get-go, determined by the local funding agency or the fixed-term contract of your university.
Add to that a research question so compelling that it blurs the boundaries of my workday and consumes my weekends more often than not, and maintaining those relationships becomes almost impossible.
The few friendships I’ve managed to sustain are with other researchers—those I can count on running into at various conferences throughout the year, those who understand what it’s like.
I’ve forgotten how much New York feels like home.
But just like back then, the city welcomes me in a hot and humid embrace.
After I drop off my luggage at the studio I rented in Morningside Heights, I head to Broadway and queue at one of the bagel places that kept me fed throughout grad school.
Equipped with an iced coffee and a bagel, I walk around the neighborhood, sun-dried tomato cream cheese melting onto my hands as the sights, scents, and sounds bring me back to being an underpaid grad student in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Five years. I’ve been gone nearly as long as I lived here, but suddenly the time away feels like the blink of an eye.
There’s the building that I had my first apartment viewing in, only to realize that I wasn’t earning enough to even be considered for the lease.
The musty smell coming from the street drain reminds me of the summer I wrote my first publication, sucking on ice cubes and frozen raspberries to cool down.
The bar where I had my first date in the city has been replaced by an Italian restaurant, though the laundromat where I cried for a full wash-and-dry cycle after my breakup with Jacob still exists.
So many things have changed, and yet one thing is the same.
I’m still fending for myself and flailing to find a lab I can stay in permanently.
Constantly surrounded by the politics of academia and now with memories of Jacob sprouting up, it’s hard to remind myself of all the progress I’ve made: ideas and what-ifs that were a faraway dream when I left five years ago, now implemented into neat experiments and algorithms that have gotten me—and the research community—a fraction of a step closer to understanding human memory.
It should be enough. In an ideal world, one where I’d have a secure position, I’d continue plugging away at the question that lies at the core of it all and be happy about each tiny grain of knowledge, but in reality?
I spend a lot of time fighting for the money that is necessary to make leaps in understanding.
In the hierarchy of academia, some people, like Jacob, end up at the top, with tenure and a name that almost guarantees getting more funding to finance their research in the future, but as much as I code and solve and explain, my name is far from being recognizable.
Which means that job security is still far out of reach.
With my pending grant and the opportunity that participating in the Sawyer’s brings, I’m hoping to level up soon. I just need Dr. Theodore L. North to stay out of my way.
I pick up groceries on the way home, then spend the rest of the day unpacking and catching up with emails I missed in the lead-up to Karo’s wedding until jet lag knocks me to sleep.
The next day, a Sunday, I prepare my materials for the workshop I’m giving at the Sawyer’s and unwind with a long rock-climbing session before I head to attendee registration at Columbia.
My rental is only a few blocks away from the Morningside campus, but when I arrive, the sun has drawn sweat to my skin.
The campus is busy, white tents with registration booths for the students pebbling the green and flocks of Sawyer’s students milling down the paths.
As I walk between the imposing buildings, I rein in my mind from dousing itself in memories from my time here.
But motor memory kicks in and guides me to Schermerhorn Hall, home of the psychology department.
Empty corridors and closed doors greet me at the department, including the one reading Prof. Dr. Jacob Bellingham.
Of course, he’s not here. He wouldn’t lower himself to do the work of his secretary.
Relieved to have one more day to pump my confidence before seeing him, I try the secretary’s door at the end of the corridor again.
It’s locked, despite the email on my phone saying attendee registration would be open from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Resigned to wait, I slump against the wall and open social media.
It’s been a few days since I logged on, with Karo’s wedding keeping me busy and the surprise encounter with Dr. North—Lewis, whatever—making me avoid my phone.
I couldn’t stomach scrolling through the platform and seeing another cheerful happy to share our new paper on effects of brain stimulation on spatial navigation skills, cementing the point that everyone around me is Discovering Things and Proudly Contributing to Science.
Given my inactivity, the quantity of notifications surprises me.
But then I see who they’re from; the profile picture of a mountain landscape with a man facing away from the camera and the username @theoretically.
Just as he informed me on the flight, Lewis has mentioned me in a post, uploaded two days ago.
I’m puzzling through his arguments against the implications I drew in my last paper when a shadow falls over my screen. Gray suede sneakers with a green stripe at the edge of my view, an inconveniently pleasant pine scent.
“Dr. Silberstein.”
“Dr. North,” I murmur without looking up. “You’ve had, what, five hours to sign up and yet you show up when I’m here. Did you miss me?”
“So much. I’ve been dying to see your scowl ever since we got off the plane yesterday,” he shoots back as he looms over me and my phone. A smirk appears on his face when he registers what I’ve been reading. “Don’t let me interrupt you.”
“You’re good. I was just standing here, being unimpressed.”
He steps around me and props his shoulder against the wall, his hair, once again, falling perfectly. “You don’t look unimpressed. You look angry.”
I glare at him. “I do, because you’re putting words into my mouth. All this text, and it’s just random pieces of information that supposedly provide evidence against statements I supposedly made in the paper.”
“Supposedly, huh?” he echoes. It’s only been a day since we arrived, but his accent is thicker now, all vowels leaning into as. “Sounds like you’re not very good at taking criticism.”
I’m not, but that’s not the point.
“If it was actual criticism, then fine. But you’re arguing against things I never wrote.
I don’t know where you got this from.” I zoom in and highlight the sentence that gave my pulse a jump start.
“Here. Would you please enlighten me on where I claim that we found evidence for memory replay using fMRI?”