Michael Boatwright was found unconscious in a motel room in Palm Springs this past winter. When he finally woke up, he told police his name was Johan Ek. He spoke only Swedish. And he had no memory of his past.
No, this isn’t the opening scene from an action movie — it’s a real (and frightening) example of Transient Global Amnesia, a condition that can spring from trauma, and can result in the inability to form new memories, according to Johns Hopkins professor of psychiatry and neurology Jason Brandt.
Most cases of amnesia have a physical origin; someone gets conked on the head, and the resulting brain damage means some memories get lost. But in the particular kind of amnesia that struck Boatwright — transient global amnesia — there is no neurologic damage to the brain. “It is fundamentally a psychiatric disorder,” Brandt told radio station KPCC. “It’s usually caused by some kind of extreme stress that is difficult for the person to deal with… An extremely traumatic or stressful situation can trigger an inability of the person to retrieve information that is stored in their memory. There is nothing wrong with the hardware, if you will. But it’s a temporary inability to access it. … The event or events are so stressful and so difficult that they are essentially excluded from consciousness.” (Read more about Boatwright’s saga here.)
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If you need a liver transplant, you might want to move to Tennessee. The average waiting time for a new organ there is 48 days, much shorter than the national average of 306 days. That’s because certain geographical areas have more donated organs, while others have lengthy waiting lists. This is geographic discrimination, say a group of Johns Hopkins doctors and scientists, but they have a solution in mind: organ donation redistricting.
To make organ distribution equitable, Dorry L. Segev and his colleagues created a mathematical model relying on “the same math used for political redistricting, school assignments, wildlife preservation, and zoning issues,” Segev says. Think of it as a kind of gerrymandering for organs — but in a good way.
