Colin McEnroe Show: Two Intriguing Cases Of Amnesia

Oscar Wilde said memory is the diary we all carry around with us, but really memory is more than that. 

Memory is the traction that allows our minds to hold the road. What would it be like to have no memory? What would you base the rest of your day on? The rest of your life?

We came to the idea of this show partly because the distrubing, affecting documentary "Marwencol" is playing in Hartford this weekend. Marwencol is the story of a man in Kingston, NY, beaten by a group of assailants outside a bar - beaten so badly that he lay in a coma for nine days. When he awoke, his memory was gone.

He then built a kind of replacement memory by compulsively assembling a tiny fictional Belgian town in in his yard. The town is populated by dolls and action figures whom he poses and photographs living out a drama that parallels his own.

Also on today's show, the story of Hartford's famous amnesiac, Patient H.M.

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