Medical science has long known that amnesia — the loss of memory — can be caused by shock, psychological disturbance, illness or brain injury. But there’s an unusual problem connected to the form of amnesia resulting from damage to the part of the brain known as the hippocampus.
In 2006, researchers at a university in London asked patients with amnesia caused by hippocampus injury to imagine and describe plausible situations in such locations as a beach, a forest or a bar. They also asked these patients to imagine a future meeting with a friend or a Christmas party to come.
They couldn’t do it. While the amnesiacs could envision some separate images related to such events, they could not visualize the whole experience. In other words, the brain damage affected not only their ability to remember the past, but also their ability to imagine the future. In short, people with damage to the hippocampus are forced to live in the present all the time.1
We don’t know how people suffering that condition view it, but a possible benefit of that state is that it may relieve its victims of a sense of dread. Dread is one of the possible ways we can look ahead. If we view some part of our personal future as being filled with trouble or pain, we probably feel dread. And dread is a life-draining emotion.
If the inability to dread is a benefit, however, it’s outweighed by the loss of the other ways of looking ahead, which include anticipation, imagination and hope, all of which can be life-filling qualities that add meaning to our present.
The Beatitudes
With that in mind, consider the Beatitudes, the series of short, pithy statements in which Jesus announces the benefits bestowed by God on the faithful.
