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A Brilliant Minds Medical Mystery: What If You Lost the Ability to Form New Memories?
Brilliant Minds explores severe memory loss in Episode 3, "The Lost Biker."
Brilliant Minds Episode 3, “The Lost Biker,” takes viewers back to Bronx General and the small team of neurologists led by Dr. Oliver Wolf (Zachary Quinto), but the story doesn’t start there. Unconventional as ever, Wolf receives a house call from a biker gang banging down his door. One of their members, Wyatt (played by Steve Howey), has a bullet in his arm.
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Wyatt, who also happens to be Wolf’s motorcycle mechanic, claims to have an occasional tremor that caused him to pull the trigger and accidentally shoot himself. Never one to turn down a good medical mystery, Wolf offers to run a neurological exam (no cops) to get to the bottom of what’s going on. The only thing is, Wyatt doesn’t actually have a tremor. He’s been experiencing memory loss and he shot himself because he forgot he had loaded the gun.
According to Wyatt’s partner, he’s been repeating jokes, retelling the same stories, and forgetting things. She offers as evidence the nine air fryers they own because he keeps forgetting he already bought one. He’s getting headaches and he’s tired all the time. Wolf sends him for an MRI when a "Code Gray" (a combative person) comes over the intercom. Wolf arrives just in time to find Wyatt in the midst of an episode, having apparently gotten so disoriented that he lashed out.
The MRI reveals a tumor that is causing a buildup of cerebrospinal fluid and growing into critical structures. It can be removed, and the removal will save his life, but the damage can’t be fixed. Worse, the surgery will likely do more damage. If he doesn’t get the surgery, Wyatt has weeks to live, maybe months. If he does, he loses the ability to store new memories. He’ll live, and he can create new memories with the people he loves, but he can’t keep those memories for himself.
The Real Medical Cases That Inspired Brilliant Minds' "The Lost Biker"
The cases in Brilliant Minds are largely inspired by the real-life work of Dr. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist who specialized in unusual cases and wrote about those cases prolifically. The episode takes elements from at least two of Sacks’ essays: "The Lost Mariner" from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and “The Last Hippie” from An Anthropologist on Mars.
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Sacks said that memory is more than just our past, it’s our mooring in time, and that’s evidenced by these two cases. “The Lost Mariner” centers on Jimmie G., a 49-year-old patient admitted to a “Home for the Aged” in New York City, circa 1975. Jimmie was friendly but confused, having seemingly lost track of the last 30 years of his life.
In his own mind, Jimmie was 19 years old, the year was 1945, and he was freshly home from World War II with his whole life ahead of him. In reality, he was creeping up on 50 years old and he just didn’t know it. Jimmie suffered from severe memory loss, courtesy of alcoholism following his return from combat. After the war, Jimmie came home and had a relatively ordinary life until about 1970 when the consequences of his drinking kicked in and erased most of his memories after 1945. It also destroyed his ability to form and store new memories.
Sometimes, he would realize the truth, or parts of it. He would catch his own reflection in a mirror, and he’d know that decades had gone by seemingly without him. Fortunately, these frightening realizations vanished as quickly as they arose.
Wyatt’s fictional symptoms match those of Jimmie G., and their stories share a naming convention, but not an origin. Wyatt’s memory loss was the result of a tumor, not alcoholism, and more closely mirrors the story of Greg F., “The Last Hippie.”
Greg grew up in the ‘50s and exhibited an early talent for songwriting. As he grew older, Greg became disenchanted with the political landscape due to his friends being carted off to Vietnam, and with his parents. He dropped out of school and left home, soon joining the Hare Krishnas. He spoke to his parents only occasionally and soon, his eyesight began to falter. Diminishing sight was interpreted by the people at his temple as evidence of a growing spiritual enlightenment. It was actually evidence of a growing brain tumor.
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By the time his parents caught up with him at the Hare Krishna temple in New Orleans, it was 1975, and they hadn’t seen Greg in four years. The boy they had known was gone and in his place was a man who was disconnected, disoriented, and completely blind. Taken from the temple to the hospital, doctors found a tumor the size of orange growing inside Greg’s brain. The tumor was removed but the damage was done.
Sacks met Greg two years later, and he hadn’t improved much. He had no reliable memory beyond 1970 as if he had been “marooned in the '60s,” Sack wrote. Like Jimmie and like the fictional Wyatt, Greg could no longer form new memories in the usual way, but there was hope: Greg was able to reconnect with his past and with his loved ones, at least to a limited degree, through music.
New episodes of Brilliant Minds premiere on Mondays on NBC at 10/9c and are available to stream on Peacock.
