Unlocking the Mystery (Show)

And reconsolidating my first memory

Mystery Show logo

The best podcast in history debuted on May 21, 2015.

The podcast, Mystery Show, was created by Starlee Kine and ran for six episodes between May and July of 2015. The show is built on the idea that there are certain mysteries that cannot be solved by simply searching the internet. These mysteries are the best mysteries.

To celebrate the 8th anniversary of the debut of Mystery Show I’ve decided to re-listen to each episode and write six essays inspired by each of Mystery Show’s six episodes.

This first essay, accompanying episode #1, Video Store, is about memory; it is about how our brains turn us all into liars; and it is about my first memory—the sudden onset of my mother’s unexplained illness. 

My Memory: The Undertow, Part I

My fascination with memory began on a Saturday in the summer of 1993.

As a kid, I had a habit of watching Saturday Morning Cartoons while seated on the breakfast bar of my first childhood home. Our kitchen was a two room affair—one space for cooking and storing food, and an adjoining space with a small table that opened to the porch and backyard. In the cooking portion of the kitchen we had a small beige TV, roughly 10 inches wide with a pair of antennas that seemed to stretch to the ceiling. 

I’m not a visual person—I have aphantasia, which is the inability to create a mental image of something in your head. Yet I have the image of this small beige TV seared into my memory. And the reason that this small beige TV is seared into my memory is that I was staring gleefully into it at the exact moment that my entire life changed. 

Just like in the first case explored in Mystery Show, one moment I had something real and solid and then, without warning, this solid object disappeared.

Or so I thought. 

Mystery Show: Case #1 Video Store, Part I

Mystery Show’s first case is about a video store lost to the sands of New York time. Starlee Kine serves as both host and detective of Mystery Show, and the case of the disappearing video store comes from Starlee’s friend, Laura. Laura rented the movie Must Love Dogs from a video store in Tribeca in the winter of 2005. She watched Must Love Dogs that night and wanted to return it the next day, but when she went back to the location where she’d rented the movie the store had disappeared. 

The way Laura tells it, the next night it was as though the video store never existed. The building itself was still there but the windows were covered with brown craft paper and behind them Laura could see that inside the store had been completely emptied out. Even the shelving units were gone. What had been a thriving business had overnight become a shuttered storefront.

This section of the podcast has all the warmth and comfort of a conversation between two close friends. There are fun bits of banter about an imaginary bankruptcy investigator calling to find out what happened to the un-returned copy of Must Love Dogs. 

But above these endearing bits of friendship, there is one particular line—uttered almost as a casual throwaway—that set me on an investigative journey into my own personal mysteries, to see what was there and what was gone.

“That is so against my nature,” Laura says to Starlee.  

The particular ‘that’ is Starlee’s tendency to return movies far past their due date. 

We all tell stories about ourselves and our nature; about the person that we were in the past; the person that we are now; the person we hope to be in the future. 

And these stories are fundamentally about our memory.

But how accurate are these memories? And by extension how accurate are the stories that we tell about ourselves?

My Memory: The Undertow, Part II

My investigation starts with my first memory. 

I’m six years old, sitting on the breakfast bar in my kitchen watching Saturday Morning Cartoons. I hear a scream of panic from down the hall. But I don’t actually hear the sound as much as I feel the sound. The sound is solid and full of kinetic energy. I’m caught in its wave, which pushes me off the counter. And then the sound reverses directions. I’m pulled now, as if by an undertow, down the hall. As I reach the end of the hall, the sound pulls me to my left—into my parent’s bedroom—and then right, into their bathroom. I look down on the floor and see where this sound originates—it comes from my mom, seizing violently, foam and blood pooling from her mouth, with an energy so strong that it pulls me, my brother, and my dad into an entirely new universe. 

This is my first memory and greatest mystery.

Mystery Show: Case #1 Video Store, Part II

Starlee’s first mystery takes her to Walker’s, a bar on the corner of Varick and Moore in lower Manhattan. At Walker’s, Starlee meets a waitress named Linda and a patron named Tom. Both are longtime residents of the area and both remember a video store in the neighborhood that disappeared overnight due to a flood. 

But these promising leads soon go cold when Starlee realizes that the Great Video Store Flood of Tribeca happened sometime in the mid 90s, a decade before Must Love Dogs was released. While Starlee loses her best lead on the case, she gains something invaluable, a conversation with Tom that opens a window into his memories and that leads Starlee to a more fundamental question:

Why do we do the things we do? Why do we make the choices that we make? 

These questions are the mysteries of our lives; unable to definitively solve them, we invent. Let’s have Starlee explain what I mean:

There’s a documentary about Fellini called “I’m a Born Liar” where he says that for him, the things that are most real are the ones he invented. My favorite part is where he talks about constructing an artificial sea. The actual sea was right there, he could have easily filmed it, but to him it felt less true than the one that he built out of plastic and light.

After listening to this part of the podcast I had to ask myself, am I a born liar? How much of my first memory feels true because I built it out of neurochemistry and stories? And how much of the present world am I missing by fixating on my first memory?

My Memory: The Undertow, Part III

My first memory is grounded in a reality that has inexorably shaped my life over the subsequent 30 years. Here are the facts of the case.

My mother had a violent seizure, which hospitalized her for several months. During this time, treatments were tried and discontinued; diagnoses were given and then retracted. Ultimately, in a well-intentioned but misguided bid to save my mother’s life, a brain surgeon removed much of her frontal lobe. The doctors thought she had a brain tumor—but there was no tumor. 

But is my first memory true? 

Think back to that paragraph about my first memory. It is literary. I was six years old. There is no way that I actually experienced this event in the way that I describe it. I lacked the vocabulary and maturity to contextualize an unexpected event like a 30-something essayist writing about memory. But that memory feels more real than the memory of the last sip of coffee I took seconds ago. Perversely, the memory likely feels more real because it is, like Fellini’s sea, less true.

Here’s what I mean. There is a concept in neuroscience called memory reconsolidation. The idea is that when we recall a memory we are not simply hitting play and rewatching a scene that has been recorded and preserved on film. Instead of hitting play and passively watching the scene, we hit play and start to rewrite it. Perhaps the rewrite is minor, so small as to be barely noticeable; perhaps it is a major rewrite driven by all the changes that have occurred in our lives in the period between the event we are remembering and our present self. But, over time, as we recall the memory more frequently, we fill in more details with our own imagination. 

I first learned about memory reconsolidation in college. I enjoyed studying neuroscience, but the truth is that my mind is more attuned to the world of abstractions, and so, instead of really digging into the scientific underpinnings of memory reconsolidation, I started to think about a famous thought experiment that I encountered in a Philosophy of Mind class called the Ship of Theseus. 

The Ship of Theseus is a paradox first proposed by the Greek philosopher Plutarch. The basic premise is that a ship helmed by Theseus, the mythical founder of Athens, undergoes a series of repairs so that it may be preserved for generations. Eventually, every plank of the ship has been replaced, so that no part of the original ship remains. Greek philosophers, as they are wont to do, then debate whether or not the repaired ship is the same ship or whether it is an entirely new ship.

And so, as I once again recall the memory of that Saturday morning in the summer of 1993, when the wave of my mother’s illness, unable to be contained within the confines of her brain, burst out into the world, I wonder: do any of the original planks of this memory remain? 

Mystery Show: Case #1 Video Store, Part III

After her false start at Walker’s, Starlee begins to make real progress solving the case of the disappearing video store. The missing piece emerges all at once, when, inspired by the plot of You’ve Got Mail, Starlee visits a children’s clothing store. 

I’m leaving out the details of this unraveled mystery so that you can experience the joy first hand when you listen to the episode. But I do want to fast forward to the end of the show, when Starlee calls her friend Laura to reveal that she has cracked the case. 

At first Laura is elated, until Starlee tells her that John, the former owner of the video store, disputes Laura’s entire story. This leaves Laura “shocked, then despondent” at the fact that her memory has made her “just a liar.”

Laura is unwilling to accept that her memory has turned her into a liar, and so she latches onto a small detail to rationalize why her memory can’t be faulty, why she can’t be lying, why the mystery must have played out in reality as it seems to have played out in her memory. 

The video store mystery is solved, and yet it isn’t. 

As Starlee says: “What it came down to was either John had a terrible memory or my friend Laura was a liar. Just like Fellini.”

My Memory: The Undertow, Finale

On the left side of my desk, just next to my computer monitor, is a photo of me and my mom, taken in the winter of 2022. In the photo we’re both smiling. We’d just finished playing music together and my arm is around her on a couch. 

As I looked at that photo and reflected on the Video Store case I saw all the ways that my detective mission had always been an impossible task. I knew the facts of the case. Large sections of my mom’s frontal lobe were removed. They cannot be replaced. That loss is a tragedy. For decades, I searched for clues by studying neuroscience, by talking to the people that knew my mom before she got sick, by staring at photos of us from before her illness, hoping that memories of the before times would come flooding into my mind.

I learned many things from these clues, but they never brought me close to solving the mystery and they definitely never brought me closure. It was only when I stopped seeking answers that I realized that, just as Theseus’ Ship is more than the sum of its planks, my mom is more than the sum of her neurons. 

And when I let that realization wash over me I finally shifted my focus from absence to presence. This shift brought tears to my eyes as I truly saw what was always right there in front of me: 

My mom.