HELPING PHYSICIANS ATTAIN FINANCIAL SECURITY
By Robert M. Doroghazi, M.D., F.A.C.C.
I have wanted to write this letter for some time. I admit it has little bearing on your pocketbook, but I do hope you find it interesting.
I have never met a savant, otherwise, I have only met one person (see below) with a memory for images, especially faces, as good as mine. I also have the ability, and I have never read about this anywhere, to know in my memories which direction is north.
Seven years ago for Christmas, the boys bought me a DVD of the first year (1952) of the Superman TV series starring George Reeves and Phyllis Coates (replaced as Lois Lane after the first year by Noel Neill). I watched each episode once and have not looked at them since.
Last year I purchased a lobby card from the 1920 Babe Ruth movie “Headin’ Home”. A young girl, with about a 3/8 image of her face (a profile would be a ½ image), is looking up at the Babe. In an instant I said “she was the earthly mother of Superman in episode #1 of the Superman series”.
It was. Completely out of context, I am able to say that a girl (barely able to see her face) who was 11 in 1920, is the same woman that had a 1 minute bit part at age 44 in a tape that I had seen 7 years before and never looked at again.
I was President of our Rotary Club in 1993-94. In the spring of ’93, I attended a training meeting for the incoming Rotary Presidents from our district. After one of the sessions, I walked over to a man and said “You’re Charlie James the baseball player”. He said “How do you know?” I said “I have your 1960 baseball card”.
Out of context, I recognize a guy, who has obviously aged in the interim, from a baseball card 33 years ago (when I was 9 years old).
I graduated a semester early from college in 1973. At the time, the late 50s/early-mid 60s music was making a comeback. There was a Dick Clark show on the TV with a tape of Leslie Gore singing “It’s My Party”. It is the only time I have ever seen an image of her. In the 1990s, I was channel surfing and saw a Batman episode (Adam West, etc) from the 60s. There were 3 or 4 women in the background. It just popped into my mind from nowhere. I said “That’s Leslie Gore”. I watched the rest of the show. Sure enough: Leslie Gore made a cameo appearance.
In 2003, we were flying to a medical meeting in Boston. I glanced up just as a man walked by. I said to myself “I have seen that little, pointy nose before”. When I have this feeling, I “search my memory banks’ and just concentrate on that particular thing that has jogged my memory. By the time he walked back up the aisle, I recognized him and introduced myself. We had graduated HS together. I had not seen him in the intervening 34 years. He later said to the person I was with “How did Bob recognize me?” She said “He has a good memory”.
About 10 years ago, I took my mom and sister and her husband out to eat in Granite City, IL (my home town). As we were being seated, I thought I recognized someone as we walked by. I said to my mom, “That’s so-and-so”. She had grown up with him, but said “No, it isn’t”. I walked over and introduced myself. It was him, and he couldn’t remember the time more 30 years earlier we had met for less than 10 minutes.
Several years before I retired I was seeing a man in his late 50s sent to the hospital for possible coronary artery disease. A routine question on my history is: “Are you married, single, divorced or widowed?” “He said “No, but I have a girlfriend” almost as if he had something to prove.
I didn’t think of this, it just popped into my head: Klinefelter Syndrome. I hadn’t even thought of this in years and had never made the diagnosis before. And that’s what he had. (The normal male is 46 (chromosomes) XY. The normal female: 46 XX. Klinfelter is 47 XXY (or they can be 46 XY/ 47 XXY mosaics. Turner’s Syndrome is 45 XO).
It wasn’t until I got to college that I let my memory show. Prior to that, it just scared people, so I kept quite. In 5th and 6th grade, I was in a bowling league. As we came in there was a sheet with everyone’s average, and I would look it over. As we started the match, we would write down their average. The other people were looking at the sheet, and I said “Oh, his average is so-and-so, and his is so-and-so, etc”. They looked at me like I was an alien.
I am now President-elect of the Alumni Assoc for the Division of Biological Sciences and Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. Two years ago I attended a talk given by a young man who is an Asst Professor of Neurobiology. He is trying to define, at the cellular level, the “minds eye” (a Shakespearian term).
I went up after the lecture and told him some of my stories. He said “I have had the same experiences for remembering images, for faces, that’s why I’m doing this research”.
I said” In my memories, from as young as I can remember, I can tell you which direction is north”. He didn’t have that ability, nor had he ever heard of it.
If you look at a map, the convention for hundreds of years has been north to the top, east on the right, west on the left. In my memory, north is always in front of me; I call north “up”. As soon as I get oriented, (The sun must be up, I really have difficulty at night, unless I have some other fixation point, like looking at a map) I can go anywhere and tell you which direction is north.
Since I have become aware of this ability, to test my memory, over the last year I have tried to think of places I went to as a child and have never been back to since, before I understood this “north thing”.
In 1960 (I was 9 years old), my cousin from NY visited us for the first time. My father drove us up to Abe Lincoln’s home in Springfield, IL. I have not been back since. It was my memory that the street was north/south, and the home faced west. I looked it up, and that is correct.
I never really knew the personality of Grandma Doroghazi (my father’s mother). She had dementia (almost certainly multi-infarct) from as early as I can remember. When I was 5 and 6, on Sundays, we would often visit her at a custodial home in Alton, IL; a two-story, white house, with chickens in the yard. I was completely bored out of my ever-loving mind.
Earlier this year, I was looking through a family history left to me by my dad’s brother, Uncle Steve Doroghazi (Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, 1944). It had the address of where Gma Doroghazi stayed. My memory was correct: from age 6, with no knowledge of the concept of north, I knew which direction was “up”.
From my reading about memory, it appears that a very significant part of everything we have ever experienced is stored somewhere in our mind. The problem is accessing it. An extreme example are savants; they can have nearly unlimited access of data, a complete depth of knowledge, in one area (ability to look at a phone book and remember every number, or the ability to perform 5 or 6 figure multiplication or division instantaneously in their head, or look at the city map of London then draw it).
The “price” of this complete access is that they are non-functional in life, often requiring custodial care. For example, a normal person must make literally thousands of “unconscious” decisions just to drive to work: walk to the car, open car door, start car, turn left here, right here, etc. A savant cannot process the data to make these normal (unconscious) decisions yet can tell you what day of the week is May 17, 3047.
Consider Mozart, whom I believe was the greatest musical genius ever. After hearing Allegri’s Miserere (Miserere refers to Psalm 51, a Prayer of Repentance) just once at the Vatican, he was able to write the entire 2 hour score from memory. There is no way he thought “A-B-C sharp, D, etc”, it was just there in his mind.
The Woman Who Can’t Forget (Price and Davis, Free Press, 2008) tells the story of Jill Price, who from age 8 (1974) can recount almost every day of her life. From 1980, her memory is essentially perfect; every conversation, every major news event on that day, etc. What really fascinated me was how her mind stores the data. Her “time line of history” starts at 1900 at the upper right hand corner of a page. The line then runs horizontally right to left until 1970 (she was 4), where it pivots straight downward and runs vertical until it gets to the present. But she remembers single years are circles. June is at the bottom, December at the top, and the months progress counterclockwise.
How did I always remember what was “up”, even before I knew about north? In my memory, north is always in front of me, and the south (behind me) doesn’t exist; there is no use to turn around because there is nothing there. How can I not even think of a person in years; and just glancing up to see that little pointy nose for a brief moment as he walked by on an airplane make me remember my high school classmate?
The human mind is the most amazing creation in the Universe. My impression: It will never be mechanically reduplicated. Science may create computers that can perform a trillion-jillion computations in a nanosecond, but it will never be able to create a computer that can have original thoughts.
RMD
Columbia Daily Tribune, 11/7/10. Missouri native Frank Buckles, 109 years old, is the country’s only surviving vet of WW I. He was 16 years old when he enlisted in 1916.
On December 8, 1941, Buckles, who was working for a shipping company in Manila, was taken as a civilian prisoner of war when the Japanese over-ran the city. When he was freed by US forces on Feb 23, 1945, he weighed less than 100 pounds.
RMD comment: I love to read about things like this; history fascinates me. I also hope a sample of his tissue is saved so his genome can be sequenced, because nature obviously dealt him a strong hand.
Barron’s, 11/8/10. An interview with Scott Minerd, who is a fixed-income expert.
“A portfolio designed to build wealth should have something like 10-20% in art and collectables….the other great advantage to art is that it is portable.
Another 10 to 20% of the portfolio should be allocated to commodities…overweight precious metals and industrial metals….
We’re essentially advocating an anti-currency trade—that is, trying to find things which are not financial assets to store value and that have the ability to be liquid and portable”.
I practice my clarinet almost every day when I am at home. A package of 10 reeds usually last about 6 weeks. I prefer the Van Doren reeds (product of France). When I was in last week, I asked the owner if he could appreciate that the dollar is depreciating. To make a long story short; he said it is just brutal.
RMD comment: I agree. It’s brutal. The US dollar is no longer as good as gold; it is an intrinsically worthless piece of paper. But you also must understand: In the end, all paper currencies are worthless. Buy some gold; as much as you are comfortable with.
As I remind you every year; it is usually around the first week of December that most mutual funds distribute their gains for the year. You could make a deposit and conceivably receive 5% or even more back to you as taxable gains. If you are considering a deposit, check with the fund to see when they distribute gains. This is not an issue in non-taxable, such as Traditional IRA or 401(k), accounts.
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