Kent Cochrane and BK Doe
We journey back into the mind this week, and back into human memory. Last week’s episode was all about remembering, but this week we flip the question on its head, and tells stories about people who forget. What is amnesia, and what happens to the people who get it? This week, we talk about how unreliable our memories really are, myths about memory, and more. Spencer tells the story of “BK Doe,” and Ryan tells the story of world-famous memory loss patient, Kent Cochrane.
Hot Topics: “A Lie Was Born” Gets Its Own Theme Song, Blind From Burger King, Sing Along To David Icke, Benjaman Kyle Kent Cochrane, 17 Years In The Woods, Invisible Gorillas, and more.
Benjaman Kyle A.K.A. “BK Doe”
In 2004, a Burger King employee found a 50 year old man naked by a dumpster. After being taken to a hospital, it was discovered that this man had no clear memory of the vast majority of his life, including not knowing his own name, or the names of any of his family members. What followed next, was a very public search to uncover the identity of “BK Doe.”
After years of television appearances, fingerprinting, missing persons reports, and a complete lack of a real identity the entire time, “BK Doe,” then named “Bejaman Kyle” was identified through a network of adoption search angels, who used his DNA to discover his family and origins. It took the world, and Benjaman Kyle, 11 years to find out just who he was.
Kent Cochrane
The most widely studied memory loss patient in the world, Kent Cochrane has been the subject of over 20 different psychological papers covering his memory loss after a motorcycle accident in Canada.
The Invisible Gorilla
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons developed “The Invisible Gorilla” experiment. The two psychologists have spent their lives proving how vulnerable and fragile our memories really are. Their work has now taken the form of TED Talks, books, and many scholarly papers.
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