About a year ago I had a bike accident where the only memories formed were leaving the house and ending up in an ambulance. I have to admit it was a scary experience not knowing how or why I ended up the way I did.

This experience got me thinking about memories: i) where are they stored? ii) how are they formed?

I shared with Mark Daly about this experience and he mentioned that there was a peculiar phenotype, transient global amnesia, in FinnGen, the population biobank of the Finnish population, that has stunning genome-wide association results. For one the associations seem to be specific to the phenotype and were not shared by other phenotypes, and two the phenotype had many towers, i.e. evidence of genetic variants associated to the phenotype.

Transient global amnesia, is a neurological phenotype, where people are not able to form memories over the course of 24 hours.

To read more about our research on transient global amnesia please see our paper.