Re: Steve's new book "IWOZ"

[carbide@egine.com]

PZ wrote:
> I just stayed up until 1:00am to watch Woz talk about his now book on
> the Colbert Report.  I wish I didn't, it tarnished my view of a
> childhood idol.  Woz made himself look like a bumbling idiot.  He
> stumbled over his words, and wasn't very coherent at all during the
> entire interview.

I saw it as well, and agree Woz didn't come off too well. But I don't
think it was a good measure of Woz the man because he was out of his
element.  Colbert COULD have gotten some interesting stuff out of Woz
if he'd done his homework and come up with questions better suited to
his guest. Colbert's a high-powered, quick-witted, funny guy, but he
could learn from the way Jon Stewart adapts his style to suit his
guests.

For example, Colbert could have gotten Woz talking about his memory
loss problem. Below is a Woz quote. This is very interesting stuff, and
not the words of a bumbling idiot, nor some arcane technical stuff
that's only of interest to people like us:

Q From e-mail: Can you discuss the nature of the "memory loss" that you
suffered?

WOZ: This may be simplified but here it goes. When you see or hear or
othewise sense something, it's held in your shortterm memory to be
perceived. If you hold it in short term memory for a while (5 seconds?
10 seconds? 15 seconds?) it can somehow (unknown) make it to a long
term, permanent, memory. The processing path for this formation is well
suspected to be through the hippocampus because people who can't form
long term memories, like myself for 5 weeks, often have identifiable
lesions in this area of the brain. This is called atereor grada amnesio
or some such thing ('forward' amnesia). It is quite common after car
crashes and plane crashes and the like. Mine wasn't diagnosed by
doctors, friends, family, psychologists, etc. After all, with all my
old memories, I could go places and ride my motorcycle, etc. People
just thought that I was weird because I said weird things. I couldn't
tell you that I'd seen someone 10 minutes before (I'm presuming) but I
had no way to know that this amnesia existed or that I had it during
the 5 weeks. I couldn't have told Steve that I had memory problems, as
in the movie.

It was real. I never got any memories from this period. I would never
have gone 5 weeks with my dogs in a shelter, nor left a missing tooth
be untreated for this period.

The 'backwards' amnesia with which we are most familiar is called
retrograda amnesia, or something like that.