Allergies, immunities and memory at a distance.

I gag when I smell hot milk, don’t like butterscotch, freeze around uniforms, and often reflexively image how I might survive by hiding somewhere like in an attic. Reactions to events are based on what we have in memory and the knowledge in memory can live active or dormant forever. To access that knowledge often requires the presence of an appropriate cue.  In general forgetting is an accessing failure rather than knowledge that has been erased from memory.

Some memory theorists have likened our memory system to our immune system, or our body’s experience allergy experience. In that context I could not help finding this next story interesting.

A 57 year old metallurgist almost died (anaphylactic shock) after eating shellfish (oysters Rockefeller) but also enjoying filet mignon at the same dinner party. He had also been bitten by ticks a few days before the feast. After almost dying he was tested for tick born diseases and allergies for shellfish. Each allergy test proved negative. His doctor remembered reading a clinical paper a long time ago that he thought just might be relevant to his patient. It was a long shot and a very low probability event turned out to be the answer. His doctor took all of the available clinical data and proved that it was the tick bite which triggered a sudden (dormant) allergy to meat. And there were more players in this set of events. It turns out that people with some blood types are at greater risk for this rare allergy. Even climate has a role in who is or is not likely to be susceptible to this complex set of events leading to a sudden allergic reaction to meat. Incredible. A dormant allergy, to i.e., meat, sits quietly through a life time, and a tick bite in Virginia (where the patient lived) but not in Scandinavia, activates the ‘memory’.

Our body supports quite an intricate compendium of biological information (memory). When and where did my hot milk gag reflex get laid down in memory and what about hiding in attics? I also won’t forget rediscovering my way around the rooms in the farmhouse where I was born with the scent of pine wood leading me along. It didn’t get there by way of the tooth fairy.