Using a pencil and a ruler, Lonni Sue Johnson lovingly traced a blue line across a sheet of graph paper. Skipping down four rows, she drew another line; she repeated this process until she got to the bottom. Then she flipped the page on its side and began making a grid. On a nearby chair, a black tote bag, stuffed to the point that it resembled an anvil, held folders filled with hundreds of nearly identical designs. She didn’t look up when her sister, Aline, and her mother, Maggi, reminded her that it was time to stop. For Johnson, who is sixty-four, it never feels like time to stop. Many days, she draws so much—from rigid geometric compositions to winsome cartoon animals—that pencil shavings pile up on the floor like autumn leaves. On especially fervent nights, she has been so oblivious of the hour that she has collapsed into sleep at her desk.

Lately, Johnson draws for pleasure, but for three decades she had a happily hectic career as an illustrator, sometimes presenting clients with dozens of sketches a day. Her playful watercolors once adorned packages of Lotus software; for a program called Magellan, she created a ship whose masts were tethered to billowing diskettes. She made a popular postcard of two red parachutes tied together, forming a heart; several other cards were sold for years at MOMA’s gift shop. Johnson produced half a dozen covers for this magazine, including one, from 1985, that presented a sunny vision of an artist’s life: a loft cluttered with pastel canvases, each of them depicting a fragment of the skyline that is framed by a picture window. It’s as if the paintings were jigsaw pieces, and the city a puzzle being solved. Now Johnson is obsessed with making puzzles. Many times a day, she uses her grids as foundations for elaborate arrangements of letters on a page—word searches by way of Mondrian. For all the dedication that goes into her puzzles, however, they are confounding creations: very few are complete. She is assembling one of the world’s largest bodies of unfinished art.

At the moment, Johnson, who lives in New Jersey, was drawing at a table in a scuffed laboratory in the psychology department at Princeton University. Aline, who is sixty, had driven her there. Down the hall was an fMRI scanner, which maps a person’s mental activity in real time, showing where oxygenated blood flows in the brain during acts of cognition. Seen through a glass partition, the machine, a white plastic tube whose interior was illuminated by green light, suggested a giant eye. It was 8:30 A.M., and in twenty minutes Johnson’s head would be inserted into the iris. Soon after the scanning was complete, Johnson—who for the past seven years has had uncommonly profound amnesia—would forget that the procedure had happened. Once an event slips her mind, it is gone for good.

Nicholas Turk-Browne, a cognitive neuroscientist at Princeton, entered the lab and greeted Johnson in the insistently zippy manner of a kindergarten teacher: “Lonni Sue! We’re going to put you in a kind of space machine and take pictures of your brain!” A Canadian with droopy dark-brown hair, he typically speaks with mellow precision. Though they had met some thirty times before, Johnson continued to regard him as an amiable stranger. Turk-Browne is one of a dozen scientists, at Princeton and at Johns Hopkins, who have been studying her, with Aline and Maggi’s consent. Aline told me, “When we realized the magnitude of Lonni Sue’s illness, my mother and I promised each other to turn what could be a tragedy into something which could help others.” Cognitive science has often gained crucial insights by studying people with singular brains, and Johnson is the first person with profound amnesia to be examined extensively with an fMRI. Several papers have been published about Johnson, and the researchers say that she could fuel at least a dozen more.

“It’s experiment time,” Aline said. “Come on, let’s do our part now.” She is tenderly invested in Johnson doing her best. For twenty years, Aline was a computer programmer for the treasurer’s office of Princeton, but she now devotes her time to Lonni Sue. Before Johnson’s illness, Aline was auditing Princeton courses in cognitive neuroscience, including one that explored memory disorders. She finds it fascinating “to try to understand what Lonni Sue’s world is like,” and this helps her “survive day after day” of guiding someone who “doesn’t realize the impact of her illness.” Aline and Maggi believe that the intellectual stimulation provided by scientists is a form of therapy. The universities pay Johnson twelve to twenty dollars an hour, and though she cannot remember granting consent, she is asked for it before a round of studies begins.

Johnson kept staring at her drawing; tendrils of her long brown hair brushed the page. “I just have to finish,” she said. Turk-Browne noted that, inside the machine, she would look at pictures that would spark her creatively: “We’re going to give you a lot of ideas today, I think.”

She leaped up and said, “Thank you!” Johnson is ravenous for artistic inspiration. Heading toward the scanner, she asked if she should bring any pencils.





1 / 3 Chevron Chevron “Red, Green, and Blue with Lonni Sue” (2008), by Lonni Sue Johnson and Margaret Kennard Johnson. © Lonni Sue Johnson and Margaret Kennard Johnson 2008 (all rights reserved) On March 4, 2008, Johnson drew for the first time since developing amnesia. The drawings were “a conversation down the page” with her mother, Maggi, who is also an artist. After taking turns making shapes, Johnson began to draw some of the whimsical figures for which she’s noted in her work as a professional illustrator.

In 2007, Johnson, who is divorced, was living alone on a rambling property in upstate New York, which she had named Watercolor Farm. Around Christmas, a neighbor stopped by and spied her through the study window: she was staring vacantly at her computer’s mouse. He took her to the hospital, where doctors determined that she was suffering from viral encephalitis—inflammation of the brain. Johnson nearly died, and several areas of the temporal lobe that manage the storage of memories, including the entorhinal and the perirhinal cortices, were severely damaged. Most important, the virus essentially obliterated her hippocampus, which, among other things, encodes “explicit” memories—the kind that we can intentionally remember. Since Johnson became ill, Turk-Browne has found, she cannot reliably recall a sequence of three images moments after seeing it. The thoroughness of her hippocampal damage makes Johnson an eerily ideal subject for scientists who are mapping the murky pathways of the brain. Brain scans of the most famous amnesiac in the academic literature, Henry Molaison, a Connecticut man who died in 2008, revealed that at least a quarter of his hippocampus was intact. With Johnson, scientists can perform an “existence proof”: if she can do a mental task, then it doesn’t require the hippocampus.

Molaison’s brain damage had been inflicted by a surgeon, in 1953, in a misguided attempt to quell seizures. It was a dark gift for science. Studies of H.M., as he was called in journal articles, upended the prevailing view that memories were stored throughout the brain. Although Molaison couldn’t recall events that occurred after the surgery, he unconsciously retained traces of new experiences. He could even learn things, though he could remember no lessons. Suzanne Corkin, an M.I.T. neuroscientist who studied Molaison, reported that he could distinguish between novel and familiar objects. He came to understand that televisions could display in color, though before his operation he had seen only black-and-white sets. He retained his “procedural memory,” or facility for acquiring skills: in old age, he began using a walker.