Originally published at: A 37-year-old man woke up last year thinking he was 16. He still doesn't remember his wife and daughter | Boing Boing
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argh - beat me to it…
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When asked for comment, Mr. Porter was quoted saying “My God, what have I done?”
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" And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself,“Well… how did I get here?”"
That is so sadly appropriate.
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Odd there’s no mention of any head trauma.
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I cannot even imagine the emotional trauma this would inflict on all concerned. Very sad, and scary, story.
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The other traumas inflicted on this dude were pretty rough; nobody aught to have to move to Missouri, shudder.
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This sounds like the monkey’s paw version of a wish to be young again. You’ll be younger in your memory, but not in any other aspect.
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They moved in with his parents and he started having stress-induced seizures and then after a few weeks woke up without being able to remember what had happened in the 20 years since high school. Its really hard to come up with a hypothesis for what the cause might be; just a crazy story
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This is fascinating, I was under the impression that memory doesn’t record information chronologically and that you couldn’t just delete everything after a specific time stamp.
On the plus side he seems to be doing pretty well for himself for a teenager. His own car AND a woman who is willing to go to bed with him every night? That’s living the dream!
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This makes me think it’s more psychological than neurological, but it’s all far, far from my areas of expertise.
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[obligatory series of jokes about middle-aged men thinking they’re teenagers]
This is really weird. It feels like the kind of memory loss that happens in fiction, not reality. Plus it feels extra creepy and unsettling because I don’t remember my high school years all that well (much less anything before it), having worked to forget them. If I lost my memory of events since then, I wouldn’t have all that much left…
Yeah, this feels like the kind of “amnesia” that people sometimes claim to have that works like it does in movies, not reality, but turns out that they’re faking. Although in this case, I wonder if it’s about how it’s being described, rather than his stated experience. I.e. maybe he lost a whole bunch of himself that included a bunch of memories after high school, and the only clear memories he has left are of his teenage years, so his brain tried to contextualize his existence in that. So it’s maybe not so much that he simply lost his memories after high school, but he’s lost a lot, period, including identifiable memories after high school.
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That he couldn’t work as a hearing tech anymore stands out. So much of that would not be narrative memory, but would be procedural memory and practical knowledge that isn’t lost with normal amnesia. Whatever the underlying problem here, it isn’t just typical retrograde amnesia
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Yeah, that’s what makes me think there was some sort of broad damage going on, that coincidentally left some teenage memories for him to hold onto as his identity.
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See, this is what happens when you don’t do regular full backups of your data.
He restored from last save point, and oops, it was from 2001.
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I am not a psychologist, but it would be so interesting to do experiments on him (and thus why I’m not any kind of medical professional 
Put him in front of his equipment he used as a hearing tech and see if he has any muscle memory. How are his typing skills? What about his handwriting? Ask him what he remembered just before waking up in a strange woman’s bed: what was the date, what did he have for dinner, what homework did he have due, what was his school schedule, just how fresh were his high school memories?
As for that fat man in the mirror, what new aches and pains did he notice? Did he notice any difference in strength? Eyesight? Maybe a bit of hearing loss?
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Is he also super strong now?
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The only upside I could see was that he didn’t have to return to high school, even if he had to relearn some subjects. 
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