New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
MEMORY GAPS
Yale doctor studies Taylor Swift fans’ amnesia from her concerts
Dr. Nathan Carroll is a Taylor Swift fan, but don’t call him a “Swiftie.” “I’m definitely not one of the super fans,” Carroll laughed. Carroll is a second-year student in the Yale School of Public Health’s Executive Master of Public Health program and an Associate Chief Resident at the Jersey Shore University Medical Center. He is also the co-lead on “Here And Then Swiftly Gone: Taylor Swift-Induced Amnesia — A Literature Review and Exploratory Hypothesis For a Rare Phenomenon in Youth,” a study that explores the social media phenomenon of people experiencing amnesia after attending Swift concerts.
“We think this is more common than people realize. Social media just made these stories more available to people,” Carroll said.
The study, which is in pre-publication, was inspired by the 2022 ticketing issues that stemmed from the Eras Tour announcement as well as the virality of the tour itself, according to Carroll.
“They (concertgoers) went through the rigamarole of getting tickets. They possibly spent thousands of dollars on a secondary market ticket, and then they have big gaps at the concert after attending it,” Carroll said. “That’s medically interesting, we have to study that.”
Carroll, along with study co-lead Dr. Soha Salman, discovered that the phenomenon is consistent with the traits of transient global amnesia. TGA is an acute, temporary onset of anterograde amnesia brought on by strenuous activity or high-stress events, according to the National Library of Medicine. Though typically attributed to older individuals, the study found that younger individuals can also be prone to TGA, especially when in “emotionally heightened states.” Other types of events that Carroll identified that can produce similar states of amnesia include weddings, funerals and large parties.
Risk factors that can contribute to TGA include high blood pressure, history with migraines, psychiatric conditions, diabetes and “strong emotional, sexual or physical activity,” the study found.
One of the major points in the study attributes cell phone usage as a contributing factor to the amnesia. Carroll said some fans will try to record parts of the show on their smartphones, but doing so limits the individual from encoding their own memories of the performance as they are focused on getting the footage instead. Carroll believes that less smartphone usage would equate to less instances of TGA, but it would still exist, especially for fans in “heightened states” of emotion.
“The connection between technology, emotion and how people resonated with Ms. Swift’s music was one of the most surprising things,” Carroll said.
“It’s a double-edged sword. If we didn’t have the cell phones there, people couldn’t record their experiences. In fact, a lot of people only realized they had amnesia because someone else recorded them singing, dancing or interacting with the music.”
The study also pinpointed other musicians for which fans similarly experienced TGA following their performances: Beyoncé and her recent Renaissance Tour and Suga from South Korean boy band BTS.
Carroll said that he and his team are currently cutting down and condensing the pre-publication version of the study in order to submit it to a journal within the next month. The next step afterward would be acceptance into a publication, which Carroll is feeling optimistic about.