Former Today show anchor Katie Couric revealed she experienced a bout of transient global amnesia, a rare condition that temporarily wipes a person’s memory while they remain self-aware.
The veteran journalist shared some details of her experience, which happened on June 27, in an Instagram post, writing, “I woke up on a normal Saturday. By that afternoon, I couldn’t tell you the month, the year, or who was president.”
In a longer essay titled “The Day I’ll Never Remember” published on Substack, Couric recalls her day starting with a trip to the farmers’ market in Aspen, where she picked up fresh fruit and an iced coffee before heading home and sitting down with a bowl of cereal and “some beautiful peaches and nectarines” from the market.
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The last thing she remembers is her husband, John Molner, driving her to a festival in town that afternoon.
Couric is not the only well-known media personality to experience this type of amnesia. In 2020, Survivor host Jeff Probst spoke publicly about suffering memory loss.
During an appearance on Live With Kelly and Ryan in February 2020, Probst revealed he had “a really weird thing” happen with his health.
“I was booking travel for my wife and I to go to Vegas, and it gets to your wife’s birth date and I went, ‘What is my wife’s birthday?’” Probst said. “I couldn’t figure it out, so I texted my wife and said, Can you call me?”
She asked him what was happening, and he said: “I don’t know. I don’t really know what’s happening. I don’t know anything. Where are the kids?”
Probst said his wife told him the kids were at school while she was at work and explained that for two hours after the phone call, he had “zero recollection” of what was happening to him.
“I had no idea who I was, where I was,” Probst said on the show. “I even wrote a note … on my laptop, I wrote a note that said, ‘For our records, I have no idea why I’m wearing these clothes. I have no idea where our kids are. I have no idea what day it is. I have no idea why I’m writing this.’”
He said that later he read the note back and “had no memory of writing it.”
Transient global amnesia occurs in about 3.4 to 10.4 per 100,000 people per year in the general population, according to the National Institutes of Health, but increases to 23.5 to 32 per 100,000 per year in individuals over 50.
Symptoms include a “sudden onset of memory loss lasting several hours,” the health agency says, with sufferers often repeating questions and lacking recall of recent events leading up to the episode while remaining co-operative and retaining self-identity without any neurological or cognitive deficits.
Episodes can last between one and 24 hours and typically occur later in the day. Once resolved, symptoms rarely recur, though it is not impossible, according to the health institute, which says the condition has been linked to migraines.
— with files from Global News’ Katie Scott
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