Taylor Swift: Fans suffer mass amnesia at her gigs

They drove the two-or-so hours to the gig and got dressed at their hotel. After that they travelled to the stadium and swapped friendship bracelets with other fans.

All of this, she remembers as normal. It was only later she realised chunks of her memory were missing entirely.

“I didn’t realise until after the fact. It was a couple weeks later I said to my husband, ‘you know the entire ten minutes of All Too Well? I don’t remember it’. I mean, I know it happened, because I have video, but my brain didn’t process the fact I was with her doing that. It’s like my brain was short circuiting.”

“I asked my husband, and he said ‘you were in the zone’. There were parts when I didn’t acknowledge anyone around me, when I was completely focused, and I think those are the parts I don’t remember.”

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Abigail Rodriguez saw Swift perform in Houston, Texas, on the evening of April 23rd – six days before Katie.

Like Katie, Abigail says the show was one of the best she has ever seen. It was only hours later, during a conversation with her sister – also a Swift fan – that she realised that significant sections of her memory were missing.

She said: “It was after the show, I was on such a high, I said she didn’t sing anything from Debut, or anything from Fearless, and my sister just looked at me and was like ‘yes she did’. We just kind of passed right over it, but then later someone said they didn’t get any video from Love Story, and I was like, ‘of course you didn’t get any video, because she didn’t sing it’. But then I saw videos, and realised she did. I was a bit upset about that.

“It’s my favourite album, and I have no memory of it. But I was in my seat for the whole concert. I’ve seen it before, on a previous tour, and I could tell you literally every detail. The show was still amazing, it’s more how this happened [that’s confusing]. It’s really weird to have videos, on your own phone, you don’t remember taking.”

These accounts are not isolated. In fact, while most people who watched Swift perform on Eras remember it as normal, significant numbers of Swifties – the most dedicated fans – have been coming forward to report varying degrees of amnesia.

Internet discussion boards reveal a mix of bafflement, upset and amusement, with fans navigating the contradiction between knowing they had a great time, but struggling to recall any specific details.

“My concert date was almost three weeks ago and I still don’t recall everything,”. One fan posted. “Like, I know I already went, but I also don’t feel like I went?”

Taylor Swift (Image: free)

Another wrote: “It’s so trippy! I was an absolute emotional mess cause I was so excited. It just feels like I blacked out for a whole day lol and now I’m just living life?? With no memories of the highlight of my year?? I hate it lol.”

A third: “Same! Like what the heck is going on?!”

For some it is several sections of black out – usually ten to 15-minute periods, though some have several sections missing – while others report recalling the evening in a kind of dreamlike state.

Sarah Wells saw Swift perform on May 6 in Nashville, Tennessee, having been a fan since she was eight years old.

“I made a point of not drinking any alcohol, because I didn’t want to end up forgetting anything, but then I ended up forgetting anyway. I can picture some things that happened – I haven’t got blackout for the whole thing – but there’s sections that are a complete blur.

“It’s weird, I was talking to my friends about it and it felt like a kind of dream. It happened so fast – like I waited so long to be there, then when I was there it was just over. It was really weird because after we got back to the hotel I was trying to remember different songs she performed and I couldn’t. Even now, I listen to songs and wonder, ‘did she do that on the tour?’”

None of the fans interviewed were drinking or using drugs or strong medication, and none have suffered from memory loss in the past. They are simply going to see Taylor Swift, then losing chunks of memory from one of the best nights of their lives.

And the show is huge. Coming to the end of its run in the US, the Eras Tour, made up of 44 songs spanning the ‘eras’ of Swift’s career, will soon move to Europe – with a total 146 shows planned globally by the end of 2024 including Murrayfield Stadium in July.

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No hard numbers have been released, but industry experts predict the show will generate more than $1 billion through ticket sales, merchandise and marketing – enough for the US Federal Reserve to credit her with shifting the country’s economy. Fans dancing at the Seattle concert are thought to have caused seismic activity equivalent of a 2.3 magnitude earthquake.

Or, as one fan put it, “she’s bigger than a planet, with her own gravitational pull”.

So why is it happening? How is Taylor Swift causing amnesia?

The internet, though full of conjecture, provides little in the way of fact.

Black magic provides the basis for one school of thought, with hundreds of TikTok videos making the case that Swift is in fact luring her fans into the occult, and somehow causing them to lose memory in the process.

The fact the singer is a Christian apparently has little bearing on the theories, with her 2020 hit Willow – believed to have a ‘witchy’ style and with a video featuring Swift dancing round a bonfire – forming the bulk of the purported evidence.

The videos seem to exist in an internet crossroads between the far-right, conspiracy theorists and conservative Christian groups, with frame-by-frame analysis of music videos and footage from the tour being used to argue the point.

Willow is indeed part of the Eras Tour set – Swift walks out hooded in a dark gown while backing dancers carry orbs – but these sorts of accusations actually go back much further, with conservative groups targeting the singer ever since she spoke out against Donald Trump, and because of her support for LGBT rights (an alternative conspiracy claims she’s the human clone of Zeena LaVey, a former spokesperson for the Church of Satan, based on the fact they look similar, though no one seems to be linking that with amnesia).

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But, whatever the case – and it does seem unlikely Taylor Swift is either a witch or a clone – it seems the amnesia phenomenon is not isolated to the Eras Tour.

Kate Packham, based in Edinburgh, saw Swift in 2018, on the Reputation Tour as it moved through Manchester. The first known example from outside the US, Kate saw Swift two nights in a row.

Kate says she remembers all of the first night, as normal. She remembers the second night too, apart from a 15-minute section when she left her seats and moved over to get up close.

“I remember running over, because I had a broken foot. I remember getting there too, because I remember thinking ‘we’ve done it, I can’t believe we’re at the front’, but that’s pretty much it. I took videos and photos, so I know I was there, but the next thing I remember is being back at my seat.”

So what ties the experiences together? At this point, it seemed likely something quite complicated was occurring inside the brains of the Swifties.

Professor Richard Morris is part of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences. One of the world’s leading neuroscientists, he specialises in the neurobiology of learning and memory.

He explained: “The contemporary neuroscience view of memory is that there isn’t just one type of memory, there’s a series of different processes in remembering events. One bit relates to encoding the information – you’re watching things in live time and your sensory perception system is keeping up. That is incredibly important for playing sport, for example. If you’re playing tennis, your visual system has to operate at lightning speed to estimate the path of the ball.

“But although the perceptual sensory system operates in real time, the memory system takes a little while to ‘make a memory’, as it were. It’s a bit like the developing process of an old fashioned, black and white photograph. You take the photograph, so there’s something there in the negative, and then you shine this onto some paper, and the paper forms something permanent. Memory is a bit like that.

“Then there is a separate process which comes after, which we call consolidation, where the system either keeps the information or doesn’t. If it does then other bio-chemical processes kick-in, and if they are activated then it results in the memory becoming a lasting one, otherwise it drifts away quite quickly.”

So while Swifties may be watching the show very closely, their brains are being inhibited from either encoding memory, or consolidating it, or both. Several talk about experiencing a huge level of focus, which could have put them into a kind of encoding trance – with the interviewees so absorbed by the show they aren’t able to form memories.

But Professor Morris also questioned whether there could be something else going on, which is why he approached a specialist in stress – Professor Shona Chattarji, Senior Professor of Neurobiology National Centre for Biological Science in Bangalore.

He explained that while mild stress is typically performance enhancing – aiding focus – prolonged, overwhelming stress can inhibit the brain.

Professor Chattarji said: “In this case, there’s obviously an overwhelming sensory overload [for Swifties], as part of a very positive experience. She’s there, she’s listening to someone she almost worships, and that’s all positive.

"But the stress hormone level could impair the encoding part, which is affecting the hippocampus, the factual encoding part of the brain, which encodes facts, events, people, time, space and things. If stress hormones are really high that encoding process could go wrong. The other possibility is that in the short-term she is encoding something, but in the consolidation phase, high stress hormone levels are not allowing her to. She’d register things but if you can’t recollect it the memory doesn’t exist.

“One can easily imagine the excitement of getting to the concert, and being around people who, like her, are extreme fans, with this sensory overload – even if it is a completely positive experience – that it would enhance her stress levels, for sure. That could be detrimental to recording factual details of what’s happening.”

“But there’s one other possibility – based in the amygdala, which processes emotionally salient information. It sounds like these fans had a fantastic time, but it could be that the stress hormone boosts the amygdala, and that does no favours to the hippocampus. It could be that in a brief moment of an ecstatic situation, that those factual details no longer matter that much. Being close to a religious guru can be similar, nothing else matters – everything else falls apart.”