Veteran journalist Katie Couric revealed that she had a bout of transient global amnesia, a rare but temporary condition that suddenly robs people of nearly all memories even while they maintain self-awareness.
The former “TODAY” show anchor recounted a scary day two weeks ago when she couldn’t name the year or who resided at the White House.
“It was Saturday, June 27, 2026. But when I was asked the month, the year, and who was president, I got them wrong,” Couric wrote on Substack on Monday.
“I wasn’t sure of the month. I thought it was 2024. And I believed Joe Biden was president.”
The 69-year-old Couric recalled she was in Aspen and spent the morning at a farmers market where she scored iced coffee, peaches, nectarines, a bag of kettle corn and “a cute straw hat I really didn’t need.”
But Couric said that when she and her husband, John Molner, drove to the Aspen Ideas Festival later that day, she went blank.
The condition affects 3.4 to 10.4 people per 100,000 per year, according to the National Institutes of Health.
But for people 50 or over, the rate of transient global amnesia jumps to 23.5 to 32 per 100,000 per year, the NIH said.
“Patients typically present with a sudden onset of memory loss lasting several hours, featuring retrograde and pronounced anterograde amnesia,” according to the federal agency.
“Patients retain self-identity and demonstrate no neurological or cognitive deficits. They remain cooperative and can name objects, with no history of trauma or epilepsy. Symptoms last between 1 and 24 hours, typically occurring later in the day rather than after waking,” the NIH said.
The threat of repeated attacks is minimal, but not impossible.
“Once resolved, the symptoms of transient global amnesia rarely recur,” the NIH added.
As scary as it could be to suffer transient global amnesia, Dr. Laura Stein said she’s actually pleased to make this finding because it’s, more than likely, just a one-time attack.
“It’s one of the most disturbing experiences for a patient and especially their family members,” said Stein, a vascular neurologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. “But as a neurologist, it’s actually one of the most reassuring diagnoses to make because it’s benign.”
The syndrome has been linked to migraines or traced to incidents of mini-seizures or strokes.
The brain’s nonstop memory function is so “intricately complex” that it’s “sensitive to even minute changes,” according to Dr. Jennifer Pauldurai.
“For 24 hours a day, our brain is doing billions of intricate things, beautiful work, and having this rare blip in memory dysfunction shouldn’t be as scary as it sounds,” said Pauldurai, medical director of the Inova Brain Health and Memory Disorders Program at Inova Health.
The episode has no link to Alzheimer’s, dementia or other more lasting cognitive declines.
“We try to identify triggers for these events. Sometimes it’s when people are under stress or have heavy exertion,” Stein said. “But we don’t always identify a trigger and people go back to living their normal lives after a really scary event like this.”
