I found amnesia to be very
interesting. Amnesia is the loss of memory, usually from hippocampal damage and
some times from surrounding areas of the medial temporal lobe. The two main
forms of amnesia are anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia. Anterograde
amnesia is the inability to form new memories after the brain damage;
retrograde amnesia is the inability to recall memories before the brain damage.
Here is an article that shows other forms of amnesia like Korsakoff’s amnesia
and many more.
One of the most interesting things
about amnesia is that short-term memory or better known as working memory,
which is memory we use at the time, is not affected but long-term memory is.
You can take a patient with amnesia, have them memorize a few numbers, and after
a while without other distractions you can ask them to recall the numbers and
they will, but if you give them some other task to complete, they will not
remember the numbers that they were given at the beginning, this probably
happens because when the patient has to start thinking about something else the
memory of the numbers has to be stored in long-term memory, but since it is not
working, it doesn’t happen. Another interesting thing about amnesia is that
when patients with it see them selves on a picture they assume it is not them
and that the person standing there is someone else, while when they look in the
mirror the recognize them selves and are not shocked by changes from age,
mostly because we know when we see a reflection in front of us that it is us
standing there.
I like that the video describes it as swiss cheese,I never even knew there was such a thing as anterograde amnesia. In movies they always show it as retrograde amnesia and they only can't remember right before the accident or a few years before the accident.It would be interesting to see what happens when someone has anterograde amnesia.
ReplyDeleteI wonder why it is that amnesia only affects long term memory and not our working memory. I saw in the video that people with amnesia confabulate, which means they fill in the blanks by making up stuff because they don't remember certain things. It must be very confusing for people around them when they do this.
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