Even though it came out more than 20 years ago, many people still remember "Finding Nemo" thanks to one of its beloved main characters: Dory. The blue fish is remembered not only for her happy-go-lucky personality but for ...
Nov 21, 2023
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Neuroscientists have discovered a fascinating connection between the retention of early life memories and brain developmental trajectories associated with autism.
Nov 8, 2023
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Whenever I teach about memory in my child development class at Rutgers University, I open by asking my students to recall their very first memories. Some students talk about their first day of pre-K; others talk about a time ...
Jun 9, 2022
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Chris J. Hanson was preparing to leave his beachfront hotel on the last day of vacation when his mind started malfunctioning in a rare and mysterious way.
Jan 6, 2022
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(HealthDay)—Imagine standing at your bathroom sink, and then you suddenly find yourself in bed but you don't remember how you got there. Then you discover hours have passed, yet you have no memory of what happened during ...
Nov 17, 2020
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Doctors treating drug-overdose patients should be on the lookout for abnormal brain swelling, a byproduct of a mysterious syndrome that can be fatal and may cause profound amnesia in survivors, a new study suggests.
Mar 19, 2019
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How and when the ability to form and store memories arises are topics of great interest to neuroscientists. Now Yale researchers have identified three distinct stages in brain development that occur before episodic memories ...
Jan 11, 2019
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A research team led by Lam Woo Professor of Biomedical Engineering Ed X. Wu of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Hong Kong has made major breakthrough in unveiling the mysteries ...
Sep 29, 2017
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Do you remember taking your very first step, or enjoying your second birthday party? Probably not, but that probably won't seem weird to you because we have become conditioned to accept infantile amnesia as a fact of life.
Aug 8, 2017
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In 2002's "The Bourne Identity," our protagonist wakes up having been shot and plucked, unconscious, from the Mediterranean on to a fishing boat with no memory of who he is or how he got there. From there, the movie franchise ...
Aug 5, 2016
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Amnesia (from Greek Ἀμνησία) is a condition in which one's memory is lost. The causes of amnesia have traditionally been divided into categories. Memory appears to be stored in several parts of the limbic system of the brain, and any condition that interferes with the function of this system can cause amnesia. Functional causes are psychological factors, such as mental disorder, post-traumatic stress or, in psychoanalytic terms, defense mechanisms. Amnesia may also appear as spontaneous episodes, in the case of transient global amnesia.
However, there are different types of memory, for example procedural memory (i.e. automated skills) and declarative memory (personal episodes or abstract facts), and often only one type is impaired. For example, a person may forget the details of personal identity, but still retain a learned skill such as the ability to play the piano.
In addition, the terms are used to categorize patterns of symptoms rather than to indicate a particular cause (etiology). Both categories of amnesia can occur together in the same patient, and commonly result from drug effects or damage to the brain regions most closely associated with episodic memory: the medial temporal lobes and especially the hippocampus.
An example of mixed retrograde and anterograde amnesia may be a motorcyclist unable to recall driving his motorbike prior to his head injury (retrograde amnesia), nor can he recall the hospital ward where he is told he had conversations with family over the next two days (anterograde amnesia).
The effects of amnesia can last long after the condition has passed. Some sufferers claim that their amnesia changes from a neurological condition to also being a psychological condition, whereby they lose confidence and faith in their own memory and accounts of past events.
Another effect of some forms of amnesia may be impaired ability to imagine future events. A 2006 study showed that future experiences imagined by amnesiacs with bilaterally damaged hippocampus lacked spatial coherence, and the authors speculated that the hippocampus may bind different elements of experience together in the process of re-experiencing the past or imagining the future.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
