A new study on infantile memory formation in rats points to the importance of critical periods in early-life learning on functional development of the brain. The research, conducted by scientists at New York University's ...
Jul 18, 2016
0
970
(Medical Xpress) -- The term mind-blowing has been used to describe great sexual encounters for many generations, but for one 54-year-old woman, sex with her husband really was mind-blowing.
A study led by Professor James Russell shines a light on the phenomenon of 'infantile amnesia'. He argues that children's ability to recall events depends on their being able to unify the environmental elements of when, what ...
Dec 1, 2014
1
1
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
0
13
(PhysOrg.com) -- “I’ll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time,” says the character Aaron in the 1987 movie Broadcast News. He and the woman he’s talking to have a lot of common ground, ...
Aug 24, 2011
1
0
Most of us don't have any memories from the first three to four years of our lives – in fact, we tend to remember very little of life before the age of seven. And when we do try to think back to our earliest memories, it ...
Jul 13, 2016
1
81
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
0
30
Neuroscientists have discovered a fascinating connection between the retention of early life memories and brain developmental trajectories associated with autism.
Nov 8, 2023
0
99
The inability of individuals to remember the very earliest years of their lives, called infantile amnesia, has been studied for many years in adults, who seem to recall very little before ages 3 or 4. But children also experience ...
May 11, 2011
0
0
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
0
16
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
