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Amnesia Case Study Psychology

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One famous case of amnesia supporting Squire's view is patient H.M. (Scoville & Milner, 1957), who had parts of his left and right temporal lobe, hippocampus, amygdala and surrounding areas of both removed. He developed severe anterograde amnesia, the inability to learn new information, resulting in an almost completely absent short-term memory storage. He also had moderate retrograde amnesia, unable to remember information between 3 to 11 years prior to his surgery, but with other long-term memories unaffected. Explaining this, Squire argued that memories are consolidated in the hippocampus, easily disrupted by trauma during this. They become less dependent on the hippocampus with time, eventually being stored in the neocortex (Alvarez & …show more content…

Patient N.B. underwent surgery removing areas of her left anterior temporal-lobe to cure epilepsy, sparing the hippocampus, but removing a large area of her perirhinal cortex (Bowles et al, 2007). Her recollection and familiarity were tested using the remember-know procedure, being presented with a word list and asked to state if she recognised the words and if this was based on specific details or familiarity. Her recollection score was higher than average, whereas her familiarity score was lower than average. The remember-know procedure has been criticised for its reliance on an individual report of recollection and familiarity, resulting in variability (Strack & Forster, 1995). Due to this, NB's receiver operating characteristics (ROC) were tested, relying on confidence ratings of old or new items based on recollection and familiarity by stating that they are two individual processes. Results showed her familiarity was still lower than controls, but this may be because she appeared unwilling to give low confidence responses. She also maintained higher confidence responses for recollection. Although these results suggest the hippocampus is necessary for recollection, and perirhinal cortex for familiarity, it is important to consider that other areas likely affected during surgery may also produce similar

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The experiment showed how our memory can be easily mislead even if we saw it with our own eyes. I believe Gould’s essay is indeed convincing when it comes to whether or not to doubt what people believe they remember is actually

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The determined progress of United powers in 1944 and 1945 accomplished a triumph, so entire as to keep any restoration of the crushed administrations. Albeit celebrated with equity by the victors, it was picked up at a gigantic cost to all of Europe. The abundances of the Soviet powers, which assaulted and plundered their way through eastern Australia are currently well known,4 however for a long time this went unrecognized by western scholars. In the event that the lead of the western Partners was far prevalent, add up to war can't be pursued without leaving devastation and an enormous loss of non military personnel life afterward and, what one creator has called, "aggregate amnesia",5 has darkened the expenses of freedom as armed forces battled

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He still remembered things that you would be surprised that somebody would still want to hold on to. He remembers his family 's discomforting feel; his so-called friends constantly mocking him, taking advantage of him. His agitation as a result of the ethically questionable experiment is apparent and deeply felt: “ Why can 't I remember?

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At the time the physician removed parts of his hippocampus as a way to stop his seizures. HM seizures went away, but he could not form any new memories. However, one form of memory left intact in both HM and Leonard is the ability to learn skills. This ability is known as procedural memory, a memory that is shown by performance rather than by conscious recollection (Kalat, 1998), it allows us to learn how to do things such as ride a bike or play an instrument. The areas of the brain outside of the hippocampus are involved in procedural memory, which is why an injury that results in anterograde amnesia doesn't affect procedural memory.

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According to memory researched Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, people can forget fights they had, people they once knew, and all manner of details across time and place. Even eyewitnesses in very serious felony cases – i.e., people who have a big interest in accurately recalling an event – have been known to “remember”

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“In truth [memory] no longer represents our past to us, … if it still deserves the name of memory, it is because it prolongs their useful effect into the present moment.” (Bergson, 1910). This is a powerful statement with regards to amnesiac patients. KC suffered brain damage, and consequently amnesia, after a motorbike accident. “… KC may be said to have global anterograde amnesia (AA), and episodic retrograde amnesia (RA)”,

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Essentially, it is the knowledge of how to do certain things. Clive experiences this in his ability to play the piano. Even though he isn't able to remember experiences of playing music, his tactile knowledge of the keys and ability to read music remains within his memory. While the longterm and shorter memory were largely affected by the destruction of the Hippocampus the procedural memory is a type of implicit memory and the part of the brain that was destroyed by the encephalitis was not necessary for implicit memory, but more so for explicit. Abilities like playing the piano, riding a bike, and walking would not necessarily be stored in the long term memory but in the areas surrounding it, like the motor cortex.

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Moreover, “a behavioural syndrome results showing not only semantic-memory impairment but also particular difficulty remembering past events as personal happenings” (Tulving, 1989). Lastly, in Endel Tulving’s conclusion to his article he states “traditionally held views about the unity of memory are no longer tenable. A more appropriate view seems to be that of multiple memory systems. Remembering one’s past is a different, perhaps more advanced, achievement of the brain than simply knowing about it” ( Tulving,

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This concept, that when people who have anterograde amnesia are surrounded by people they love they are able to remember better, is something that psychologist have been looking into in more recent years and found

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To what extent do you believe that psychogenic amnesia is distinct from organic amnesia? Amnesia is the total or partial loss of memory and can affect different types of memory (Madan, 2011). In order to be able to help those with amnesia using the best treatment, the different forms of amnesia need to be understood correctly. In knowing this, the treatment can be designed around the type of amnesia, with the cause, symptoms and ways to help becoming more specific and focused. By studying the diseases and improving our knowledge of the roles that memory plays we can increase our understanding of the brain structures and how the types of memory fit together.

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This brings back to the idea that memories aren’t reliable but in fact they have been constructed according to our beliefs and stereotypes. This can also be seen in Allport and Postman’s study where participants were asked to recall details of a picture. The participants stated that the black man was the person who was holding the razor when in reality it was the white man. This demonstrated that our memories are actively being

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This is what other researchers have thought of too, and therefore a conclusion was made that additional processes have been taking place as well. Another strength is that there is neuropsychological evidence for this model as a patient, HM (Milner, 1966) underwent surgery which impaired his hippocampus and in turn affected his long-term memory as it no longer functioned properly, whereas his short-term memory was rather functional. Due to this we can conclude that these two processes are involved in the process of memory, as one of the stores was affected when the brain was damaged but the other was not (Baddeley, 2009).

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Also, another part about the memory that I did not know prior to this course is that the whole brain is not used when it comes to using your memory. The amygdala, the hippocampus, the cerebellum, and the prefrontal cortex are the main parts that your brain uses to retrieve and store memories.

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The biological approach to the basis of memory is explained in terms of underlying biological factors such as the activity of the nervous system, genetic factors, biochemical and neurochemicals. In general terms memory is our ability to encode, store, retain and recall information and past experiences afterwards in the human brain. In biological terms, memory is the recreation of past experiences by simultaneous activation or firing of neurons. Some of the major biopsychological research questions on memory are what are the biological substrates of memory, where are memories stored in the brain, how are memories assessed during recall and what is the mechanism of forgetting. The two main reasons that gave rise to the interest in biological basis of memory are that researchers became aware of the fact that many memory deficits arise from injuries to the brain.

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In one of the few neuroimaging studies pertaining to patterns of retrieval in episodic memory, Polyn and colleagues (2005) found that patterns of activity were similar when subjects actively viewed faces, places, and objects as when subjects attempted to reactivate memories of these specific images. This degree of similarity between encoding and retrieval was found to predict how much information about the images subjects were able to retrieve, with greater degrees of similarity predicting greater information recall (Polyn et al.,

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