Have you ever wondered how memories work from a biological viewpoint? Along with the frontal cortex of the brain, the hippocampus is the center for processing memory. Before understanding memories, perception must be understood. It is the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses. Once a person perceives a stimulus, whether it be seeing, feeling, or smelling, neurons fire up to the hippocampus and it is encoded with electricity and chemicals. But what happens when a person has a serious head trauma or other brain tampering mechanisms? What can happen is medically called amnesia, and two special forms of it are called retrograde and anterograde amnesia. Retrograde amnesia can be described as the loss of memories that have occurred or information that was learned …show more content…
When damage to the head and brain occur, this disease will specifically target the most recent memories a person had encoded. According to Cristen Conger, “The more severe the case, the farther back in time the memory loss extends” (Conger). The process in which amnesia affects the brain is called Ribot’s law which simply states that time plays a crucial role in amnesia. The neurons that had previously built memories from years before have a stronger pathway from having been retrieved or remembered before. The main type of memory that is lost with retrograde amnesia, along with its counterpart anterograde amnesia, is explicit and episodic memory. Explicit memory requires conscious thought to retrieve information. Such examples are naming animals or remembering what groceries you had bought yesterday. Similarly, episodic memory deals with past personal experiences in which requires conscious thought. These neural pathways are stored in a different place than your