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Memory And Retrograde Amnesia

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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

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The cause for Wearing’s amnesia is viral encephalitis, from the herpes simplex. If this virus travels to the brain it can cause swelling which leads to the brain crushing against the skull. The encephalitis affected various parts of the brain which includes the temporal lobes, the left frontal lobe, and the occipito- parietal lobe. The hippocampus, which is found in the temporal lobe, is completely destroyed affecting the function of memory.

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Many concerns have centered in on the possible links between repeated concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CPE. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a serious, degenerative brain disease that affects a person’s ability to think. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy involves the progressive brain damage, particularly in the frontal region of the brain, which controls many functions including people’s judgement, emotion, impulsive control, social behavior and their memory. A signature feature of the disease is abnormal deposits of a protein called tau that accumulates around small blood vessels in brain crevices. Researchers believe that multiple blows to the head may dislodge the tau protein from the cell structure and cause it to form in clumps inside nerve cells.

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Clive has damage to multiple parts of the brain including his hippocampus, and some of the frontal portion of the brain. The hippocampus is “a structure underneath the cortex that is important in many learning and memory tasks,” (Matlin, Farmer, 1983, p. 160). He continues to have problems creating memories, switching his short-term memories into long-term memories. After being infected, Clive is still able to talk, write, and even show affection to his wife, but a portion of his semantic and episodic memory system were affected.

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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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Amnesia, as an organic clinical disorder caused by brain damages, refers to permanent disturbance of declarative memory despite preserved cognitive functions (Markowitsch, 2001; Moscovitch, 2004). Patients with anterograde amnesia (AA) consistently show different degrees of impairment in forming declarative memory, with normal implicit and working memory. Studying amnesia provides insights on cognitive and biological mechanism underling memory, and a representative model is vital for understanding existing data and making predictions. Although researches on amnesia have progressed a lot since the famous case of H.M., a convincing and widely accepted model has yet to be established. One of the main debates concerning it is whether the major

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The physical damage to the brain is known as neurological amnesia, but amnesia can also stem from a psychologically traumatic event or a head

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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 &

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