BOTH TYPES OF AMNESIA HOW TO
Debate continues regarding precisely how to characterise this profile and what this reveals about the function of neural areas putatively associated with this condition. Group studies are also informative in extending beyond the individual, offering greater statistical power, and allowing identification of consistent patterns, although care must be taken when collapsing across patients with possibly heterogeneous profiles of damage and ability, and combining behavioural and imaging methodology can be useful in this regardĩ, although the lesion-deficit model has been dominant and studies tend to focus on how individuals with amnesia are impaired, a comprehensive picture can be obtained only by contrasting this with patterns of preservation. Understanding of amnesia has been substantially driven by case studies of patients such as HMĦ, and indeed this approach remains informative provided that robust methodological approaches are adoptedħ. This well-established primary neurological locus means that research with patients can inform both the amnesic condition and how the hippocampus and MTL contribute to memory and cognitive function more broadly.
Although a range of brain areas can be involved in profound memory loss (for example, the prefrontal cortex or, in the case of alcoholic Korsakoff syndrome, the thalamic/diencephalic region), neurologically derived amnesia has more commonly been associated with damage to the hippocampus specifically and to the medial temporal lobes (MTLs) more broadly. The neurological basis of amnesia will obviously depend on the aetiological nature and extent. The large majority of cases represent adult-acquired memory loss, although individuals have been identified as having ‘developmental amnesia’, acquired at birth or in infancyģ. Herpes simplex encephalitis), and alcoholic Korsakoff’s syndrome. Causes can include traumatic head injury, neurosurgery (for example, to treat severe epilepsy), anoxia/hypoxia (lack of oxygen), ischaemia, viral infection ( Instead, the focus is on the amnesic condition as a long-lasting or permanent disorder, emerging from an organic or neurological cause. However, the nature of these problems means that other functional and mechanistic descriptions likely apply, and so they are outside the scope of this overview.
The extensive impacts of this condition mean that individuals with amnesia usually require assistance in daily life.Īmnesia can be temporary or have a psychological root (for example, transient global amnesiaĢ) and is a term used in reference to memory problems in various neurological conditions (for example, amnestic mild cognitive impairment). Mnesis (memory), and at a broad level, amnesia can be defined as a profound loss of memory. This is likely due in part to the centrality of memory in defining our place in the world and sense of self, in enabling effective everyday functioning, and of the often-striking loss of memory function in patients with amnesia, relative to healthy individuals. Those with dissociative amnesia may be at greater risk of self-injury and suicide.The ‘amnesic syndrome’ has a relatively high profile both in the neuropsychological literature and in popular culture. Most cases of dissociative amnesia are temporary, but memory gaps can last anywhere from a few minutes to an entire lifetime. When a person with generalized dissociative amnesia forgets everything about the self and their life, they may move to a new location and establish a new identity but, when discovered, they don’t know how they got there or why they have no identification. A person with dissociative amnesia may not remember friends, family members, or coworkers. Symptoms range from forgetting personal information, like one’s own name and address, to blocking out specific traumatic events or even the events of one’s entire life. Dissociative amnesia is not normal forgetting, like misplacing keys or forgetting the name of someone you met once or twice.
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