Retrograde Amnesia Essay

Retrograde Amnesia has pros and cons. Pros would be forgetting about bad ex’s and tragic events like rape or witnessing a murder. Not remembering were keys are or where you live would be a con. Retrograde Amnesia is recollection failure Derivative of neurological or psychological nature. Retro means recent past or before so the name really speaks for itself. Early signs for retrograde amnesia would be consistency of forgetting things that not so long ago happened or getting lost in places where you should have known were to be. Forgetting names like I myself sometimes forget might seem like a symptom but it’s not. People generally differ in their knowledge in degrees when it comes to factual information. However, if forgetting names of relatives

In Chapter 12 of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Mr. William Thompson suffered from an extreme case of Korsakov’s, also known as Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome (Sacks, 1985, p. 109). According to Anderson (2010), Korsakoff syndrome can cause serious damage to one’s hippocampus and temporal lobe due to habitual alcoholism, resulting in amnesia (p. 201). Similar to HM (Anderson, 2010, p. 200), Mr. Thompson suffered from anterograde amnesia and could remember nothing for more than a few brief moments (Sacks, p. 109). Anderson (2010) states that anterograde amnesia results in the incapability of creating new memories, leading to fractional or absolute inability to remember something that just happened (p. 201). Yet, one’s long-term memories before the incident remain intact; such as when Mr. Thompson recognized his younger brother, Bob, as he walked by the window (Sacks, 1985, p. 112-113). Mr. Thompson and HM both suffered from anterograde amnesia and could remember some long-term memories but not remember new ones, signifying that the neural makeup involved in making fresh memories are diverse from maintaining past memories (Anderson, 2010, p. 202).

Lucy Whitmore is the character with anterograde amnesia. Anterograde amnesia is a loss of memory of what happens after the

In 1985, a musicologist, and a husband to Deborah Wearing by the name of Clive Wearing, was a man in his mid-forties that suffered from a brain infection called herpes encephalitis (Sacks,2016). The infection caused damage to different regions of the brain that is connected to one’s memory (Sacks,2016). This infection caused the brain to swell up, and caused it to get crushed against the skull (France, 2005). Unfortunately, he was then diagnosed with a disorder called amnesia (Sacks,2016). Clive Wearing suffered from two types of amnesia such as, Anterograde, and Retrograde amnesia which both effected his memory (The Human Memory,2010). Retrieved from http://www.human-memory.net/disorders_anterograde.html.

Anterograde amnesia refers to a memory deficit from brain injury that prevents patients to store new informations in their short term memories. The patients show normal memories for events that occurred before the injury but has severely impaired ability to recall information about events that occurred after the incident. Anterograde amnesia is reflected in the movie “50 first dates” through the main character, Lucy Whitmore, whose memory lasts only a day because her memory stopped on the day of car accident. (additional description) The movie, “50 first dates,” contains valid depiction of anterograde amnesia yet it also contains some dramatic points that is far from reality.

Amnesia is common recognized psychological problem in daily life and according to Talmi, Caplan, Richards, and Moscovitch (2015), amnesia is usually thought as abilities’ loss in long-term memory regardless of intact of short-term memory. In other words, some people suffer from the amnesia related with the impairment of short-term memory and the others suffer from the amnesia related with the impairment of long-term memory. Those amnesias can happen not only by physical wound, but also psychological trauma. For example, “A 34-year-old man without past history of any psychiatric or neurological disorder developed severe anterograde amnesia following a psychological trauma” (KUMAR, RAO, SUNNY, &GANGADHAR, 2007). When it comes to sorts of amnesias,

Everything the human organism experiences is perceived and stored by the brain. The memory stays in the brain for life. Indeed, in the late 1880s, psychology Freud introduced the concept of repress memories and he state that the brain repressed traumatic memories automatically. His concept was developed base on patients he had worked with, not on scientific methods. The question is that is it really possible for the brain to block out memories? If so, how is it possible? According to Robert Todd Carroll (1994), some psychologists agree that repressed memories can be restored through therapy. In that sense, it is possible that Elaine could recover some painful memories from her childhood during the process of psychotherapy. Then repressed memory

The most obvious aspect was that her speaking abilities seemed to have slowed down or somewhat gone in reverse. It took her a very long time to be able to speak understandably. She has been in therapy since that time. Both my mother and sisters ‘disabilities’ could have something to do with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is believed to be involved in learning and memory. Another neurotransmitter – endorphins – has been apart of my family’s life. We are all really into exercise, which is a natural ‘upper’, releasing endorphins into the brain and thus making us feel better. My mother loves exercise, stating that it always makes her feel more relaxed and happy. That makes sense because that’s what endorphins are supposed to do. For me, I usually feel better after exercise, but it’s not always like that. However, after I exercise, I’m always able to concentrate more and thus easier for me to get work done. When going to back to the topic of my mother and sister’s accident, they both had MRI’s. I never learned what was found, but I knew they had them

A fundamental aspect of human memory is that the more time elapsed since an event, the fainter the memory becomes. This has been shown to be true on a relatively linear scale with the exception of our first three to four years of life (Fitzgerald, 1991). It is even common for adults not to have any memory before the age of six or seven. The absence of memory in these first years has sparked much interest as to how and why it happens. Ever since Freud (1916/1963) first popularized the phenomenon there have been many questions and few robust empirical studies. Childhood amnesia is defined as the period of life from which no events are remembered (Usher & Neisser, 1993) beginning at birth and ending at the onset of your

Losing one’s memory can be a mysterious affliction, and the causes can be quite complex. Severe memory loss is introduced in author Oliver Sacks’ collection of stories The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and lectures given by professor Jim Davies can help with understanding of some of the concepts introduced in the book. In chapter two, The Lost Mariner, the patient Jimmie is suffering from aspects of both retrograde and anterograde amnesia, which Davies explained as loss of memory of events or facts learned before an event (the event that caused the amnesia), and loss of ability to create new memories after the event, respectively. In more detail, and in relation to our book (here, the target example), retrograde amnesia would consist of any loss of memory that happened prior to an event, such as an injury or onset of disease in Jimmie’s case. Dr. Davies’ explanation of retrograde amnesia helps to understand Jimmie’s case, where in the year 1975 he is unable to recall any events after 1945. As well, the explanation of anterograde amnesia as including symptoms such as inability to form new memories, learn information or tasks, or to recall the recent past is useful when applied to Jimmie’s experience of not being able to recall events that happened even a few minutes prior. Jimmie’s suffering from both retro and anterograde amnesia, as explained by Sacks, results from Korsakov’s syndrome – a destruction of memory caused by alcoholic

“Amnesia refers to a large scale loss of memories that should not have been forgotten. They may include important milestones in life, memorable events, key people in our lives, and vital facts we have been told or taught”(Nordqvist, 1). The chance of developing amnesia might increase if you’ve experienced brain surgery, head injury or trauma, stroke, alcohol abuse, or seizures. Amnesia can be classified into different types depending on which aspect of memory is affected; this is often determined by the areas in the brain that are damaged. “Many kind of amnesia are associated with damage to the hippocampus and related areas of the brain”(Mastin, 4). Diagnosing the cause of amnesia involves a range of tests including medical history, blood

“Psychogenic amnesias are usually caused by some sort of emotional trauma. Emotional trauma is the common thread that runs through the amnesia associated with the following disorders: dissociative amnesia (the inability to recall significant personal information); fugue (memory loss accompanied by sudden, unexpected travel from home); dissociative identity disorder (the presence of two or more distinct personalities, with the inability to recall extensive time periods); and post-traumatic stress disorder (significant distress and memory disturbances following an extreme traumatic event). Psychogenic memories, while principally involving episodic information, may extend to semantic information, which is rarely seen in biogenic amnesia” (Chara 1).

Throughout this chapter Jenni Ogden discusses how amnesia can affect a person’s life by examining the life of H. M. As a young man H. M. suffered from epileptic seizures, they were affecting every part of his life and because of this he had brain surgery at 27

Her doctor was Joseph Keats and he is the head of the Callahan institute for brain injury. The fictional disorder is the writer’s version of anterograde amnesia. Anterograde amnesia patients exhibit an inability to remember day to day events after the point of injury. Typical symptoms of anterograde amnesia displayed throughout the move. For example, different moments where she repeats after every kiss, “nothing beats a first kiss”. In the beginning she meets Henry over and over for the “First time” and she then goes on to date and marry him. One of my favorite scenes in the movie that demonstrates the severity of her memory loss is when she beats the crap out of Henry’s best friend with a metal bat. Another example of how extreme this form of memory loss is when they show the scene of them after they have been dating a while. Henry ask her to marry him and after they say yes they fall asleep together. The next morning she wakes up beside him she goes hysterical and attacks

Amnesia is a condition that is basically just memory loss, either stored information or new information that cannot be kept in the mind. The two main types of amnesia are anterograde and retrograde amnesia. Anterograde amnesia is the inability to remember new things since the transferring from short term to long term does not work. Retrograde amnesia is the loss of existing memories, and not being able to recall events that have already happened to you. Some other types of amnesia that are less popular are post traumatic amnesia which occurs after a traumatic brain injury, and global amnesia which is where the person will experience both anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia at the same time. Amnesia has several different causes such as lesions to the