Amnesia studied as a disorder of memory remains an avenue to enrich clinical understanding of a condition that continues to be powerfully challenging to this day.
Abstract Memory and forgetfulness have been viewed since antiquity from perspectives of physical, emotional, and spiritual states of well-being, and conceptualized philosophically. Publication types Historical Article Review. If you develop this condition, you will have difficulty forming new memories but may not be aware of it. Severe trauma or stress can also cause dissociative amnesia. A specific type of dissociative amnesia, called dissociative fugue, can lead to unexpected traveling or wandering.
It can also lead to amnesia around the circumstances of traveling as well as forgetting other details of your life. If you receive electroconvulsive therapy for depression or other conditions, you could experience retrograde amnesia of the weeks or months before your treatment. You could also experience anterograde amnesia, usually resolving within 2 weeks of the treatment. Amnesia can be diagnosed by your doctor or a neurologist.
They will start by asking questions about your memory loss, as well as other symptoms you may have. They may ask a family member or caregiver to help with their evaluation, since you may not be able to remember the answers to their questions. Your doctor may also use cognitive tests to check your memory.
They may also order other diagnostic tests. They may use blood tests to check for nutritional deficiencies, infections, or other issues.
They may also perform tests to check for seizures. Chemically induced amnesia, from alcohol for example, can be resolved through detoxification. Once the drug is out of your system, your memory problems will probably subside. Amnesia from mild head trauma usually resolves without treatment over time. Amnesia from severe head injury may not recede.
However, improvements usually occur within six to nine months. Amnesia from dementia is often incurable. However, your doctor may prescribe medications to support learning and memory. If you have persistent memory loss, your doctor may recommend occupational therapy. This type of therapy can help you learn new information and memory skills for daily living. Every person has two of these: one on the right side of the brain, and one on the left. The hippocampus is pretty small—around 3. Damaging the hippocampus is the most common way to get amnesia, but damaging other brain areas that communicate with the hippocampus can also cause amnesia.
In this study, we are going to focus on the hippocampus, because the role of the hippocampus in amnesia has been studied the most. There are two ways that scientists talk about amnesia. First, amnesia can happen alongside other problems. For example, there are some diseases and injuries that can cause damage to the hippocampus and cause memory loss. People can have different degrees of amnesia as a symptom, from mild memory problems to severe memory problems.
Having amnesia as part of a large set of problems is fairly common. But amnesia can also occur by itself, without other problems. Amnesia by itself is very rare, because damage to just the hippocampus is very rare. Luckily, these things do not happen very often. But if a person does damage the hippocampus, this usually causes the person to have memory problems. Interestingly, people who have amnesia have a hard time learning some kinds of information, but not other kinds of information.
People who have amnesia are very rare, but they are very important for teaching doctors and scientists about how memory works and how scientists can help people with memory impairment to get better. One way that a person can get amnesia is after an incident that prevents oxygen from getting to the brain.
This can happen as a result of a heart attack, very bad seizures, or a traumatic brain injury. When the brain is not getting enough oxygen, brain tissue starts to shrink also called atrophy and does not work well any more. The hippocampus is very sensitive to a lack of oxygen. This means that it atrophies faster than other parts of the brain when it does not have enough oxygen. Unfortunately, when the brain is injured, sometimes it does not heal the same way that skin heals when a person gets a scrape or a cut.
Sometimes, the brain stays injured and atrophied and causes problems like amnesia. Scientists have learned a lot about amnesia and different types of memory by studying people who have damaged the hippocampus. The most famous patient with amnesia is known by his initials: H. Scientists use initials to protect the identity of patients when they write about them in scientific articles.
Henry Molaison was born in Molaison had seizures when he was a child, which means that his brain was not working normally. These seizures caused Mr. Molaison to have a very difficult life. To stop the seizures, a brain surgeon named Dr. William Scoville removed both of Mr. Because this happened a long time ago, the surgeon was not completely sure what would happen.
Scientists did not know what the hippocampus was important for yet, and Dr. Scoville thought he could help Mr. A good thing that happened because of the surgery was that Mr. But, unfortunately, removing both of Mr. He had amnesia. Amnesia made lots of things difficult for Mr. After his death, a postmortem exam revealed that only a small portion of his brain — a region in the hippocampus — was damaged.
These findings, along with data from other studies of people with amnesia, helped researchers link the hippocampus to memory loss, according to the study.
An unlucky bathroom tumble robbed Scott Bolzan, a former National Football League athlete, of 46 years of memories. After hitting the back of his head, Bolzan remembered nothing of his wife and children, of his time in the NFL, or of his subsequent career in aviation, ABC News reported. A brain scan later showed that there was no blood flowing to the right temporal lobe of the brain, which is associated with memory.
Bolzan's retrograde amnesia — which erases memories prior to an injury — is one of the most severe cases on record and is likely irreversible. However, Bolzan was not mentally impaired in any other way and can still form new memories, according to ABC. At the age of 32, single mother Naomi Jacobs woke up one morning in having forgotten nearly two decades — all the details of her life since — and believing herself to be 15 years old.
Her own home was completely unfamiliar to her, and she didn't recognize her year-old son, though she could still recall phone numbers and could drive a car, the Daily Mirror reported.
Jacobs had kept meticulous diaries over the years, and she used them to piece together the details of her forgotten life, which included accounts of drug use, psychotic episodes and abusive relationships, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
Her memory returned slowly, with most of it restored within eight weeks, and she wrote about the experience in her book " Forgotten Girl: A Powerful True Story of Amnesia, Secrets and Second Chances " Pan Macmillan, Current page: Page 1.
Mindy Weisberger is a Live Science senior writer covering a general beat that includes climate change, paleontology, weird animal behavior, and space.
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