You Can Learn to Remember: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life pdfdrive com

lost memory
I
n extreme circumstances a memory can be so unbearable that the person who
has had the experience will prefer temporarily to deny – or to wipe out – their
entire personal histories rather than face that one memory. Sufferers of
psychogenic amnesia (also known as “hysterical” or “fugue” amnesia) may be
able to recite the alphabet or remember how to work complex machinery, but
will be unable to give their names, addresses or any personal details. The
psychogenic amnesiac usually recovers after a few days, and there seems to be
no structural damage to the brain. Some researchers believe that the victim’s
memories have been disconnected from one another; others do not actually
believe in the condition, claiming that it represents a conscious refusal to
remember, rather than a genuine inability.
The most common cause of amnesia is a blow to the head. When a football
player is knocked unconscious, he first suffers post-traumatic amnesia – defined
as a period of unconsciousness accompanied by a resulting confusion and an
inability to say exactly where he is. When this phase is over, he may have
retrograde amnesia – the inability to remember events before the accident,
sometimes stretching back as far as several years. As he recovers, the earlier
memories come back first, and his blank spell retreats to a point several minutes
before the accident. But those last few minutes are almost without exception
never recovered, because the trauma has interfered with their consolidation. For
a time during recovery, the football player may also suffer from anterograde
amnesia, or a difficulty in learning new facts. This seems to be a problem with
consolidating long-term memory, because tests reveal the short-term memory to
be unaffected by anterograde amnesia.
Another type of amnesia occurs if we suffer damage to the hippocampus
and thalamus (through such conditions as encephalitis, stroke, a prolonged
period of drinking too much, or vitamin B1 deficiency). People with this
problem often have good recall of the past and normal short-term memories, but
they are unable to recall what they had for breakfast only an hour ago. Their
procedural memory (see
p.38
) seems unaffected. If allowed to play with the

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same puzzle, day after day, their procedural memory will enable them to become
steadily faster at solving it, even though they never remember having solved it
before.