Remember a phone number when you don’t have your phone book in hand, when you recognize someone you know on the street and you know your name, you remember where we went on vacation last year?All these functions are usually attributed to a very important basic psychological process: memory; However, when the ability to remember things from the past is affected or when we are unable to learn something new, our memory may be affected and we may be victims of anesthegrade amnesia. on that.
Currently, the role of memory is also important for the time it is gained when it is in good working order. So, people with it?Good memory ?, are they able to solve a problem more quickly if they have already solved the same problem, that is, if they have already practiced the necessary procedure to come up with the solution.
- It’s worth saying the same thing about memorizing skills like swimming.
- Easy typing on a keyboard or cycling.
- Skills that once learned are no longer forgotten even when we stop practicing them for long periods of time.
- In the absence of practice.
- But in a short time it is possible to recover the previous level of performance.
Viewed from this perspective, human memory seems to be responsible for the operation of very different tasks, however, this is not always done satisfactorily, some failures, such as not remembering where we leave the keys of our house, do not seem very serious. In other situations, failure can seem alarming, such as when you don’t remember who you just talked to.
Memory is the ability we have to learn, organize and fix events from our past and is closely related to another basic psychological process: attention. Thanks to memory, we are able to store data through very complex mechanisms that develop in three stages: encoding. , storage and recovery. The presence of amnesia prevents this ability from developing properly.
We can define memory as the psychological process of encoding information, storing it in our brain and retrieving it when the person needs it, the most important thing is that this information acquired through learning can be retrieved if necessary, sometimes with great speed and precision. and at other times with great difficulty.
Studies in the field of cognitive memory psychology and cognitive memory neuroscience indicate that there are different memory systems in the human brain: each with its own characteristics, functions and processes.
Memory is the psychological process used to encode information, store it in our brain, and retrieve it when the person needs it.
Amnesia is identified as a symptom when someone is found to have lost or has memory problems, the person facing this symptom is unable to store or retrieve previously recorded information, either for organic or functional reasons.
Organic amnesia is linked to a certain type of injury in a region of the brain, which can be caused by illness, trauma or abuse of certain drugs, while functional amnesia is the result of psychological factors, such as defense mechanism. (e. g. post-traumatic hysterical amnesia).
There are also cases of spontaneous amnesia, such as global transient amnesia (AMS). This disorder is more common in older men and usually lasts less than twenty hours.
Another type of classification is the one that divides amnesia in two according to memories that the person is unable to recover or form; for example, a person is said to suffer from anusgrade amnesia when incapable of forming new memories. On the other hand, it is said that a person suffers from retrograde amnesia when he is unable to recover memories that he could before.
The person with an anesograde amnesia may remember events in youth or childhood, but is unable to learn and remember the events that occurred from the time the injury that caused the amnesia occurred.
Among organic amnesia, Korsakoff syndrome is one of the most common clinical tables; in fact, it is part of its diagnostic criteria and is one of the most obvious and disabling symptoms. It takes its name from the fact that Korsakoff was the first person to describe this syndrome.
Korsakoff syndrome is characterized by an acute phase of mental confusion and space-time disorientation; in the chronic stages, confusion continues to exist; The onset of this syndrome is often the continuation of an episode of Wernicke syndrome (encephalopathy).
The main symptomatology of wernicke‘s stage is the presence of ataxia (lack of coordinated movements), ophthalmoplegia (paralysis of the eye muscles), nystagmus (involuntary pupil movements) and polyneuropathy (pain and weakness in different limbs).
People with Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome also suffer from disorientation of time, place and person, inability to remember family members, apathy, attention problems and lack of concentration. inability to engage in a coherent conversation.
Severe concussion after a fall, accident or application of electric shocks as a therapeutic method in depressed patients often causes retrograde amnesia. In many cases, amnesia appears to affect only the minutes leading up to the concussion. If it’s too strong, loss can affect memories formed in the months or even years before the time of concussion.
Retrograde amnesia is defined as well as the inability to remember the past; In many cases, this type of amnesia usually disappears, so the person can gradually recover some of their memory, at best the recovery is complete.
There are cases where head trauma causes total and permanent memory deficit without further intellectual damage. The person with that?Pure? Amnesia retains intact its intellectual capacity, has no language problems, has no harm in perception or attention and retains the skills acquired before the injury.
However, amnesia is characterized by great difficulty in retaining new information (anterograde amnesia). These people are capable of carrying on a conversation. Their working memory works normally, although a few minutes later they are unable to remember what happened.
The person with this type of amnesia cannot learn new things (or has trouble doing so) and sometimes does not remember the above information either, it is as if the person lived forever in the present, the past does not exist and the future can hardly be imagined without past. About amnesia, it is said that “he lives continuously in the present”, that he cannot make plans for the future (because he forgets them).
However, the person with anesthegrade amnesia may acquire new skills, although their learning is slower than other people’s.
Determining which regions of the brain are involved in the development of antegrade amnesia is an important challenge for today’s science. Brain damage caused by anusgrade amnesia is generally thought to be found in the hippocampus and areas of the medial temporal lobe.
These brain regions act as a ticket where data is temporarily stored until it is stored more permanently in the frontal lobe, so the hippocampus is interpreted as a short-term memory reservoir, if this region does not store the information correctly, it will. It will be impossible for information to pass to the frontal lobe, making it impossible to store long-term memories. If amnesia isn’t total, memories won’t have many real details.
However, although the hippocampus appears to be the most important region of an anograde amnesia, recent studies have already signaled the involvement of other brain structures in this process; specifically, it is assumed that previous basal brain damage could also alter the process. for the production of Acetylcholine, a substance very important for memory functioning, because it initiates and modulates memory formation processes.
The most common form of anterior basal brain damage is aneurysms, a condition that has been linked to anusgrade amnesia; finally, the relationship between changes in amnesia and Korsakoff syndrome established that a third region could also be involved in the development of anterograde amnesia.
The latter structure is the diencephalus, a region quite committed to Korsakoff syndrome. The great relationship between anusgrade amnesia and Korsakoff syndrome led to the current study of the involvement of the diencephalus in amnesic processes.
The clearest evidence of an anograde amnesia is the poor performance of people with amnesia in traditional memory and recognition tests, in fact, within minutes of receiving a list of 15 or 20 words, the person with amnesia is unable to remember several of them.
In addition, the problem is most evident for words at the beginning or center of the list, when words are more memorized and interpretation can be similar to normal, so does a conversation, movie, or television. Daily events are a problem: people with amnesia forget where they left off their belongings, what they did, and the people they met.
Therefore, they may have difficulty living together because they find it very difficult to have a conversation or remember what they have talked to another person in other situations, and they also feel that they live outside the present.
Daily events are a problem for people with amnesia: they forget where they left their belongings, what they did, and the people they met.
They talk about facts and people from the past as if yesterday they had passed, they cannot make plans for the future and they do not even know what they are going to do tomorrow, perhaps that is why they lack the warmth or personal intimacy that we normally use in our references to the past and in our hopes for the future.
At the same time, it is obvious that your memory problems can cause serious disorders in your daily life, at home they may require constant care or supervision because they cannot remember to take the medication at set times, they cannot learn to perform tasks. with many consecutive steps, etc.
However, people with anestrograde amnesia may do other things, some learn to make short trips, for example, from their homes to some nearby stores, and much of their knowledge does not seem to have been lost, as is the case with retrograde amnesia.
Gabrieli, Cohen and Corkin (1983) tried to find out with patient HM, asking him to define the created words and phrases that had come into use when he was already in amnesia. His success was limited, although he knew what rock and roll was. There was also an attempt to make him learn the meaning of unknown words. Despite a fairly long workout, he was barely able to correctly match the words with his definitions.
There are other cases. A 10-year-old boy with severe anusmograde amnesia, due to anoxia (lack of oxygen), was unable to improve his reading level after the episode that caused the amnesia and was doing very poorly on several semantic memory tests. By comparison, he was able to learn how to use video games as easily as his colleagues (Wood, Ebert
Some theoretical explanations have found the key to the existence of more than one memory system, although some of them remain intact in amnesia and are responsible for the normal functioning in some tests, another or other systems are damaged, so the income in the different tests varies compared to the income of the population that does not suffer from amnesia.
The distinction between episodic memory and semantic memory (Tulving, 1972) has been useful for some authors to argue that in amnesic syndrome semantic memory works normally, which would explain the preservation of language functions. Episodic memory damage would cause memory failure and recognition; a typical failure of these people.
The person with amnesia keeps the functions of language intact and shows good performance in testing with words that require knowledge acquired in the past, in this sense all the concepts and rules necessary to solve these tests successfully are acquired from an early age of each person’s life. .
Theories about how amnesia is acquired aside, the most important thing is to continue with the idea that anusgrade amnesia is a selective memory deficit that occurs as a result of brain damage and that results in the person having significant difficulties storing new information. People who are experiencing this change are unable to remember new aspects and have great learning difficulties.
On the other hand, anusgrade amnesia does not affect the memory of past information, so all information stored before the change appears is preserved and the person can remember it without any problem, on the other hand, it should be taken into account. that the characteristics of an anograde amnesia may vary in each case.
Bibliography
Belloch, A. , Sandon, B. et Ramos, F. (Eds. ) (1995). Psychopathology Manual (2 vol. ). Madrid: McGraw Hill.
Freedman, A. M. , Kaplan, H. I. et Sadock, B. J. (Eds. ) (1983). Psychiatric treaty. (2 vol. ). Barcelona: Salvat. (Orig. : 1980).