Amnezia Hardcore
Amnesia
Amnesia is a memory condition in which memory is disturbed. In simple terms, it is the loss of memory. The causes of amnesia are organic or functional. Organic causes include damage to the brain, through trauma or disease, or use of certain (generally sedative) drugs. Functional causes are psychological factors, such as defense mechanisms. Hysterical post-traumatic amnesia is an example of this. Amnesia may also be spontaneous, in the case of transient global amnesia. This global type of amnesia is more common in middle-aged to elderly people, particularly males, and usually lasts less than 24 hours.
Another effect of amnesia is the inability to imagine the future. A 2006 study published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that amnesiacs with damaged hippocampus cannot imagine the future. This is because a normal human being, imagining the future, uses past experiences to construct a possible scenario. For example, a person trying to imagine what would happen at a party set to occur in the near future would use past experience at parties to help construct the event.
Amnesia In Pop Culture
Global amnesia is a common motif in fiction despite being extraordinarily rare in reality. In the introduction to his anthology The Vintage Book of Amnesia, Jonathan Lethem writes:
Real, diagnosable amnesia - people getting knocked on the head and forgetting their names - is mostly just a rumor in the world. It's a rare condition, and usually a brief one. In books and movie, though, versions of amnesia lurk everywhere, from episodes of Mission Impossible to metafictional and absurdist masterpieces, with dozens of stops in between. Amnesiacs might not much exist, but amnesiac characters stumble everywhere through comic books, movies, and our dreams. We've all met them and been them.
Lethem traces the roots of literary amnesia to Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, among others, fueled in large part by the seeping into popular culture of the work of Sigmund Freud, which also strongly influenced genre films such as film noir. Amnesia is so often used as a plot device in films, that a widely-recognized stereotypical dialogue has even developed around it, with the victim melodramatically asking "Where am I? Who am I? What am I?", or sometimes inquiring of his own name, "Bill? Who's Bill?"
In movies and television, particularly sitcoms and soap operas, it is often depicted that a second blow to the head, similar to the first one which caused the amnesia, will then cure it. In reality, however, repeat concussions may cause cumulative deficits including cognitive problems, and in extremely rare cases may even cause deadly swelling of the brain associated with second-impact syndrome.
Amnesia has also been useful as a plot device in many video games, to help explain why the main character, and therefore the player, knows very little about the world he is in. "Amnesia" has also been used as the title for a number of songs, including those by Britney Spears and the progressive death metal band In Mourning.
Forms of Amnesia
* In anterograde amnesia, new events contained in the immediate memory are not transferred to the permanent as long-term memory.
* Retrograde amnesia is the distinct inability to recall some memory or memories of the past, beyond ordinary forgetfulness.
The terms are used to categorize patterns of symptoms, rather than to indicate a particular cause or etiology. Both categories of amnesia can occur together in the same patient, and commonly result from drug effects or damage to the brain regions most closely associated with episodic/declarative memory: the medial temporal lobes and especially the hippocampus.
An example of mixed retrograde and anterograde amnesia may be a motorcyclist unable to recall driving his motorbike prior to his head injury (retrograde amnesia), nor can he recall the hospital ward where he is told he had conversations with family over the next two days (anterograde amnesia).
The effects of amnesia can last long after the condition has passed; many sufferers claim that amnesia changes from a neurological condition to a psychological condition, whereby the patient loses confidence and faith in their own memory and accounts of past events.