

Acute Conditions include trauma to the brain and infections like meningitis. Cause of Amnesiaīoth retrograde and anterograde amnesia can be caused by Acute or Chronic Conditions. This causes a nasty situation and makes day to day life even vulnerable. He can’t remember the types of meals he ate in earlier parts of the day and even cannot remember the individual’s faces he interacted before. The seizures were known to reduce to a considerable extent, but he was known to forget elementary things of his life. History of Anterograde AmnesiaĪ patient named HM, aged 27 undergoes bilateral resection of the medial temporal lobe due to refractory seizures. There are certain factors which lead to amnesia are cardiac arrest, cranial traumatism, asphyxia and use of pharmaceutical drugs which include hypnotic drugs, neuroleptics, anaesthetics and ketamines. Uncoordinated movements and confusions are other symptoms which can be presented and when associated with alcohol can cause Wernicke-Korsakoff psychosis. It explains the interference of recently learnt information with that of previously learnt information. This phenomenon is called retroactive interference. Neuropsychology deals with psychological alterations to one’s life and its discovery in a recent study suggests that a total of 7/10 people are unable to retain temporary build in the information. Unable to synchronize certain things at the workplace and the home.Have a problem remembering and recalling names.


May not remember faces of known people.May not remember the person whom they have met earlier.Unable to recall the last meal an individual ate.Few common scenarios that will help you understand anterograde amnesia are as follow: It doesn’t interfere with the information you already know. This may lead to confusion within an individual and frustration too develops gradually. The symptoms of this disease type are associated with short term memory retrieval and encoding. Rather, a person might have a problem remembering long term memories at this stage too. It is specific with the inability to retain new information. There’s an impairment of consolidation and storage or both at the same time. Hence, no new retainable memories are to be made by such individuals. This is challenging in one’s life as it will make one’s life difficult in terms of the working environment and social interactions. You’ll feel yourself being helpless, not able to remember things happened just a few seconds ago. Anterograde AmnesiaĪs soon as you try putting in new information into your brain it won’t accept it. It is mainly associated with damage to the cortex but may typically involve prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. It is mainly associated with the last two stages of declarative memory which are storage and retrieval stages. The patients are mainly associated with false memories called confabulations. This leads to anxiety and will eventually lead to their inability to recognize important people in their lives. Retrograde Amnesia is the inability to recall old memories. This will, in turn, lead to damage to the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. The Anterograde Amnesia is particularly affecting the encoding and consolidation stages of declarative memory. The individuals tend to struggle in recalling the recent events. Perhaps, an individual may forget the things that happened just a few minutes earlier. The Anterograde Amnesia is particularly associated with the inability to form new memories. Amnesia can further be classified into Anterograde Amnesia and Retrograde Amnesia. With amnesia, any of these four stages can be affected. And the last one concerned with the simplicity of the stored memory and to make memories more resilient known as retrieval taking place in the prefrontal cortex, cortex and hippocampus. The third stage is storage which happens in the cortex.

The second stage is consolidation in the hippocampus in the deep temporal lobe. The first stage is encoding which takes place in the prefrontal cortex. The declarative memory can be broken down into four stages and each stage has an association with a different brain part. Amnesia has a profound effect on declarative memory types. Implicit memory is mostly associated with the habits you acquire throughout your life like texting a friend or writing a novel while explicit memory refers to retaining facts and figures like your Dad’s phone number. Firstly, memory can be divided into two broad classifications which are implicit (procedural) memory and explicit (declarative) memory. What is amnesia? Amnesia is when brain damage, disease or psychological trauma causes memory deficit.
