Past and Future Amnesia
Amnesia has been shown to impact upon the way sufferers think of the future as well as how they remember the past.
Amnesia calls to mind a person who is without a past. However research is now showing that not only can certain types of brain injury affect a person's recall of their past, it can also have a significant impact on their ability to function in the present and imagine what will happen in the future.
We tend to think of amnesia as a result of an accident,where head trauma is sustained, or as a result of some terrible shock, as is often depicted in films. But research into actual cases of amnesia suggests a much more fascinating and strange picture. Amnesiacs can be imprisoned in the present, unable to remember the past, but also without any ability to imagine their future lives and experiences.
A recent study conducted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has involved the first intensive testing of brain-injured amnesiacs, and how they feel themselves living in imaginary worlds inside their heads. The study’s findings suggest that the brain views imagined and remembered experiences in almost exactly the same way, as if they are reflected from the same mirror. It is believed that these two types of images a regenerated by very similar neural networks.
The study’s results provide an insight of what it is like to live in the moment, with no conscious engagement with either the past or the future. The study has provided fresh impetus to the debate about what memoryactually is, and how it functions. We tend to think of the hippocampus as the brain’s memory centre but some neuroscientists think that this may not be the whole story. They suggest that once memories have been registered in the hippocampus, this region may not be necessary for memory retrieval, if they have taken up residence elsewhere in the brain.
| “Amnesiacs can be imprisoned in the present, unable to remember the past, but also without any ability to imagine their future lives and experiences” |
The authors of the study suggest that the hippocampus may merely be the place where the memories are constructed, and without it there would only be fragments of words and images, with no coherent whole. In other words the hippocampus is like the scaffolding or structure for the memory to grow around. It may be like a tree which supports a network of vines. Morris Moscovitch, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, thinks that amnesiacs may lack the coherence of the hippocampus’s scaffolding, and therefore cannot construct whole memories.
Link this post:
Comments
You must sign in or register to post comments.