The Neurology of Memory & Anterograde and Retrograde Amnesia

* Consolidation- hypothetical process involving gradual conversion of information into memory codes stored in long term memory.

The brain and the distinct parts have countless duties but one of the utmost vital ones is assembly and retain new memory. In the Brain… it says, “Structures within the temporal lobe, a region of the brain near your ears, are responsible for different types of learning.” Page 5. The temporal lobe aids learning and saves the information that can be used later. Learning is key to help humans and animals to survive and thrive. Learning allows living beings to be able to do old tasks and new tasks. “… The hippocampus gathers all of the sensory aspects of the event and conducts soon initial processing of these sensory elements into a neurological format that elements that are not completely understood.” Said in the Brian, page 6. The hippocampus keeps a

The part of the brain that is in charge of memory is called the hippocampus, which is part of the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex is in charge of thinking, problem solving, and many different kinds of language skills. People that have a problem with their hippocampus can have trouble remembering new details they have taken in. There are also many different parts of the hippocampus that apply directly to the memory. These parts include short-term memory, long-term memory, sensory memory, and the constructive processes. Short-term memory is the information that stays in your brain only when you are thinking about it, about 20 to 30 seconds. After this, it is most likely forgotten. Long-term memory is when your hippocampus keeps track of facts you learn, ideas you have, and experiences. Even when people stop thinking about these things, the memory can last a lifetime. Another part of the hippocampus, sensory memory, remembers information only for one or two seconds. The brain creates a mental image that disappears when you stop directly thinking about a particular thing. The last part of the hippocampus is the constructive processes. Constructive processes are memories that your brain makes up in order to make sense of a detail in which you only remember some of the details. The few details that the brain remembers are combined with other small details that your brain adds in order for it to

Anterograde Amnesia is the inability to store new information after the brain damage has occurred. (Luke Mastin 2010). Anterograde Amnesia is very rare, in fact there have a few cases where the amnesia was "pure". The symptoms and hardship of the person depend on the cause for the memory loss. Some symptoms of Anterograde Amnesia are partial memory loss, having a hard time recognizing relatives or family, feeling of confusion, difficulty taking in new information, inability to remember familiar places, and difficulty in learning and remembering new things.(PHC Editorial Team 2013) Characteristics of Anterograde Amnesia are abnormally small hippocampi bilaterally and elevated hippocampal water.(Mayo Clinic 2014) There are many ways to recognize

Anterograde amnesia is a common and distinguished neurological disorder in the psychological and neurobiological field. Media depictions of this neuropsychological disorder are not as common as other forms of amnesia, but it is still incorrectly portrayed. Anterograde amnesia refers to the inability to retain new information, while still having intact memories that occurred before brain damage (Carlson, 2014). There have been several studies that focus on anterograde amnesia and its diagnostic criteria, course, associated features, assessment, etiology, underling neurobiological mechanisms, treatments, and future research.

There are two main dimensions of amnesias. The first cause is physical or psychological; the second proceeds or follows a traumatic event. Most amnesia is a result either from organic or neurological causes (damage to the brain through physical injury, neurological disease or the use of certain drugs), The seriousness of the amnesia depends on the areas in which the brain is damaged. The second dimension is the dichotomy between forgetting the past versus an inability to form new memories. Terry, W. Scott. Learning and memory: basic principles, processes, and procedures. Boston, MA: Pearson, 2009. Print. Retrograde amnesia is not being able to remember events before the disorder. The amount of time that can't remember depends on the severity. Anterograde amnesia is the inability to form new memories, it is usually caused by severe brain trauma.

Amnesia is common recognized psychological problem in daily life and according to Talmi, Caplan, Richards, and Moscovitch (2015), amnesia is usually thought as abilities’ loss in long-term memory regardless of intact of short-term memory. In other words, some people suffer from the amnesia related with the impairment of short-term memory and the others suffer from the amnesia related with the impairment of long-term memory. Those amnesias can happen not only by physical wound, but also psychological trauma. For example, “A 34-year-old man without past history of any psychiatric or neurological disorder developed severe anterograde amnesia following a psychological trauma” (KUMAR, RAO, SUNNY, &GANGADHAR, 2007). When it comes to sorts of amnesias,

Anterograde amnesia, as described earlier, is an inability to form lasting memories after some disturbance to the brain, such as a brain injury or degenerative brain disease. The revelation of the H.M. case was the identification of the medial temporal lobes as memory consolidation and storage centers. Within the medial temporal lobes, the hippocampus has been identified specifically as a brain area involved in learning new information (Gluck, 2014). To put it another way, people with damage to the hippocampus will have difficulty forming new memories because they won’t be able to learn new things. The hippocampus helps to integrate objects in a spatial and temporal context. Episodic and semantic memory forming is impaired, otherwise known as declarative memory, though the person can remember declarative memory from the past. The process of encoding, storage consolidation, and retrieval seems to go through the medial temporal lobe with the hippocampus playing a key role. In anterograde amnesia, the consolidation process is damaged. Thus, in the short term new information can be learned, but since it is not consolidated, it can’t be retrieved, so it is forgotten (Webbe slides). Additionally, damage to the basal forebrain can cause anterograde amnesia. This is because the basal forebrain sends neurotransmitters to the hippocampus to tell it whether and when to process and store information (Gluck, 2014). In this way, the hippocampus is the main brain structure involved so

The functional domains that lie within the province of retrograde memory need to be clearly specified. During a person’s lifetime we build up an enormous store of knowledge, experience, and skills. The article states that “Until recent years, it has most commonly been used to refer to the loss of memory for events that had preceded

After a new memory is learnt, it enters the process of encoding during which the memory is labile and capable of disruption until it becomes stabilised over a period of time (Nader & Einarsson, 2010; Nader et al, 2000). This process is called consolidation and originally consisted of the theory that once stabilised in the brain, it remains fixed (Suzuki et al, 2004). This theory has been rebutted by the acceptance of reconsolidation, a theory that imposes the ideology that when memories are retrieved, through similar experiences (Lee, 2009), they become labile until,

Amnesia is a memory disorder that contributes to the loss of memory (King, 2016). There are two types of amnesia: anterograde and retrograde amnesia.

How is memory encoded and what methods can lead to greater recall? There have been many different models suggested for human memory and many different attempts at defining a specific method of encoding that will lead to greater recall. In this experiment subjects are asked to do a semantic task on a word related to them and an orthographic task in which they analyze the letter in the word. The results of the experiment indicate that the words which where encoded semantically and are related to the self have greater recall.

When I heard the bells ringing it was stored in my short term memory, and it was later stored in long-term memory. Today if I hear alarm clocks it may trigger the same response as the school bell due to overlap within consolidation. Consolidation is when an event is encoded and stored into a memory (Mastin, 2010). These emotional memories are stored so vividly within memory

A human’s memory system is just one of many amazing things that demonstrate the brain’s complexity. Without memory we would have no recollection of anything, ever. Within our memory system there are three main measures that assess how much information is retained, these are known as recall, recognition and relearning. These are all measures of retention, that influence how much information is encoded, stored and retrieved within one’s memory system. Each measure of retention has a different level of sensitivity. The more sensitive a measure of retention, the easier it is to retain information.

In both study conditions, successful encoding was associated with significant activations in the bilateral hippocampus in addition to the dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. These activations were more pronounced during deep processing verses shallow processing. The results of this study is consistent with recent research by showing that successful encoding for later episodic memory is associated with increased neural connectivity, which is the precondition during successful retrieval. Memory traces reside in neocortical areas, coordinated by the hippocampus. This hippo-campal-cortical connectivity increases during successful encoding and we can see that this was more pronounced during successful deep level encoding, which means deep level encoding leaves behind more distinctive and retrievable memory traces.