

You don’t remember anything about your life prior to waking up in the hospital.

You were in a car accident, suffered a head injury, and now have retrograde amnesia. What if you woke up in the hospital one day and there were people surrounding your bed claiming to be your spouse, your children, and your parents? The trouble is you don’t recognize any of them. They have difficulty remembering episodic memories. People with retrograde amnesia cannot remember some or even all of their past. Retrograde amnesia is loss of memory for events that occurred prior to the trauma. However, when presented the same puzzle several days in a row, although he did not remember having seen the puzzle before, his speed at solving it became faster each day (because of relearning) (Corkin, 1965, 1968). and then you left the room for a few minutes, he would not know you upon your return and would introduce himself to you again. He also could not remember people he had met after his surgery. would read the same magazine over and over, having no memory of ever reading it-it was always new to him. The brain damage caused by his surgery resulted in anterograde amnesia. Many people with this form of amnesia are unable to form new episodic or semantic memories, but are still able to form new procedural memories (Bayley & Squire, 2002). This suggests that damage to the brain has resulted in the inability to transfer information from short-term to long-term memory that is, the inability to consolidate memories. The hippocampus is usually affected (McLeod, 2011). With anterograde amnesia, you cannot remember new information, although you can remember information and events that happened prior to your injury. Anterograde amnesia is commonly caused by brain trauma, such as a blow to the head. There are two common types of amnesia: anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia ( ).
