According to myth, the art of memory was born in the 5th century-B.C. when Simonides of Ceos, the Greek poet, after stepping outside came back to a banquet hall that had been raided and demolished (“People with Amnesia Forget All Details of their Earlier Lives,” 2021). When chaos and destructions were taking place, he back inside, went into the depth of his memory, reconstructed the banquet scene, and guided loved ones to their relatives’ corpses (“People with Amnesia Forget All Details of their Earlier Lives – The Psychology Of,” 2021). Since ancient times, various philosophers have thought about memory, its working mechanism, its significance to people, and the role it plays in human and divine interactions.
The experimental approach to understanding memory, however, is a more recent undertaking. The work done by neuropsychiatrists Eric Kandel explored snail’s memories and found out that they are simplified memory types (“People with Amnesia Forget All Details of their Earlier Lives,” 2021).
Additionally, Eric Kandel was able to make a great breakthrough in understanding the working of memories from a neurological perspective but only explored the surface of what there is to know about human memory (“People with Amnesia Forget All Details of their Earlier Lives,” 2021). Developing a complex understanding of the memories of individuals suffering from amnesia equips one with extra knowledge about memory in general, and could perhaps provide some additional insight into the personal importance held by our memories.
The authors in the article argue that society has held a simplistic view of amnesia for some time now. This view can be attributed to the work of scientists Jost and Ribot, whose knowledge about amnesia emphasized that the memory, age, and strengths respectively, determine the period taken after the development of amnesia for memory to disappear (“People with Amnesia Forget All Details of their Earlier Lives,” 2021). In other words, Jost and Ribot consider there to be an open timeline that dictates the time when certain memories of individuals suffering from amnesia disappear. The authors in this article explain that in Ribot’s law of retrograde amnesia (1881), individuals suffering from amnesia tend to forget their most recent memories first (“People with Amnesia Forget All Details of their Earlier Lives,” 2021).
The earlier memories then disappear after amnesia fully develops. The authors further explain Jost’s law (1897), that the time taken for the memory to forget depends on a combination of the strength of the memory and the time when the memory was developed (“People with Amnesia Forget All Details of their Earlier Lives,” 2021). Therefore, the authors argue that these amnesia claims elicit the question: Do people suffering from amnesia forget their memories in a certain order?
The authors in the article argue that a complete understanding of amnesia departs from Jost and Ribot laws and looks deeply into the lost and retained cognitive abilities of individuals with hippocampal brain damage to other areas. The authors further clarify that individuals with amnesia do not forget everything of their earlier lives, they also never use their memories in a particular order, and their memory is never lost but what is lost is the ability to retrieve the information in the memory (“People with Amnesia Forget All Details of their Earlier Lives,” 2021). Various studies carried out by the authors in this article offer important information about various functionalities of different parts of the brain. Moreover, they provide useful information that helps people understand the responsibilities of different sections of the brain and healthy or damaged elements in the human being’s brain.
My belief has changed about the myth because I have understood that individuals with amnesia retain certain functionalities of the memory. The information stored in the memory is never lost. The person only losses the ability to retrieve information from the memory. This is because research reveals that certain memory functions are normally retained by individuals with severe amnesia (Sangster & Battistelli, 2017).
This is evidenced by a certain study done on amnesiac E.P. whose hippocampus had been destroyed by herpes simplex encephalitis. E.P. experienced difficulties trying to recognize individuals encountered many times and with a recollection of past events specifically forty years before the damage of his hippocampus (Sangster & Battistelli, 2017). A study was performed on the patient to measure the capability of four areas of topographical memory: pointing landmarks, alternative routes, novel navigation, and familiar navigation.
The patient was then taken through all the tests and compared with different subjects who were much familiar with the tests that the patient was being asked. Though the patient replied to street names describing his routes less than his healthy counterparts, presumably because of his amnesia, the patient was better than they did on the alternative routes section of the test (Sangster & Battistelli, 2017). Therefore, this study reveals that while the amnesia patient’s memory is impaired in various respects, the initial memory could be fully intact.
Conclusively, the article is excellent because it has explored the myth claiming that most people with amnesia forget all details of their earlier lives. The outcome of the article resulted from reviewing various studies carried out trying to understand the memory of individuals with amnesia. After exploring various studies, the authors in this article found out that individuals with amnesia never forget details about their earlier lives. Additionally, their memory is never lost in a particular order, and they might not lose their memories but only lose the ability to retrieve information in their memories. Reading this article has enabled me understand that people with amnesia never forget details about their earlier lives but the ability to remember these details.
References
People with Amnesia Forget All Details of their Earlier Lives – The Psychology Of. (2021). Web.
Sangster, A., & Battistelli, P. P. (2017). Myths, Amnesia and Reality in Military Conflicts, 1935-1945. Cambridge Scholars Publishing..