Why Our Memory is playing tricks on Our Lives

The most reliable studies show that many people suffer from memory loss. Memory can play dirty tricks. Without any doubt,  individual memory  is the essential core of personal identity, and its alteration has serious consequences, and  we should  treat it with extreme caution, because,  “each year, million Americans sustain a minor head trauma that results in a brief loss of consciousness […] persistent headaches and memory loss.” (1).

Oliver Sacks’  The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat  is a book that became very popular when  it was first  published (2). Sacks is both a  well-known neurologist and a successful author of good  science  books. In  The Lost Mariner (3), he told the story of a 60-year-old sailor,   hospitalized in a nursing home in New York to treat progressive memory loss. The sailor remembered absolutely nothing, and he couldn’t even remember what the doctor had previously told him 10 minutes before about why he was hospitalized. The sailor had an amnestic-syndrome known as Korsakoff’s syndrome.  This syndrome includes degeneration of mammillary nuclei involved in memory consolidation.

The case reported by Oliver Sacks is certainly striking, but  we would like to  mention the case of a  young man,  19 years of age  who, after a motorcycle accident, had suffered a mild head  injury, which implied the absolute loss of memory . The young man was subjected to all kinds of testing (including the one about a possible simulation), but although much information has been furnished to him, he didn’t remember anything on his past life.

Another curious case of loss of memory is given in P. Turriziani et alii,   where some patients forgot both people’s names and the names of the streets. This type of memory loss has been studied extensively and is well documented.  Some studies report the case of a man who was literally unable to orient himself adequately in new environments. In this case, there was a man who suffered from Topographical disorientation, viz “a specific difficulty in storing the spatial-directional value of visual landmarks in novel environments.” (4).

A completely different case from that of memory loss described above was carried out by Professor Alexander Lurija, one of the most experts in the field of neuropsychology. Professor Luria’s told the story of a man who suffered from  hypermnesia (5), whereby he, instead of forgetting, remembered  all the facts  he live in  down to the smallest details. Apparently the hypermnesia would  seem to be  an advantage for humans suffering from it, but in reality,  he was deeply bothered by the inability to forget at least some events of his life. In this particular case, the excessive accumulation of memory had ruined the life of this exceptional man, who was condemned to remember everything.

Notes

1)      Archives of clinical neuropsychology, 1986, Vol. I,  p. 73.

2)      Oliver Sacks,   The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, New York, Touchstone, 1998.

3)      Ivi, The Lost Mariner, p. 23.

4)      P. Turriziani et alii,  “Loss of Spatial Learning in a patient With Topographical Disorientation in New Environments,” in Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 2003 Jan, 74 , pp. 61-69.

5)      Alexandr Lurija, The Man Who Couldn’t Forget, 1968.