Amnesia: how and why do people lose their memory?

She was considered missing, although she was found by the police. After all, she could not tell the police her full name, place of residence or the names of her loved ones. She said that her name was Sam, and remembered only that she was dying. The police found her in the spring of 2015 in a semi-conscious state in the town of Carlsbad in California. A Facebook campaign was organized to find her relatives, the message about her was reposted by 200 people, and media outlets around the world wrote about her.

Gradually, she began to remember something. Some glimpses: a swimming pool in Perth, a club in Sydney, Queensland, Byron Bay – everything was connected with Australia. Finally, from a TV news report, “Sam” was recognized by relatives. It turned out that her name is Ashley Menatta (Ashley Menatta), she is not a resident of Australia, but California, missing in 2013. The meeting with loved ones was very emotional: “We all sobbed. They were so worried about me when I went missing.”

Ashley found her family, but this does not mean that everything is in order with her self-identification now. After all, for a long time she considered herself a kind of Sam, and now they tell her that she is Ashley, relatives tell her biography, and she can only take it on faith! Can she feel like Ashley Menatta again if she doesn’t remember anything about herself?

Read more:

• Why do we need memories

Repression of traumatic events

We saw a similar story in the famous film “The Bourne Identification” with Matt Damon, where CIA special agent Jason Bourne completely lost his memory of who he was, but retained the skills of a professional killer and knowledge of foreign languages. The author of the novel on which the film was based described a case of so-called psychogenic amnesia. It is caused by some traumatic event that a person is unable to accept. And then the memory refuses to reproduce the difficult events that have occurred: a car accident, a murder that happened in front of a person, etc. Sometimes oblivion covers not only a specific terrible episode, but also the period of time accompanying it, or even the entire life of an individual, his personal identification, when he no longer knows who he is and what happened in his past.

In real life, the Bournes are usually found by the police. Discouraged and confused, they don’t remember their name, they don’t have any memories. Often it turns out that they have come a long way, as if they were running away from the place where they lived (this phenomenon is called “dissociative fugue”). But it is also an escape from the trauma they have received.

One of the clearest examples of such amnesia is a man found in August 2004 near Burger King in Richmond Hill, Georgia. Half-dressed, unresponsive to anything, with traces of trauma on his head… Later, consciousness returned to him, but he remembered almost nothing about himself. True, he claimed that he was 56 years old (he even gave his date of birth), but his memories in total would not have accumulated for a day – it seemed to him that something in his life was connected with Indianapolis and Denver, but what?

He was named after the first letters of the name of the diner near which he was found – Benjamin Kyle (Benjamin Kyle). The FBI could not find his relatives, DNA analysis did not give anything, neither linguists, nor hypnosis, nor his appearance on a popular TV show helped. But he was not a fraudster, the doctors said with confidence. On September 16, 2015, it was reported that Kyle was finally able to reconstruct his history using genetic genealogy, a method designed for those adopted children who want to find their real parents.¹

Memories of what was not

Loss of personal identity can also be associated with brain damage. It combines the inability to recover memories and form new ones as a result of damage to the medial temporal lobe. However, such patients usually remember their own name, even if other people’s names have fallen out of memory.

Susannah Cahalan’s autobiographical book Mind on Fire was published in 2012. Month of my madness “, immediately hit the bestseller lists. Suzanne told in it a dramatic story that happened to her in 2009. Then she was 24 years old, she had already received a permanent job as a reporter at The New York Post for a year, she lived in Manhattan, she had recently started an affair with a musician … in a word, everything in her life was good. The first “bells” of the disease were barely noticeable. Suzanne began to violate her obligations, which was completely unusual for her, then she could not get rid of thoughts about cockroaches that appeared in the apartment. It seemed to her that her boyfriend was mocking her, then it began to seem that her father was trying to kill her stepmother. After a couple of seizures, she was placed in intensive care. She fought, grunted, she was drooling, the pressure went off scale, then dropped sharply, her memory sharply weakened. Doctors discovered that she had a rare autoimmune disease called encephalitis caused by antibodies to NDMA receptors. Suzanne was the 217th patient to have it. Thanks to the right treatment, she was able to recover and write an article about her experience first in her newspaper.²and then a book. However, she remembered crumbs: how she was looking for evidence of her boyfriend’s infidelity, how she found herself lying tied up on a bed in a hospital. The whole course of events had to be reconstructed according to the stories of relatives and doctors and video recordings that recorded her psychosis.

Read more:

• “Our life force is manifested in oblivion”

“I can never remember. It’s just a dark hole in my mind, a stain of despair,” she says. But she remembers her hallucinations: an eyeball floating in the air, a Buddha who smiles at her and forbids her to jump out the window … She remembers how, talking with a nurse, she discovered in herself the ability to “age” people: here the nurse’s face is covered with a network of wrinkles, and she decrepit before our eyes, obeying the magical power of Susanna. In the same way, she then “aged” her boyfriend: his hair turned gray, and his face became just like his father’s. She was tormented by the question: “Why do I remember these visions well, but what was in reality was erased from memory?” She found comfort in the words of a psychiatrist, who said that these memories also have meaning. “He said that my inner self created them, that they are emotionally charged and that’s why they stuck in my memory.”

Memory losses

In 1889, the famous British neurologist John Hughlings Jackson described the case of his colleague, Dr. Z., who suffered from epilepsy. Once he had a boy with his mother at the reception. The child had symptoms of a respiratory illness. Dr. Z. said that at that moment he was somehow uneasy. He remembered pulling out his stethoscope, but turned away slightly to avoid talking. His next memory is of him sitting at his desk talking to a new patient. Where did the boy and mother go? An hour later, he discovered from his notes that he had examined the boy, recorded his diagnosis and treatment plan. But he didn’t remember any of it!

Read more:

• 10 questions to refresh your memory

This is an example of what is known as transient epileptic amnesia (TEA), a type of epileptic seizure that occurs in the temporal lobe of the brain. In this case, the person looks quite normal. He can communicate, perform various tasks. Some have some confusion or repetitiveness in speech, but there are also those who are driving, playing golf, or, in Dr. Z’s case, correctly diagnosing pneumonia as usual. How is this possible, because these attacks last up to an hour? According to cognitive neuroscientist John Hodges, who has studied TEA for over 30 years, the explanation is that these are all automatic actions. “They depend on procedural memory, which is no longer controlled by the temporal lobes of the brain, but by the basal ganglia and cerebellum.” He talks about a lawyer who defended a client in court, but could not remember anything about this meeting. According to Hodges, the lawyer had a TEA attack after the meeting, erasing the previous event from his memory.

Our memories can be accurate or distorted, complete or fragmentary, honest or false. In any case, given their fragility, we can only hope that we are more than our memories. As the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria wrote, “a person consists not only of memory. He also has feelings, will, susceptibility, morality.

¹ Learn more at atlanta.cbslocal.com

² For more information, see the newspaper’s website nypost.com