Get Adobe Acrobat ReaderResearch Areas - Autobiographical Amnesia
Autobiographical Amnesia is a patchy, but dense, loss of the ability to evoke memories for salient life events, often extending back over several decades, well before the onset of symptoms of epilepsy.
The phenomenon of circumscribed, temporally extended retrograde amnesia with the absence of marked anterograde amnesia has been reported in single-case studies in association with a variety of neurological conditions (tuberculous meningitis, head injury and viral encephalitis) many of which were accompanied by temporal lobe epilepsy . It is also a well-recognised manifestation of 'functional' or psychogenic amnesia. In the light of the high prevalence of amnesia for salient life events in the TEA series investigated by Zeman et al, a single patient from this series was studied in detail. RG, a 68-year old man, had a profound impoverishment of autobiographical memory (e.g. for holidays, weddings, etc.) for events that pre-dated the clinical onset of his epilepsy by some 30 years. Memory for public events and semantic knowledge were unaffected. It was suggested that memories for autobiographical events, which are multi-modal and highly distributed in the brain, may be particularly vulnerable to disruption by epileptic activity (Manes et al, 2001). We have recently reviewed existing knowledge of autobiographical amnesia (Butler and Zeman, 2008) and documented the ocurrence of an extensive depletion of autobiographical memory among patients with TEA who performed normally on standard anterograde memory tests (Milton et al, 2010).