One morning in 2008, Naomi Jacobs woke up and completely lost memories of the previous 17 years. The only thing the 32-year-old woman remembered was going to bed and the next day taking the French test.
There are many causes of memory loss
Jacobs lived like a 15-year-old girl for the next 8 weeks, until the memories returned. According to medicine, Jacobs's amnesia is considered a case of "dissociated amnesia" . This is an amnesia caused by stress and psychological causes, not physiological damage. Jacobs later revealed things that happened in the past such as job loss, drug abuse, rape in the age of 6 and nearly strangled his boyfriend when he was 20 years old.
Dissociated memory is a controversial diagnosis. Many experts, including Harrison Pope, a psychologist from Harvard University, think it is not true. Other suspicions that identify dissociation disorder (including personality or multiple personality disorder) stem from patients' expectations or illusions about how they think they should behave.
People diagnosed with a disordered disorder often have both personality disorders and emotional instability. They are sensitive and delusional. In an interview with the Sunday Times, Jacobs said she admired the way her mind dealt with psychological trauma, which is splitting memories.
Dementia can be caused by a variety of causes, causing the patient to forget temporary memories or unable to remember new things.(Artwork: newhope360.com)
Cases of amnesia or psychological separation are quite rare. Most common are system dementia, brain damage or neurological disease such as stroke. The problem for them is not losing old memories or forgetting who they are, but not having new memories.
Henry Molaison is diagnosed with anterior amnesia (anterograde amnesia) . In 1953, after removing the hippocampus (part of the brain, playing an important role in remembering) and also the nuclear (amygdala) for treating epilepsy, Molaison "stuck in the present". , when new memories exist only in the brain for a few seconds. Dr. Brenda Miler has to get acquainted with the patient every day.
An hour after eating, Molaison immediately forgot and sat down to eat again. The researchers also found that he was able to endure unusual pain through testing by heating his arm with a hair dryer. They argue that the cause of this trait is due to amygdala removal, the brain structure responsible for remembering past pains.
Other types of system dementia can be caused by brain tremors, alcohol and drug addiction. Long-term alcoholism also leads to Korsakoff syndrome , which causes patients to lose their past memories and the ability to form new memories. They often fill in the gaps in their memories with fictional stories and believe it to be true. A more rare case of amnesia occurs when blood is pumped to the area of the brain responsible for not enough memory due to a cause.
A recent study indicates that childhood memory loss can occur around 7 years of age and is a side effect of memory maturation. However, this problem is not serious, compared with adult dementia.
