Amnesia

Amnesia is the loss of the ability to reproduce information about a certain period of time stored in memory.

Amnesia should be distinguished from forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is a fairly common phenomenon, especially in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, with its huge amount of information that people are increasingly encountering.

Amnesia implies the loss of important and significant memories that should not be forgotten (memorable events, important milestones in life, significant people, volumes of information that a person knew or studied), while there are visible difficulties in learning new information, in forming new memories, with orientation in place and space.

Types of amnesia:

Anterograde amnesia – a person cannot remember new, recently received information. Information about the events of the very recent past disappears from memory. But, at the same time, memories of events from the relatively distant past are preserved. This type of amnesia most often occurs with traumatic brain injuries, when the patient poorly or does not remember the moment of the injury and the events after it, but remembers well the events that preceded it.
Retrograde amnesia – a person, on the contrary, does not remember the information preceding the event or trauma, but at the same time is well oriented in what happened after.
Antero-retrograde amnesia is a combination of both of the above types (before and after the event).
Transient (transient) global amnesia is a temporary loss of all types of memory. It is more common in old age, especially against the background of existing vascular diseases (for example, atherosclerosis of the cerebral vessels).
General progressive amnesia is a gradually increasing and increasing decrease in memory: forgetting one’s thought processes, then memory for the location of events in time is lost, after that the events themselves are forgotten, then emotional relationships, life skills and habits are forgotten.
Fixation amnesia – the ability to remember suffers.
Palimpsests are memory disorders that occur when drinking alcohol. At the same time, a person is not able to remember the events that happened to him at the time of intoxication.
The causes of amnesia are divided into organic and functional. Organic causes include memory disorders that have developed as a result of traumatic brain injuries, when taking certain medications (for example, sedatives), with some organic brain diseases (for example, Alzheimer’s disease, cerebral circulation disorders). Functional mechanisms include methods of psychological defense of the brain, which consciousness tries to protect itself in stressful situations.

The most common among the organic causes of amnesia are:

Stroke and other disorders of cerebral circulation;
Encephalitis (an inflammatory process in the brain);
Hypoxia of the brain (insufficient oxygen supply to the brain – with heart attacks, carbon monoxide poisoning, respiratory failure);
The use of certain medications (sleeping pills, sedatives);
Tumors in the brain located in areas that respond to memory function;
Subarachnoid hemorrhages;
Epilepsy;
Traumatic brain injuries;
Electroconvulsive therapy is one of the methods of treatment of chronic mental disorders;
The causes of functional (conversion, dissociative, hysterical) amnesia are a protective reaction of the brain from a powerful, extremely unpleasant event. Mog “turns off” the memory for this period. Most often, such cases occur among participants in road accidents, among military personnel during hostilities, among survivors of violence, terrorist acts, natural disasters.

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