She could understand classroom lectures, only to forget the material the next day, along with other details about daily events. There are many reasons why the student might have had difficulty learning after such an event.
But we began to ask ourselves whether there was any evidence to suggest that the very act of suppressing unwanted memories in response to continual, inescapable reminders, could alter hippocampal functioning in such a way that it produces a condition akin to organic amnesia.
And we realized that we had been sitting on neuroimaging data consistent with just such a mechanism. Hulbert: In clinical psychology, generalized memory deficits that arise in the aftermath of trauma have been widely documented and are considered an important clinical feature to resolve.
Although a number of theories for this pattern have been proposed, this clinical phenomenon has never before been interpreted as the result of a cognitively induced amnesia arising from efforts to voluntarily control the retrieval of unwanted memories. Indeed, the idea that a state very much like organic amnesia might be naturally created by our own mental activities and their effects on the state of the hippocampus — i.
In basic cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, the windows of amnesia identified here — the forgetting caused by hippocampal modulation — have never been identified as a core process of forgetting. This study provides some converging evidence for the notion of cognitively induced amnesia. So while a number of cognitive processes may modulate activity in the hippocampus, the common result may be cognitively induced fluctuations in the ability of the hippocampus to perform its normal encoding and consolidation functions, resulting in disruptions to episodic memory.
Hulbert: We were shocked — really just as much as the participants were after the fact — that their memory for novel events like seeing a photo of a peacock standing in a parking lot could be reduced by nearly half, simply because they had engaged in an unrelated word-suppression task shortly before or after the image of the peacock appeared. If you think about it, it is really quite stunning.
Most people would not find that intuitive. Indeed, it is for precisely this reason — the utter unrelatedness of what is being suppressed to the memories that later suffer side effects — that memory deficits associated with trauma seem so puzzling; people might not generally connect the fact that suppressing intrusive memories of an unpleasant event could generally impede memory function.
Yet, that is precisely what our data suggest. This particular set of findings nicely accords with other research indicating that the hippocampus is especially critical for this type of strong, context-bound memory. Instead, it seems as though reducing activation in the hippocampal memory system to limit reflexive memory retrieval creates a temporary functional lesion linked to episodic memory problems.
Hulbert: The first main benefit comes from simply understanding the origins of memory deficits in the aftermath of trauma. So, difficulties with memory in general can be understood as a side effect of trying to control memory via retrieval stopping, something that comes naturally to people. I phoned and a caregiver answered. We made an appointment for the following Thursday at pm. The drugs. And some days aren't good at all.
Call first, around in the morning, and I'll let you know how he's doing. Apart from that, I should warn you, he doesn't remember very much -- the tumor has wiped out his memories of the past. Thursday came, and I phoned. The caregiver answered again and said I could come over at 1.
I asked if I could bring anything. I knew that the Woolworth's in town -- one of the last remaining ones -- had a huge candy counter. So I picked up a bag of Abba Zabba peanut butter-filled taffy. Tom lived on a street full of identical apartments -- the kind of street where you'd have to count how many apartment houses from the corner yours was or you'd end up in the wrong building. When I knocked at the door, the caregiver invited me in and asked me to take my shoes off.
Then he led me across a fluffy white carpet to the living room, pointed me to an old armchair, and told me that Tom would be out in a minute. I put the candies on the coffee table. When Tom walked in, I stood up. He came over and shook my hand, and he sang, more than he spoke, "thank you for coming.
Those eyes -- the intense, gripping eyes locked onto mine and stayed locked as we shook hands, even as we both sat down. I broke the gaze to look him over -- his hair was thinning, he'd lost weight, but otherwise he looked the same as I remembered him.
The same narrow face, the same guileless smile. Could you tell me your name again and how it is that I know you? There was neither recognition nor unrecognition. Just a calm, interested face staring back at me. That sounds like it must have been interesting. What did I work on there? I guess I guess I was absorbed in my own work.
I'm really sorry. I mean, you never complained. You always seemed pretty focused. I'd hate to think that I was doing something I didn't enjoy. I guess that was many years ago. Did we stay in touch after that? A research corporation in Palo Alto. You worked with Joy, and I worked with Bob. But we saw each other from time to time, and I was interested in what your group was doing.
Your team gave a really good presentation during the annual roundup. I remember you had worked on a very clever new musical instrument called the 'bead box. It was a way for non-musicians to have fun with music, without having to devote themselves to years of practice.
But I don't get many bells ringing these days! I just stared. Would it be rude if I told him that I never really thought of him as a friend? I mean, if one person thought of another as a friend, and the other person denied it, that would be hurtful. But Tom had no memory of me one way or the other. As I was thinking this, he spoke. There's often this. We meet people, we see them every day, we say hello, but we don't really know them. Read on to learn more about this rare condition, including its symptoms, risk factors, and treatments.
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