Amnesia refers to a malfunction of memory and can be due to various causes. These can be organic, such as a brain injury, a disease or the use of certain substances. For example, epilepsy or thyroid disease can affect memory . Or functional causes, where we find the psychological traumas that lead to memory loss as a defense mechanism.
Likewise, the types of amnesia are differentiated according to the chronology. That is, if what is not remembered is what happened before a specific date, it is called retrograde . If what fails is the generation of new long-term memories, it is anterograde amnesia .
memory and cinema
To understand it better, we can take as an example 2 famous movies for perfectly describing anterograde amnesia. The first of these is Memento , directed by Cristopher Nolan and based on a story by his brother. Apart from being famous for its montage style, since it does not advance chronologically but jumps continuously forwards and backwards, it is also famous because it presents a protagonist with a serious memory problem. After seeing how his wife is raped and murdered, he receives a severe blow that causes anterograde amnesia. Every morning he wakes up not knowing where he is, what has happened since the attack and who he has met since then. He uses photographs on the back of which he writes the name of the individual and other essential information, as well as tattoos, which mark the clues he has been finding about the murder of his wife. Every day you must review everything and make new notes.
The other film that shows us a similar case is 50 First Dates . Here a charming Drew Barrymore, who was ET’s girl friend, suffers a traffic accident on her father’s birthday that also leads her to not be able to generate new memories. But in this case the reaction of his family is to spare him the trauma by making him believe that every day he wakes up is still the same date . Every day he repeats the same routine and they leave him a copy of the newspaper of that fateful date in his favorite cafeteria. The one who takes her out of this false reality is Adam Sandler, who falls in love with her and does the impossible every day to be able to win her back over and over again, while trying to convince the family that they must explain what is really happening. Barrymore remembers what he does from morning to night and it is when he falls asleep that everything is erased.
Without remembering anything from the past
It is often said that reality is stranger than fiction, and that is what happens in the case of Clive Wearing , a British musicologist, conductor, tenor and keyboardist born in 1938 who suffers from chronic anterograde and retrograde amnesia. He lacks the ability to form new memories and usually believes that he just woke up from a coma as he only remembers a few small things from his past, such as who his wife is. His condition was caused by herpetic encephalitis, a serious infection of the central nervous system caused by the herpes simplex virus and estimated to affect 1 in 500,000 individuals each year. If left untreated, it causes rapid death in 70% of cases and survivors are left with serious neurological sequelae. If, on the other hand, it is treated, usually with high doses of acyclovir, encephalitis is fatal in 1 out of 3 cases, and causes severe sequelae in half of those who overcome it.
In a documentary broadcast in 2005, Wearing was interviewed about what it felt like to live like this: “There is no difference between day and night. There are no thoughts at all. Without dreams. Day and night always the same, blank”. And he continued: “ It is exactly the same as being dead , which is not difficult, right? Being dead is easy: you do nothing at all. This is exactly the same”.
When asked if he missed his old life, he answered: “Yes. But I’ve never been very conscious about that.” “What do you miss?” the interviewer asked. And Clive answered: “The fact that he was a musician. And that he was in love.”
What if you remember everything?
But memory can not only be lost, it can also be enhanced. And we are not referring to developing techniques to be able to memorize a series of data, but to a disorder called hyperthymesia that makes the subject remember absolutely everything they have experienced since their youth. Every day, every detail, anything you’ve experienced firsthand or read. That is why it is also called superior autobiographical memory. There are not many cases that are known, but whoever followed the series from the late 1970s Taxi will remember the actress Marilu Henner: in 2010 she recognized that she had that ability, and that she could remember every day of her life since she I was 11 years old.
