Human anterograde amnesia can develop following bilateral damage to the hippocampus and medial temporal lobes, as in hypoxic brain injury, or following damage to the basal forebrain, as following anterior communicating artery (ACoA) aneurysm rupture. In both cases, the mnestic deficit may be similar when assessed by standard neuropsychological measures. However, animal and computational models ...

Transient epileptic amnesia is a form of temporal lobe epilepsy in which sufferers often complain of irretrievable loss of remote memories. We used a broad range of memory tests to clarify the extent and nature of the remote memory deficits in patients with transient epileptic amnesia. Performance on standard tests of anterograde memory was normal. In contrast, there was a severe impairment of ...

paraneoplastic neurological syndromes have only been described with pleural mesothelioma in five cases. we have described a 72-year-old man who developed anterograde amnesia 27 months after diagnosis of epithelioid pleural mesothelioma. investigations revealed a limbic encephalitis with no alternative causes identified. limbic encephalitis is a classical paraneoplastic syndrome and presentation...

In the movie, Memento, the hero, Leonard, suffers from a form of anterograde amnesia that results in an inability to lay down new memories. Nonetheless, he sets out on a quest to find his wife’s killer, aided by the use of notes, annotated polaroids, and (for the most important pieces of information obtained) body tattoos. Using these resources he attempts to build up a stock of new beliefs and...

The default-mode network (DMN) is a set of specific brain regions whose activity, predominant in the resting-state, is attenuated during cognitively demanding, externally-cued tasks. The cognitive correlates of this network have proven difficult to interrogate, but one hypothesis is that regions in the network process episodic memories and semantic knowledge integral to internally-generated men...

The term ‘‘anesthesia’’ was originally used by the ancient Greek surgeon Dioscorides and resurrected by Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes to describe the insensible state produced by inhalation of ether. The goals of general anesthesia include amnesia, unconsciousness (also termed hypnosis), and immobilization. By definition, general anesthetics reversibly produce all 3 of these therapeutic effects. Gen...

Short-term memory following the intravenous injection of methohexitone (0.15 mg/kg), diazepam (0.05 mg/kg) and sodium 4-hydroxybutyrate (10 mg/kg) has been examined by means of a visually presented digit retention test with intervals of 4 and 20 seconds before recall. No significant change was found with the 4-second interval; statistically significant impairment was found with the 20-second in...

We hypothesized that word-stem completion (WSC) priming and perceptual identification (PI) priming, two types of repetition priming, rely on different cognitive and neural mechanisms: WSC priming on a modification mechanism that influences lexical retrieval, and PI priming on plasticity in pre-lexical perceptual systems. We compared the priming performance of the amnesic patient H.M. with words...