Research Paper Topic:

What more specifically are you trying to ask about these types of amnesia? What are the different locations of brain injury involved in different types of amnesia?

Memory: Amnesia, Retrograde Amnesia, and Anterograde Amnesia

Write a research paper on it. Use APA 7 style with proper format, citations, and references. Use 5-10 research articles published between 2018 – 2023. You may use sources that are older or not research articles after you met the minimum requirements. An abstract is not required.

Have 5-10 pages of content in the body of your paper (not counting the title page and the reference page(s)). Write in double-spaced Times New Roman 12-point font. Do not use direct quotes in this paper. To help you with grammar and spelling, use Grammarly . Memory Impairment and Brain Injury

Here is some information from one of the Book Materials covered from this course about Amnesia, Retrograde and Anterograde Amnesia.

What is Memory and What are Memory Systems?

Memory is the ability to store and retrieve information. Memory enables organisms to take information from experiences and retain it for later use. Because these basic functions of memory, the storing and retrieving of information, are not unique to living organisms, we also use the term memory to describe artificial information-storing devices. However, this analogy is imperfect. For living organisms, memory does not work like computer storage or a digital camera, faithfully recording the information that is inputted. Instead, in much the same way that perception transforms sensory signals to create a stable representation of the world, our memories are influenced by the situation or context and the way we process, interpret, and use information. The memories we retrieve can be incomplete, biased, and distorted. Two people’s memories for the same event can differ vastly, because each person stores and retrieves memories of the event distinctively. In other words, memories are personal and unique stories. In addition, not all experiences are equally likely to be remembered. Some life events pass swiftly, leaving no lasting memory. Others are remembered but later forgotten. Still others remain in our memories for a lifetime.

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Although the term memory is most often used to refer to your ability to consciously recollect information at will, such as remembering what you had for lunch yesterday, memory is expressed whenever you exhibit a response or behavior that is modified by past experience. Psychologists have identified different types of memory that rely on different brain circuits, or systems, for storage and expression.

7.1 There Are Many Types of Memories and Memory Systems

Throughout each day, you express your memories through your thoughts, words, and actions. Your ability to walk, bike, or drive home relies on your memory for those skills. Knowing the address of your home and how to get there represents other types of memories. Remembering a phone call you made just before you drove home is yet another expression of memory. Psychologists have investigated the different forms of memory expression since the early twentieth century, and much of what has been learned about how different types of memory are organized in behavior and the brain was discovered through studies in patients with brain injuries. The most famous of these patients is H.M.

THE CASE OF H.M. H.M., or

Henry Molaison,  was born in 1926 and died at a nursing home in 2008. Until his death, the larger world did not know H.M.’s real name or what he looked like (FIGURE 7.1). His privacy was guarded by the researchers who studied his memory. Although H.M. lived until his 80s, in many ways his world stopped in 1953, when he was 27. As a young man, H.M. suffered from severe epilepsy. Every day, he had several grand mal seizures, an affliction that made it impossible for him to lead a normal life. Seizures are uncontrolled random firings of groups of neurons, and they can spread across the brain. H.M.’s seizures originated in the temporal lobes of his brain and would spread from there.

Because the anticonvulsive drugs available at that time could not control H.M.’s seizures, surgery was the only choice for treatment. The reasoning behind this surgery was that if the seizure-causing portion of his brain was removed, he would stop having seizures. In September 1953, H.M.’s doctors removed parts of his medial temporal lobes, including the hippocampus (FIGURE 7.2). The surgery quieted his seizures, but it had an unexpected and very unfortunate side effect: H.M. seemed to have lost the ability to remember new information for more than a few moments.

H.M. never remembered the day of the week, what year it was, or his own age. Still, he could talk about his childhood, explain the rules of baseball, and describe members of his family, things he knew at the time of the surgery. In other words, his ability to remember details from his life prior to surgery was relatively intact. According to the psychologists who tested him his IQ was slightly above average.

H.M. suffered from amnesia, an inability to retrieve vast quantities of information from memory as a result of brain injury or psychological trauma. There are two basic types of amnesia: retrograde and anterograde.

In retrograde amnesia, people lose past memories for events, facts, people, or even personal information. Most portrayals of amnesia in the movies and on television are of retrograde amnesia, as when characters in

soap operas awaken from comas and do not know who they are. (FIGURE 7.3a). By contrast, in anterograde amnesia, which is more common in real life, people lose the ability to form new memories (FIGURE 7.3b). After his surgery, H.M. suffered from anterograde amnesia. He could remember details of his life prior to 1953 but could not remember anything that happened after that.

FIGURE 7.3

Retrograde Amnesia Versus Anterograde Amnesia

Amnesia can involve either of two forms of memory loss. (a) Retrograde amnesia is an inability to access memories that were created before brain damage. (b) Anterograde amnesia is an inability to create new memories after the brain damageDespite this very poor memory, H.M. could hold a normal conversation as long as he was not distracted. This ability showed that he was still able to remember things for short periods. After all, to grasp the meaning of spoken language, a person needs to remember the words recently spoken, such as the beginning and end of a sentence. But H.M. would lose the thread of a conversation if it extended beyond a few minutes. People who worked with H.M. such as the psychologist Brenda Milner, who followed his case for over 40 years had to introduce themselves to him every time they met (Milner et al., 1968). As H.M. put it, “Every day is alone in itself.” Because of his pifofound memory loss, he remembered little. But somehow, he knew that he remembered nothing. How could this have been the case? As researchers studied H.M., they discovered he could learn some new things, although he did not seem to know he had learned them. For instance, he learned new motor tasks. In one series of tests, he was asked to trace the outline of a star while watching his hand in a mirror. Most people do poorly the first few times they try this difficult task.

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On each of three consecutive days, H.M. was asked to trace the star 10 times. His performance improved over the three days, and this result indicated that he had retained some information about the task. On each day, however, H.M. could not recall ever having performed the task before (Milner, 1962). His ability to learn new motor skills enabled him to get a job at a factory, where he mounted cigarette lighters in cardboard cases. But his condition left him unable to describe the job or the workplace. Another example of H.M.’s intact memory abilities was demonstrated with priming. As described in Chapter 4, priming is the facilitation of a response to a stimulus based on past experience with that stimulus or a related stimulus. In one study H.M. was shown a list of words. Later he could not remember having seen the list. However, when presented with words so quickly that they were hard to read, H.M. was more likely to identify words that had been on the list. Healthy control participants also showed this facilitation in identifying briefly presented words they had recently encountered, but unlike H.M., they were also able to recall having seen the list earlier (Postle & Corkin, 1998).

DIFFERENT BRAIN REGIONS SUPPORT DIFFERENT MEMORY SYSTEMS

Studies of H.M.’s strange condition contributed many clues to how memories are stored normally and abnormally in the brain. For instance, we know from studies of H.M. and other patients like him that regions within the temporal lobes, specifically the hippocampus, are important for the ability to store new memories for life events that can be consciously expressed after a short time. As his case illustrates, the temporal lobes are important for being able to say you remember what happened, but they are less important for memories expressed by motor skills or after priming. These are different types of memory that rely on different brain regions.

Largely on the basis of research with patients with different types of brain injuries, psychologists sought to determine the different types of memory and the brain circuits they rely on for storage and retrieval.

Although memory involves multiple regions of the brain, not all brain regions are equally involved in all types of memories. A great deal of neural specialization occurs. Because of this specialization, it is thought that several memory systems exist in the brain that underlie the ability to retrieve information beyond a minute or so after you perceive it. Each memory system is specialized for specific types of information and/or memory expression.

Although scientists debate the exact number of human memory systems, they generally agree on a few basic distinctions. The most basic distinction is a division of memories based on how they are expressed. On the one hand are memories we express without conscious effort or intention, memories we do not know we know; on the other hand are memories of which we are consciously aware. Peter Graf and Daniel Schacter (1985) refer to unconscious or unintentional memory as implicit memory. In contrast, explicit memory includes the processes we use to remember information we can say we know. Implicit and explicit memory can be further subdivided into a few different memory systems.