On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 08:33:52 -0700, "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes"
<katbarx at hotmail.com> said:
1 quoted line
In short: The injury to Latro's head seems to have created an inability to recall informaiton from long-term stores at some cognitive levels -- some fairly abstract cognitive levels; this is clearly an injury in the "higher" centers of the brain.
It's been a while since I've taken the classes, but in some of my psyc classes we discussed the case study of a patient who had epilepsy so severe that they resorted to surgery on his hippocampus. I managed to pull up some info from google:
http://thalamus.wustl.edu/course/limbic.html
<cite>
The significance of the hippocampus is driven home by a famous patient named H.M. As part of an epilepsy surgery, doctors removed most of his medial temporal lobes. Since that surgery, in 1953, he has formed no new memories. He can remember his childhood and everything before the surgery, and he still has working memory and the ability to form procedural memories. You can have a normal, lucid conversation with him, but if you leave the room for a moment, when you return he will not remember you or the conversation. He has completely lost the ability to lay down declarative memory. </cite>
We discussed other patients in the class and studies done on them and how their learning had changed. I vaguely remember that they would do exercises where they wouldn't retain the memory of the exercise, but on latter trials their learning curves were improved.
A condition that mimics this is Korsakoff's Syndrome which arises from extreme alcoholism. It produces lesions in that region of the brain. One of Oliver Sacks' books has a case study on it.
If you want to read about memory, but the flip side, Luria has a case study about a man with eidetic memory The Mind of a Mnemonist. Luria has some interesting case studies.
mimosa