Patients with hippocampal amnesia cannot imagine new experiences
D Hassabis, D Kumaran, SD Vann, EA Maguire
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2007•pnas.org
Amnesic patients have a well established deficit in remembering their past experiences. Surprisingly, however, the question as to whether such patients can imagine new experiences has not been formally addressed to our knowledge. We tested whether a group of amnesic patients with primary damage to the hippocampus bilaterally could construct new imagined experiences in response to short verbal cues that outlined a range of simple commonplace scenarios. Our results revealed that patients were markedly impaired relative to matched control subjects at imagining new experiences. Moreover, we identified a possible source for this deficit. The patients’ imagined experiences lacked spatial coherence, consisting instead of fragmented images in the absence of a holistic representation of the environmental setting. The hippocampus, therefore, may make a critical contribution to the creation of new experiences by providing the spatial context into which the disparate elements of an experience can be bound. Given how closely imagined experiences match episodic memories, the absence of this function mediated by the hippocampus, may also fundamentally affect the ability to vividly re-experience the past.
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Fortune Favours the Brave Paperback – 13 Dec. 2018
by Michelle Marcella Clarke (Author), Prof John Crown MB (Foreword)
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Michelle Clarke takes us on an extraordinary journey, through challenges most of us would never know, were it not for her courage to write this story. In 1993, aged 32, she suffers a fractured skull in a horse-riding accident in Zimbabwe, an event which changes her life forever. The traumatic brain injury adds to her existing conditions of Bipolar, Anxiety and Chronic Fatigue. Her marriage fails and she returns to live in Ireland. In 2003, she meets KT at a bus stop in Dublin. He invites her for coffee, and they have been together ever since. The third member of their team is Freddie, a very special little rescue dog. In July 2017, the shocking diagnosis of breast cancer arrives via a routine mammogram and she enters the next phase of ill-health, but this time with the loving support of KT and Freddie. She records her journey through this cancer, primarily to help others, who are experiencing cancer, and their supportersand loved ones, but in doing so she also reaches out to all of us who care about the rare life story of a fellow human being.
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