Memory Loss & Brain Injury
Michael Babboni
Personal Injury
Brain injury is often accompanied by various degrees of memory loss. Dr. Glen Johnson, Clinical Neuropsychologist, states on his Traumatic Brain Injury Survival Guide website: “Impaired memory is one of the universal problems of people with head injury. All of my patients have complained about memory problems following their injury.”
Studies of traumatic brain injury cases show the memory loss differs from patient to patient:
- less than 3% experienced no memory loss at all;
- in 6% of cases, post-traumatic amnesia lasted for less than an hour;
- 7% experienced memory loss from an hour to a day;
- 16% between a day and a week;
- 23% between a week and a month; and
- 45% experienced amnesia for longer than a month.
Post-traumatic amnesia is a state of confusion or memory loss that occurs immediately following a traumatic brain injury. The injured person is disoriented and cannot remember the events that occurred after the injury; they may be unable to state their name; where they are, and what the date and/or time is.
The amnesia resulting from a trauma can be either retrograde amnesia or anterograde amnesia or both.
Retrograde amnesia is the loss of memories that were formed shortly before the injury, particularly where there is damage to the frontal or anterior temporal regions. Dr. Johnson explains it this way:
“For some people, retrograde amnesia can cover just a minute or even a few seconds. In other words, they'll recall the car coming right at them but are unable to recall the moment of impact. For other people, retrograde amnesia may affect longer periods of time. The last three or four hours prior to the accident are gone. I had one individual who had lost the last year of his life. As people get better from their head injuries, long-term memories tend to return. However, memories tend to return like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; these bits and pieces return in random order. In general, the smaller the degree of retrograde amnesia, the less significant the head injury.”
Anterograde amnesia is when one has problems with creating new memories after the injury has taken place, which may not develop until hours after the surgery. Dr. Johnson wrote this about anterograde amnesia:
“A good part of that is due to the brain injury itself. Complex systems in the brain are injured. The chemical balance in the brain is upset. As brain chemistry normalizes and brain systems begin working, memory also starts to work. I've had patients who have spent several months in the hospital but are only able to recall the last to two to three weeks of their stay.”
Post-traumatic amnesia may be either short term, or longer lasting, but rarely permanent. A person usually resumes normal function when continuous memory returns. And while retrograde amnesia sufferers may partially regain memory down the road, memories are never recovered with anterograde amnesia because those memories were not encoded in the brain properly.
Memories from immediately prior to the trauma are often completely lost, partially due to the psychological repression of unpleasant memories (this is referred to as psychogenic amnesia); and partially due to incomplete encoding if the event interrupts the normal process of transfer from short-term to long-term memory.
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