• Question: Why is it that when a person suffers from amnesia, they don\'t forget the basic life techniques, such as the language in which they speak, and how to speak it? Has there ever been a case where the brain has completely shut down and lost everything, not just memories, leaving the person with the brain equal to that of a newborn baby?

    Asked by koalasrock to Fiona, Jane, Joanna, Michelle, William on 17 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Jane Henry

      Jane Henry answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      There are all manner of different amnesias, where people forget the wierdest things but not other things depending on which bit of their their has been damaged by say a stroke or accident. There is even a phenomena called inattentional blindness where people do not recognise one side of their body, eg on being told to lift both arms, they would lift one and not both. And being told to lift the arm on the side they had the problem, even say things like they just did life their arm when they haven’t if questionned, assuming the researcher missed it. Other people have all the pre accident memories but lose the ability to form new lasting memories which makes it very difficult to function. People in a vegetative state were until recently thought to have lost everything, and not even have the awareness a baby would. Where there is no response at all, not even unconscious reflex responses, people are thought to be brain dead.

    • Photo: Joanna Brooks

      Joanna Brooks answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Good question! Firstly, imagine the brain like a computer with lots of different folders for storing information or processing systems. It is possible to damage just one of these folders which means you will only lose information in that particular folder – like language.

      There have been cases in which the brain can shut down completely and the person loses everything – usually there is a virus involved. For example, the Rabies virus (carried by animals and passed to humans by a bite) causes severe inflammation of the brain along with terrible headaches, fever, severe pain and sickness. Without treatment the virus can put the person into a coma which they may never recover from as the brain shuts down completely.

    • Photo: Michelle Murphy

      Michelle Murphy answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Mainly because memory and langusge are controlled by different areas of the brain

    • Photo: Fiona Randall

      Fiona Randall answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Hi Koalasrock 🙂 What a good question!
      The memory is a very interesting part of brain function and we still don’t know the exact details of it but are slowly piecing it together. Basically when you first experience something you store it in short term memory areas of the brain, and if it is important enough it is then stored in the long term memory. The long term memory is in a different part of the brain, like keeping something in a different drawer almost. In amnesia, people often forget everything that happens after a certain point (like in the movie 50 first dates-have you seen it?). That is because the part of the brain where the memories up to that point were isn’t affected by the damage, but the other parts with the newer memories are. In illnesses like Alzheimer’s the brain machinery that actually stores memories is lost, but the old memories that were made before that are still there. I’m not sure about the 2nd bit of the question but sometimes people who have a very severe head injury have to learn normal functions again like how to eat and speak. That is in extreme cases. I hope that is clear, feel free to ask me anything else.

    • Photo: William Davies

      William Davies answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Our knowledge is distributed throughout the brain mainly in the cortex. Things like amnesia are generally the result of damage to a specific part of the brain (e.g. the hippocampus), so certain brain processes such as memory retrieval are affected, but most of our knowledge is safe. We also have several back-up systems which may not be so efficient, but which can be adapted to take over the lost function. People in permanent vegetative states have lost the majority of their brain function, although some recent work suggests that they might be slightly conscious of events around them

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