Amnesia

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Amnesia

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• Thomas G. Bowers, Ph.D.
• Penn State Harrisburg2000

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Amnesia

• Disorders of memory
• Often due to diseases of CNS
• Alzheimers Disease
• Other types of dementia as, as Picks Disease
• Chronic heavy use of alcohol
• Exposure to environmental toxins, as lead,
  mercury

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Amensia

• Normal forgetting
• There is evidence that cognitive flexibility and
  fluid intellectual processing decreases with age
• At the same time, many very well learned skills
  as vocabulary tend to persist

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Amnesia

• What is memory exactly?
• Penfield
• Direct electrical simulation of brain yields
  highly specific experience - ala memory?
• Probably not - not a storage phenomena, but a
  complex pattern of stimulation

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Amnesia

• Alcoholic Dementia
• Wide spread cognitive deterioration
• Often without the profound amnesic disturbance of
  Korsakoffs psychosis
• Extensive cortical atrophy, involves white matter
  to an extensive degree
• Do show some memory impairment

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Amnesia

• Korsakoffs psychosis
• Actually misnamed, not a true psychosis, but a
  memory disorder
• Lack of eating and vitamin B intake can lead to
  neuronal cell death
• May also relate to chronic liver disease

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Amnesia

• Korsakoffs psychosis
• Lesions are noted in the thalamus and mammillary
  bodies, and other limbic system structures
• Loss of gray matter noted in the orbitofrontal
  region, and mesiotemporal region
• As well as the thalamus, other diencephalon
  structures

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Amnesia

• Korsakoffs psychosis
• Also noted olfactory deficits
• Cognitive performance
• Performance on well-structured, untimed tests of
  overlearned material is good
• Performance tends to decline on tests that
  require speed, visuoperceptual and spatial
  organization
• Auditory processing also slow

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Amnesia

• Korsakoffs psychosis
• Cognitive performance
• Do well on measures of simple attention
• Encoding material is defective
• They show little learning curve
• Tend to perseverate
• Tend to make intrusion errors
• Short-term recall not much different than normals
• They tend to report implausible circumstances
  without guile

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Amnesia

• Korsakoffs psychosis
• Cognitive performance
• Poor performance on problem solving
• Disorientation to time and place, apathy, loss of
  initiative, interests, insight

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Amnesia

• Is Korsakoff an end stage of chronic alcoholism?
• Korsakoffs has a sudden onset, residual of a
  massive confusional state
• Extreme passivity and emotional blandness
• Often end up in custodial care

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Other Sources of Memory Problems

• Marijuana
• Comparisons of college students who used or did
  not use marijuana showed no differences on the
  HRNB
• Carlin, 1986 Culver and King, 1974
• Danish study showed no differences between users
  and controls (Bruh Maage, 1975)

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Other Sources of Memory Problems

• Marijuana
• Grant, Adams and Carlin (1978) marijuana is not
  neurotoxic, at least in the short run (i.e.
  approximately 10 years of regular use)
• Subjects were not heavy hallucinogen customers