Essay Example on Memory is a very hard subject to Study

Wearing the man with the worst case of amnesia has lived his life in total confusion as he feels unconscious and describes his diagnosis as death He has no thoughts no dreams and no ideas Everyday is a unthinkable struggle for Wearing even after being diagnosed for 20 years Before all of this happened Clive Wearing was a successful musical director in London in the early 80s He traveled around the world performing in front of hundreds of people leaving the crowd breathless Wearing had no idea of the unexpected change he would soon experience The herpes virus commonly known for leaving sores on the skin was the cause of his condition Wearing was given medicine to stop the virus from spreading but the medicine did not stop the permanent brain damage In very rare occasions the herpes virus can attack the brain which causes the brain to swell up and be crushed against the bone Due to his herpes Wearing s hippocampus was completely wiped out along with his temporal lobe occipito parietal frontal lobes thalamus hypothalamus and amygdala After this Wearing was not able to create new memories but he still vaguely remembers memories from his childhood Surprisingly Wearing is still able to play music but he often has auditory hallucinations He was forced to live at St Mary s hospital where he was treated for seven years because of his illness 

The hippocampus links all of the relevant information together and encodes it into a new memory by forming a new synapses Not all information is equal in the hippocampus Important things are encoded more effectively than routine things The hippocampus is selective because it is very busy newer memories live in the hippocampus for a while But as more memories are formed the neurons that represent a specific memory migrate further into the cortex this happen because memories are stored throughout the brain Your memories often linked together if they are similar spoken memories are near the language cortex and visual memories near the visual cortex Human memories are not stored like books in a library they are constantly being updated Long term memories can appear to be lost like passwords deadlines addresses and phone numbers It is not that these memories are lost but rather you can recall these memories When we want to access a memory from the dark recesses of our brain signals from our frontal cortex link to the memory then we can reconstruct the information