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If a person suffered a brain injury and went into a coma and lost all memory, then when he woke up, would he feel like he’d started life for the first time? He’d feel that his life began the day he woke up in that hospital?
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If such a person were, say, 20 years old, would his 21st birthday feel like his 1st birthday?
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Would such a person have to re-learn how to read, write, speak?
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Is it plausible to suffer a brain injury that knocks out memory but little else?
Your question is extremely broad and has multiple possible ways of thinking about. But one thing that might help you understand the complexities you’re asking about is this little video.
The correct answer is that amnesia doesn’t usually work the way it does in Movies and TV.
The most common type of amnesia is that short-term memories don’t get transferred to long-term memory. Which means, you remember your childhood but can’t remember what you had for lunch today. In severe cases you get the full-on “Memento” style amnesia where a person literally has no memory of anything past the last few minutes and has to be constantly reminded that they’re in a hospital and what their condition is.
The short answer to all those is no.
It is possible to lose the ability to read, or write, or speak (or any one or two thereof - yes, including being able to write but not read) due to brain injury, and in some cases those abilities can be relearned, or partially so, but this is not really a matter of loss of memory, in the usual sense, it is the loss of abilities, and in such cases memory may not be affected much or at all. People with mere amnesia do not forget how to do these things and are not taken back to an infantile condition. Amnesia is (mainly) a loss of memories about one’s life experiences, usually only some of them (and often only temporarily).
It is also possible to damage teh mechanisms of memory formation, but this does not lead to loss of old memories, but an inability to lay down new ones after the injury takes place.
No, that really is not the most common type of amnesia. It is really quite rare, and you yourself seem to have forgotten the truth of your first paragraph by the time you wrote your second. Memento style memory loss is very rare, and even then, I do not think the movie portrays it very realistically. (Nor is it what the OP seems to be asking about.) Most amnesia is a (usually largely temporary) loss of memories about what events happened to one in the period (whose length may vary) leading up to the injury. Another relatively type is the sort of “patchy” memory loss that comes with Alzheimer’s and other dementias, but, again, that is clearly not what the OP is thinking of.
With a head injury you may need to re-learn all of those skills even if you retain your memory.
Not like on the TV and in movies, as stated.
It’s possible to have the memory-making equipment damaged, leaving you remembering the past before the injury and living ever afterward in an eternal now of sorts, unable to form new memories.
My experience with people with brain injury is largely my mother after her stroke and my nephew after a car accident.
My mother initially lost the ability speak, read, and write but not the ability to comprehend the spoken word. She had to re-learn all three of the lost skills, and she was able to do so, although not to the level she had been able to perform before. Her ability to remember was not affected by the stroke, which was localized to the language centers of the brain.
My nephew suffered a severe and diffuse brain injury, basically leaving no part of the brain unscathed. He had to relearn everything - walking, talking, using his body, etc. He can recall things from prior to the accident, but since then forming new memories and learning new things is much more difficult. He did go through a period where recollection was poor and new memories almost non-existent, but aside from something that takes out the hippocampus or related structures you usually get the memory function back to a greater or lesser degree.