amnesia patient

Can you convince an amnesia patient that they are someone that they really aren’t? (e.g., Can you convince a patient that they were excellent in Math, loved to ski and was good to his/her family)

Never thought about that. Interesting question.

Amnesia has lots of different causes. If it was a short term dissociative fugue (blanking out a tramatic event), the answer is no. In fact, I think the answer woud usually be no. You might be able to in a heavy drinker or someone taking powerful drugs, though. Not much help, eh?

pretty unlikely. The classic view of amnesia, ie someone who can’t remember anything about their past, is really, really, really rare. Some experts doubt it truly exists. More common is to lose the present, and be unable to remember anything new after a certain date in one’s life. Identity is well fixed, but no new learning can take place.

If interested, check out the book “The man who mistook his wife for a hat” for some interesting cases of memory and perception/cognition disturbance

/hijack

I have a slight case of amnesia. Last Aug I was envolved in an car crash. As a side effect I cannot remember about 20 hours of my life. I can remember going to bed the night before, the next thing I remember is waking up in my bed at 9:00 the next night.
Its a strange feeling…