No worries, I learned something anyway.
Okay, the answer I give here is a personal judgement call. It may or may not be absolutely correct. IMHO, the tester’s judgement that the protagonist was faking could have been wrong.
Longterm memory has two components: declarative memory and procedural memory. Declarative memory is the memory for facts, names, dates, general knowledge, the rules of logic etc. Procedural memory is the memory for skills and habits, such as riding a bicycle or swimming. So, in the case of getting shocked repeatedly by the same object you can either
(1) Remember that object X shocked me, so I must not touch it
(2) Touch object X and get shocked often enough that it becomes an ingrained (learnt/conditioned) response to start avoiding it.
Option 1 falls under declarative memory, and option 2 falls under procedural memory. A person who has anterograde amnesia has a problem with option 1. However they can learn via option 2. Since the protagonist in Memento did not show learning via procedural memory, the tester concluded he was faking.
Now why did I say this may not have been the right answer? Because it is perfectly possible that our protagonist suffered losses to both his declarative and non-declarative memories, and hence was unable to learn to avoid the electric shock.
I hope that clarifies it somewhat.
Which, btw, is very similar to the point I was trying to make when I said
, and leads me to ask again, if the “Memento” test might be so flawed, couldn’t the “coin in hand” test have similar capacity for false positives?
Mmm, let me grasp at a straw – I am imagining a scenario where a complex of brain disorders causes the testee to a)consciously “forget” events, and, b)unconsciously lead them to make inappropriate bad “guesses”.
Oh, the coin-in-hand test certainly could generate false positives. That’s why I kept stressing that a combination of testing methods is used in diagnosis!
[hijack]
Why is my Online button thingy (it looks like a square root sign in a box) grey even though I’m online?
[/hijack]
I don’t know, why is your on-line button thingy grey even though you’re online?
This had better be one funny punchline…
Okay, TGU, that made me laugh!! I’m still snickering as I type this.
I didn’t mean it to sound riddle-like…it was a genuine question!
My guess is that in your profile, you clicked an option to prevent you from showing up as being online.
The test in Memento did not work. He was diagnosed incorrectly as explained near the end of the movie.
it is possible to lose both declarative and non-declarative memory, but it is extremely rare. in the 1950’s there was a man known in articles as h.m. who suffered from severe epilepsy. the seizures were located in his temporal lobes, and as no one knew then what that part of the brain did, they decided to remove them and see what happened. he lost all memory from the previous few years (roughly 1-3 years, iirc) but could remember everything before that perfectly well, and suffered with anterograde amnesia for the rest of his life. he could learn how to complete new actions, such as solving puzzles, but could not remember having learned. he would state that he had never seen a puzzle before, but if instructed to solve it, would be able to do it easily without knowing why. neuroscientists studied him for decades.
a basic breakdownof types, symptoms, and causes, of amnesia.
most often, a person does not get just anterograde, or just retrograde amnesia, but a mixture of both. cite.