Some comments in this thread got me thinking about long-term and short-term memory storage and the transfer of one to the other.
My brief history.
My senior year in college (1989) I played intramural flag football. We had a game scheduled for 6PM. I can remember clearly 2PM that afternoon as I remember deciding (in my empty-headed way) to skip my 2PM History of Britain class.
That’s the last thing I remember for that day. Literally.
I’m told I got an elbow to the head about 6:15PM or so. It banged me up but did not knock me out. I’m told I could still function and in fact played the rest of the game. One of my pals checked up on me by asking me what the baseball standings were and when I expressed disbelief that the Cubs were in first place in September (I’m an avid fan) he took me to the local hospital.
I have two or three hazy memories of being in the hospital. They’re fuzzy (literally) and in black and white.
The first clear memory I have is waking up in a hospital bed about 9AM the next morning.
I can understand losing memory after the trauma has been received. That’s all well and good. Brain damaged. Needs to heal.
But those earlier 4+ hours intrigue me. It’s more than 13 years down the road and those memories appear to be gone forever. Somewhere in the transfer of short-term to long-term storage something got wiped (or made permanently inaccessible).
I’m also told that during my time in the hospital I couldn’t remember anything for more than a few seconds. I would be talking to person X, turn away for a few seconds, turn back to person X and ask them “When did you get here?”. Repeatedly. And for all persons.
I’m told it was a trial to be with me. Though my kid sister says it was hilarious.
So what’s the mechanism there? How does memory got from short-term to long-term?