Why Don’t Patients Of Memory Loss Forget Their Language?

Amnesiacs tend to forget their language because they suffer from anterograde amnesia, which is a type of amnesia that prevents them from forming new memories.

Amnesiacs tend to strongly retain childhood memories, which seem to be cemented by time. That being said, they are known to register new ones, albeit only semantic ones.

50 First Dates is one of the most popular romantic comedies in recent decades. The film is a typical rom-com; it celebrates love, it is (moderately) funny and it is highly unrealistic. Still, it isn’t inaccurate. Barrymore’s portrayal of an amnesiac is surprisingly top notch, unlike protagonists in ridiculous drama or action films who are purged of their amnesia after a blow to the same spot on their head where an earlier blow caused it. This is convenient for the plot of fiction, but not real life.

The notion of memories also entails something that has been a perennial source of introspection and wonder. The essence of the self, our personal identity, has perplexed us since antiquity. The central question is what makes a vague memory of an 8-year-old you packing a school bag with his books the same person as you are at this moment, despite harboring completely different ideologies, appearance, milieu and even biological cells. Despite being biologically and metaphysically different, what makes these two different organisms across time the same being – what makes you you? What accounts for this connectedness?

Descartes believed that personal identity existed separately from our experience, in a Cartesian Ego, a soul. Hume, on the other hand, believed that identity was nothing eccentric, but merely a sum of experiences, a psychological continuity of memories. We are just our thoughts and our memories. Hume believed that it is the nature of memory that dupes us with an illusion of a persisting self, one existing separately from our experiences.

Hume’s proposition is remarkable, but more importantly, courageous, for it was implicitly refuting Christianity’s eternal promise. However, his view became progressively more plausible as we became more knowledgeable about the brain’s intricate workings through neurology. One should not confuse amnesia with dementia, where the sense of self somehow erodes. Family members often claim that the patient is no longer his old self. Amnesia, an extensive loss of memory, strangely, spares his victims of this atrocity. Why? Honestly, we don’t know. The mysteries of memory, subjectivity and self-awareness continue to elude us.