On Mon, 5 Jul 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] went: > A student posted a question to my Webboard regarding people who seem > to remember trivial facts from long ago but forget important > material from the recent past. I said that it sounded to me like an > encoding or consolidation problem involving the hippocampus, but I > wanted to check with you'all to find out if I was accurate in that > appraisal. Depends--on the question. Are we talking about someone who's truly anterograde amnesic--that is, someone who retains important new information for a few seconds, then quickly begins to lose the information forever? Very likely that would be a hippocampal problem. It's different if we're talking about someone who's just a bit scatterbrained--someone who goes down to the basement for a hammer, thinks "What did I want down here?," returns empty-handed, and then thinks, "Oh yeah, I wanted the hammer." (I stole that example from neuropsychologist Donald Stuss.) This ia a problem in _retrieving_ appropriate information at the appropriate time. A likely culprit here would be prefrontal cortex, especially a region called DLPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), especially in the right hemisphere. (Endel Tulving has published a lot on the respective specialization of left and right prefrontal cortices for encoding and retrieval.) This is a dysfunction that we all experience to varying degrees. Disclaimer: This has been another of my off-the-cuff, didn't-check- my-files responses. Not to be taken internally. --David Epstein [EMAIL PROTECTED]
