On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, [EMAIL PROTECTED] went:
> A student asked me why she might not have remembered much about her
> hospital stay after she gave birth. She told me that her mother took
> many pictures of her with the new baby but she has no memory for
> many of the events in the pictures. Can memory be affected by having
> recently given birth?
I think there's a surge of oxytocin around the time of labor.
Oxytocin has some amnestic effects, at least in rodents; I'm not sure
what kind of human data there are.
> On the other hand, just before she left, she told me that several
> hours after the pictures were taken, she had been given a general
> anesthetic (I don't know why: she didn't offer a lot of
> information). I thought that this might have affected the
> consolidation of long-term memories. Is that possible?
I could picture that with a benzodiazepine, but I'm less sure about
whether it would happen with a (presumably barbiturate) general
anesthetic.
pretty much making this one up as I go along (maybe Stephen will do better),
David Epstein
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
