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Throughout this course I have been extremely interested in memory. During the past few weeks I have had the pleasure of reading numerous articles on “normal” memory, problems with memory, different types of memory, how memory effects behavior, and memory in different people. This week, I read an extremely intriguing article on a specific type of memory loss known as dissociative fugue or dissociative amnesia.

Dissociative fugue, or dissociative amnesia, is a condition in which the brain suddenly and unexpectedly incurs severe memory loss. While the cause may sometimes be due to head injury, stroke, viral encephalitis or temporal lobe epilepsy, it is often based on a psychological cause (such as post traumatic stress disorder or depression). These cases are jarring and scary as many individuals simply stand up and walk away one day, as people without a past or an identity. However, as one playwright describes in the New York Times article I read (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/health/psychology/17brody.html?pagewanted=1), “You never lose your memory. It’s always there. It just falls out of the file cabinet.”

These cases astonish and bewilder me, as it seems that the brain has the ability to literally misplace significant amounts of memory for short periods of time. In these cases, individuals must reconstruct their realities until they are able to retrieve their memory.