Most of us can't remember everything we did on every September 9th, especially if it was an unmemorable occasion where we just sat around watching TV. But what if it wasn't the details you couldn't remember? What if you couldn't remember anything at all? Your name. The location of your Stouffville homes. The identity of your spouse and children. This information is all stored in your memory. If you cannot recall it, you have a condition known as amnesia. Learn more about it here.

Amnesia is the word for any condition that causes the loss of memory. Amnesia can manifest in two different ways. In Anterograde amnesia, affected people are unable to form new memories. In this type of amnesia, there is a failure of the mechanism that transfers information from your short term to your long term memory. For example, if you were told that you worked for Dent Repair Burlington, in a few minutes you would forget. You would, however, still have the memories you formed before amnesia set in.

The second type of amnesia is the type that is more familiar to the public because of its frequent use in film and television. It is called retrograde amnesia, and it involves a loss of memories that were formed before amnesia set in. With this type of amnesia, you wouldn't be able to remember whether you were driving to pick up your custom framing or riding a bike before the onset of amnesia. Newest memories and memories having to do with self-identity are the most affected. You are, however, able to form new memories.

It is possible for one person to suffer the affects of both anterograde and retrograde amnesia simultaneously. In addition, the person's ability to imagine future events may be affected as well. Sometimes, only certain types of memories, such as procedural memory (the ability to remember how to do things), are affected. With amnesia, it is often difficult to tell if a patient will ever recover his or her memory and be able to return to work at RMT Mississauga. Transient Global Amnesia, for example, commonly affects older men for less than 24 hours. In other cases, the patient may never recover the lost memories.

Because memory is stored in various places throughout the limbic system of the brain, anything that affects this system has the potential to affect memory. Some common causes of amnesia are emotional trauma, perhaps caused by trying to figure out how to tell if your man is cheating, physical trauma to the head, such as a motorcycle accident, alcohol or drug abuse, malnutrition, post-traumatic stress disorder, and mental illness. However in some cases, such as with Transient Global Amnesia, there is no identifiable underlying cause.