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Anterograde Amnesia and 50 First Dates
Psychology Basis
Anterograde Amnesia: Anterograde Amnesia is a loss of the ability to create new
memories after the event that caused the amnesia(like an traumatic head injury), leading to a partial or complete inability to recall the recent past, while long-term memories from before the event remain intact. This is in contrast to retrograde amnesia, where most memories created prior to the event are lost while new memories can still be created. To a large degree, anterograde amnesia remains a mysterious ailment because the precise mechanism of storing memories is not yet well understood, although it is known that the regions involved are certain sites in the temporal cortex, especially in the hippocampus and nearby subcortical regions.
Retrograde Amnesia is the inability to recall long term memories that were stored prior to the traumatic event.
Anterograde Amnesia Causes:
Benzodiazepine drugs, which are known to have powerful amnesic effects
Traumatic brain injury, which can be caused by blows to the head(for example: a car accident)
Shock or an emotional disorder Illness, though much rarer, can also cause
anterograde amnesia if it causes encephalitis, which is the inflammation of brain tissue
Alcohol intoxication
There are three types of memory:Sensory Memory is memory in which the
impression of a sensory stimulus is storedWorking Memory is memory in which
information for short-term use is stored(Commonly referred to as “Short-Term” memory)
Long term memory is memory in which information that can last a lifetime is stored
Media
Lucy Henry
Lucy is a woman living in Hawaii with her brother and father Henry is a man also living in Hawaii, working as an aquatic
veterinarian Henry meets Lucy and falls in love with her The next day, Henry sees her again, and she has no recollection
of meeting him the pervious day Henry tries various ways to get Lucy to remember him, but she
never does remember him the next day
Lucy’s Dad Lucy’s Brother
Soon, Henry meets Lucy’s dad and Brother and they inform him that due to a car accident on Lucy’s Dad’s birthday about a year ago, Lucy wakes up every morning, thinking that it is the morning of her Father’s birthday
Connection
CONNECTION
Lucy meets Henry at the café the first time, and makes plans to have breakfast with him
again the next day…
CONNECTION
… But the next day Henry acts like they met the day before, making inside jokes related to their previous conversation, and Lucy freaks
out because she doesn’t remember him.
CONNECTION
Eventually Lucy finds out that her family has been deceiving her every day, in order to make it seem like it is the day of the accident every day, and they are
forced to tell her the truth about what happened. Lucy insists they take her to the doctor so that she can hear
it from him herself.
CONNECTION/VALIDITY
The Doctor calls Lucy’s condition “Goldfield Syndrome”
“Goldfield Syndrome” is not a real thing, but Anterograde Amnesia is
The Doctor
The Doctor also states that her brain is healthy now, but because of permanent damage, it is having trouble converting “short term memory into long term memory”
As previously discussed, the correct term for “short term memory” would be “working memory” but nonetheless, he is correct in saying that that is where the problem is in her memory making process
CONNECTION/VALIDITY
CONNECTION/VALIDITY
This disconnect that the doctor previously mentioned, perfectly
describes Anterograde Amnesia: the inability to create new, long term
memories. Therefore, Lucy is suffering from Anterograde Amnesia.
My take
Although the severity of Lucy’s case is rare, Anterograde Amnesia is a very real thing. I think this film is great for the purpose of raising awareness to the public that there are people out there, struggling with this problem daily. Although they to fail to call Lucy’s problem by the correct name, they do present the problem of Anterograde amnesia consistently throughout the film.
ReferencesImages: Google Images (I
googled “50 First Dates”)Information: Wikipedia (I
searched “Anterograde Amnesia” and “Retrograde Amnesia”)