Our textbook Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience mentions that movies often feature characters with some sort of memory loss. One of the movies listed is The Bourne Identity (2002) starring Matt Damon. In this film, we see the character played by Damon, Jason Bourne, lose his memory after an accident that leaves him unconscious and badly wounded. Once he wakes up, he does not remember his identity, but he still remembers procedural memories from his training as a CIA agent. Bourne’s situation is related to a rare condition called psychogenic fugue.

Fugues are classified as a dissociative disorder, a syndrome in which an individual experiences a disruption in memory, consciousness, and/or identity. This may last anywhere from less than a day to several months, and is sometimes, but not always, brought on by severe stress or trauma. Psychogenic  fugue is usually triggered by traumatic and stressful events, such as wartime battle, abuse, rape, accidents, natural disasters, and extreme violence, although fugue states may not occur immediately.

Some of the symptoms of fugues include sudden and unplanned travel away from home as well as an inability to recall past events about one’s life. Confusion or loss of memory about one’s identity is also part of the symptoms. If the amnesia of fugue occurs without an episode of unexpected travel (fleeing), dissociative amnesia is usually diagnosed (Fugue).

There was a case reported of a 41-year old Nurse who appeared to have Psychogenic Fugue. She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in New York in 1990 after a series of symptoms coupled with episodes of amnesia. She reported that symptoms of depression, anxiety, insomnia, and decreased ability to work had worsened over the month and a half prior to her admission. For a while she would take long car rides, and often appear in different states with no memory of why and how she got there. Also, she would find notes in her room, like phone numbers and such, but she did not remember how they appeared there. She would think that someone might have been following her and that people were sneaking into her apartment to leaves these notes. Based on the family and relationship history that she described during therapy, one could notice that there was a pattern of emotional abuse from her mother, her husband, and even her in-laws. She endured some trauma when she was assaulted in June 1987. She is diagnosed with psychogenic fugue, and her treatment involves a mixed cognitive and supportive exploratory treatment. With the help of therapy, the doctors are able to help the patient feel protected and less helpless, and to deal with the traumas that caused her this condition in the first place (Soute 1992)

As Paula Ford-Martin points out that there are some other forms of treatment. In some cases, hypnotherapy, or hypnosis, may be useful in helping the patient recover lost memories of trauma. Creative therapies like music therapy are also constructive in allowing patients to express and explore thoughts and emotions in “safe” ways. Medication may be a useful adjunct, or complementary, treatment for some of the symptoms that the patient may be experiencing in relation to the dissociative episode. In some cases, antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication may be prescribed.

Sources:

Ford-Martin, Paula. “Fugue.” The Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology. Ed. Bonnie Strickland. 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2001. 263-264. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 9 Mar. 2014.

Stoute BJ, Messina EG, Viederman M. Case of a 41-year-old nurse with psychogenic fugue States. The Journal of psychotherapy practice and research. 1992;1:371-386.

What exactly is prosopagnosia? A good start to find out more about this condition would be to start by finding out the roots of the word itself. The word prosopagnosia comes from the Greek prosop for “face” and agnosia for “ignorance.” This is a condition characterized by the impairment in the ability to recognize other individuals’ faces, even for people they know well such as family, coworkers, and friends.  What is interesting about this condition is that people who suffer it have no problem whatsoever recognizing other objects, and have a well functioning cognitive function and memory (Goldstein 30).

So, what causes prosopagnosia?  This condition can be caused by brain damage, more specifically to the occipito- temporal region (Harris).   The impairment of some cognitive systems, like perception or memory, could be what is causing the failure to recognize familiar faces.  As for the neural systems that are affected, Harris explains that prosopagnosia is frequently associated with bilateral damage to the visual cortex, particularly the fusiform gyrus.  Recent studies have suggested that people with developmental prosopagnosia have no lesions on the fusiform gyrus, might have a subtle alteration of the white matter connections in this region.

In case report presented by Bornstein, we can learn about A.G., a man aged 64, who was a clerk. He was well, no problems with his health or anything, until one night he woke up suddenly from his sleep because of sever dizziness that made him unconscious, but that did not affect his daily routine the following day. However, a similar episode happened two years after. He woke up with severe frontal headache, and he had an appointment with a doctor on the same day. On his way there, the headache intensified, so he decided to go back home. During that time, something odd happened: he knew exactly where he was but the streets seemed strange to him. He took the bus he always took home, but he couldn’t recognize the streets, and even had trouble distinguishing men from female passengers.  Once at home, he decided to wash his face, and when he stared at the mirror, the face he saw looked strange.  Days later, when his son visited him, Mr. G did not recognize him until he spoke.  He was then admitted to a hospital, where he explained that he had found difficulty in appreciating the facial features and expressions of people he had known for several years.  Bornstein and Kidron came to a conclusion about this patient’s diagnosis. Since the patient had mentioned that he had lost consciousness twice probably caused by small thrombotic processes, which caused him to strike the right occipital lobe of his brain.

There also have been physiological studies performed in primates that have “identified cells that respond specifically to faces, prompting the search for similar tissue in humans,” as well as  “blood flow studies with recently developed neuroimaging techniques and the electrical activity of the brain that show that this is also the case in humans (Puce). Still, with all these advances, there is still plenty of research to be made to specifically detect what causes prosopagnosia.  The results might not pinpoint to a single area that is associated with this condition, but rather to an association of different areas and neurons that might cause it.

Works cited:

BORNSTEIN, B., & KIDRON, D. P. (1959). Prosopagnosia. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 22(2), 124-131. doi:10.1136/jnnp.22.2.124

Harris, A. M., & Aguirre, G. K. (2007). Prosopagnosia. Current Biology : CB, 17(1), R7-R8. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2006.11.04

Puce, A.Face recognition: Psychological and neural aspects. (pp. 5226-5230) Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/03500-2