CAN NEUROLOGICAL PATIENTS LOSE THEIR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SENSE OF SELF?
French psychologists, before James, were aware of a useful distinction: Brain diseases disrupted their patients’ recent, ongoing memories. These anterograde memories were lost to a much greater degree than were those older (retrograde) memories laid down in the remote past. Today it is a commonplace observation that patients with Alzheimer’s disease lose their recent memories first. They may lose their eyeglasses every day, yet remain capable of recounting detailed personal memories from childhood. Not until 1992 did the case reports by Narinder Kapur draw attention to some unusual exceptions to this old clinical dictum. This new subset of patients showed the opposite pattern: a severe retrograde amnesia. They lost their old autobiographical memories, while retaining their recent memories and their fund of general factual information. Could a single, isolated lesion in the brain cause this inverse pattern of autobiographical memory loss? No, patients with this condition had lesions at s
