"It's like waking. Like you just woke up."

The New York Times reports about a new study out of University College London that tested how brain-damaged people with amnesia visualize imaginary scenes. Participants in the study had suffered damage to their hippocampus, the brain region that is central to forming new memories, and the results suggest that without it, people have difficulties envisioning familiar scenes. The study's authors believe that this is because humans rely on memories of past experiences to imagine future ones, and that the hippocampus provides the context for these memories.

Though different in several notable aspects, this study's findings were consistent with the results of a paper published last year by Carnegie Mellon Psychology Professor Lynne Reder, who examined the effects of short-term memory loss through use of the drug midazolam. The drug, used to relieve anxiety before surgery, induces short-term anterograde amnesia, the most common form of amnesia. Anterograde amnesia, which was portrayed in the film "Memento", impairs a person's ability to form new memories while leaving old ones unharmed. Reder found that the drug prevented people from recalling items through a process known as recollection, in which people retrieve contextual details involved in the experience of studying information. Another process for remembering information, familiarity, was unaffected by the drug.

Read more by clicking here.

Jonathan Potts