title: How can be best explain retrograde amnesia in human memory disorder?
abstract: I firstly consider general issues relating to our attempts to understand retrograde amnesia. Three main hypotheses are reviewed that have been proposed to account for retrograde amnesia. A theory is outlined to explain the dense autobiographical amnesia that is a focal phenomenon in some cases of severe head injury. This theory postulates that autobiographical retrieval requires the activation of a distributed network of cognitive operations, and that autobiographical amnesia results from the occurrence of multiple areas of pathology, distributed over both space and time.
authors.affiliation: Wessex Neurological Centre, Southampton General Hospital, UK.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Kapur
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D017668:Age of Onset; D000648:Amnesia, Retrograde / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001921:Brain / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001930:Brain Injuries / Q000503:physiopathology; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology; D008960:Models, Psychological; D013997:Time Factors