Brain Damage and The Reminiscence Bump
The impaired functioning of autobiographical memory due to damage or disease can have profound effects on an individual's episodic memory. This can skew an individual's lifespan retrieval curve and influence the presentation of the reminiscence bump. Memories an individual has for personal life events can show a different pattern than the average individual if they have brain damage caused by an event like an accident, a blow to the head or disease. For these individuals with brain damage, the life span retrieval curve can look different. An example of this is an individual having the reminiscence bump between the age of 5 and 13 rather than 10 to 30, which is the pattern for the average individual.
Brain injury in the frontal lobes can obscure memories and lead to the loss of details. In more extreme cases patients may even construct available autobiographical knowledge into plausible but false memories.
The effect of temporal lobe damage on the reminiscence bump is highly variable as a function of age at the time of injury. This is because patients with damage to the temporal lobes or underlying structures in the limbic system may lose the ability to form new memories, especially if the damage is within the hippocampal formation, while retaining access to at least some memories from before the injury. Individuals with this type of brain damage are not able to form new memories after the incident that caused the brain damage, but they still have access to memories that happened before the brain damage occurred. If the brain damage was present at the age of 10, the individual may not remember anything from between the age of 10 and 30 and have no reminiscence bump.
Those with damage to regions of the brain involved in visual processing, such as the occipital lobes, may develop amnesia. The episodic content of autobiographical memories is predominantly encoded in the form of visual images. If the ability to generate visual images is compromised or lost then access to specific details of the past held in episodic images is lost as well. When life events or episodic memories are encoded in the brain, they are in the form of pictures or visual images. They develop amnesia since they can no longer bring these visual images of the past to mind.
A common psychological phenomenon is the severe clouding of autobiographical memory, which results in the overgeneralization of memories. For instance, clinically depressed individuals, schizophrenic individuals, and those suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder tend to recall many memories that lack detail (clouded) and are much more schematic than typical autobiographical memories. In these instances, a patient asked to recall specific memories of his father could only recall general events such as "walks in the park after Sunday lunch" and was unable to generate a single specific memory of a single walk.
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