When young and healthy people lose their memory, it is always unexpected. Left without memories of themselves and loved ones, they have to build their lives anew. It is especially difficult for families to explain to patients who they are every day over and over again. Lenta.ru found out how people live who have lost the ability to remember what happens to them.
The lives of Steve and Camre Curto from the American state of Michigan turned upside down in an instant. In 2012, a young couple was preparing for the birth of their first child when the woman went to the hospital due to difficulty breathing. She was diagnosed with preeclampsia, a serious complication that occurs during pregnancy. During the attack, her brain was left without oxygen for several minutes. Doctors saved her life and saved the child, but she lost her memory.
“It was pure coincidence that the parts of the brain that are responsible for creating and storing memories were affected,” says Steve. “She could lose her speech, her arm could be paralyzed. I didn’t understand it then.”
When the woman woke up, he immediately noticed the changes. Kamre looked at him blankly, as if she was seeing him for the first time. She did not recognize her beloved husband, forgot about her pregnancy and the birth of her son. “I didn’t know anyone,” she said later. “I had no idea who I was, I didn’t even remember my name.”
Forgetting as a natural process
Most likely, many have seen the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” where the company was engaged in erasing events using a special program. This method would be a real salvation for many, but in reality everything happens a little differently.
As time passes, intense emotions and feelings, spoken words, committed actions and deeds lose their colors and begin to seem too distant and completely unimportant.
If we talk about amnesia, this is the same example where it passes naturally, but takes a specific period: years, or maybe even decades. But you can forget a loved one who was very important to you in the same way.
If you broke up with your lover, then time will also help erase the person from your memory. After all, the sensations and pleasant moments experienced together gradually fade. This especially happens when there is a replacement.
The process is subject to a certain strategy. First you need to allow yourself to forget the details of the event, and then delete the entire memory.
Questions and answers
At what age does amnesia most often occur?
Typically, amnestic syndrome appears in people after 65 years of age due to senile changes in the brain. In other age groups, amnesia can occur after trauma, severe intoxication, or as a result of severe psycho-emotional shocks.
Is it possible to restore memory without taking medications?
Even with a regressing form of the disease of organic origin, certain groups of drugs may be required to restore memory in full. They will help normalize metabolic processes and restore bioelectric impulses. If amnesia appears after stress, then in mild cases, competent psychotherapy will be sufficient.
Types of amnesia
I will describe such a loss from the medical side. There are several of its manifestations:
- Retrograde. Everything that happened before the onset of the disease is forgotten.
- Anterograde. The patient cannot remember what happened to him and around him since the onset of the disease. This usually occurs after a serious injury or stressful situation. Often he can remember what happened before. But sometimes this direction develops together with the previous one.
- Fixation. Occurs when a person cannot remember new information and store it.
- Traumatic. Occurs after severe or moderate traumatic brain injury. Is temporary.
- Dissociative. In this case, the brain removes memories from personal life, but leaves skills and abilities. Can be localized, generalized, continuous and selective.
- Children's room. The most common type, existing in almost everyone. This manifests itself when there is no way to remember what happened in early childhood.
Occupy your head
Bad memories come to mind when there is nothing else to think about. And this means that you have a lot of free time, which in turn is a consequence of the fact that your life is empty and meaningless. You sit there, smell your fingers, and the brain, hungry for at least some activity, begins to reproduce the most unpleasant moments in memory, to put it simply, to reflect. And then tears, snot, sobs and even homosexuality begin. This is no joke, this is not something to joke about. All you need is to radically change your life. Come up with as busy and interesting a schedule as possible for yourself, full of events, new discoveries and information. If you are constantly busy with activities, albeit monotonous, but pleasant for you, then you will not notice that the bad memories have disappeared. Because your brain has something to do. In many ways, the following method is impossible without this.
Causes
Before you understand how to get amnesia, you should understand its source. There are enough reasons for this and they are all divided into 2 categories: organic and psychogenic.
The first group includes:
- Traumatic brain injuries - severe bruises, concussions. The patient can talk about what happened before the injury, but the moment of its receipt and beyond is already lost.
- Acute pathological disease of the central nervous system or brain - ischemia, tumor, circulatory disorder, stroke.
- Alcohol or drug poisoning. It often happens that after alcohol abuse, in the morning you don’t remember what happened yesterday. Consciousness is confused, and the condition is accompanied by tremors.
- Taking medications that have a strong effect on the psyche: antidepressants, sleeping pills.
The psychogenic category includes:
- severe stress or psychological trauma;
- emotional shock;
- illnesses of this nature;
- epilepsy.
In most cases, forgetfulness occurs during a stressful situation when the brain tries to remove bad moments.
Psychologist Daria Milai
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Literature:
- Moiseev V.S. Alcohol disease. Damage to internal organs. - M.: GEOTAR-Media, 2014. - 480 p.
- Zinovieva O.V., Vashchenko N.V. Damage to the nervous system due to alcoholism. — Neurology, neuropsychiatry and psychosomatics, 2019. — No. 11.
- Nikiforov I.I., Rakitin M.M. Neurological complications of alcoholic illness. — Neurology, neuropsychiatry and psychosomatics, 2017. — No. 9.
- Fedotov A.I., Tuchina O.D. On the issue of cognitive impairment when drinking alcohol. — Bulletin of St. Petersburg State University. Medicine, 2021. - T. 12, no. 3.
Is it possible to erase a person's memory?
The brain part of the body is responsible for this function. Thanks to it, information is remembered, stored and reproduced. However, with all the latest technologies and brilliant successes in the scientific world, this topic has been studied rather poorly.
Conducted research and experiments have not given scientists a clear answer to how this property works and what its principles are. Methods for partial or complete removal of memories cannot be predicted. Therefore, it is highly not recommended to use memory erasing in solving problems.
However, such a phenomenon does exist. In science it is known as amnesia. This is not an isolated disease, but only a consequence of certain disorders in the body. Which ones I have already described above.
I will only add that external catalysts, such as serious injuries, are also unpredictable and can cause damage to physical and mental health, as well as lead to tragic consequences. Internal reasons related to human psychology, in turn, provide hope for recovery, and with effort, the process can be made controllable.
Treatment of amnestic syndrome in Moscow
The goal of helping a patient with memory loss is to restore it or stabilize the condition and achieve long-term remission. Amnestic syndrome does not have a specific treatment regimen. Each patient receives an individual care plan. It depends on the cause of the development of the disorder and the characteristics of its manifestation. For the organic form, medications or surgery are used primarily, and for the psychogenic form, psychotherapy is used. The most commonly used drugs are:
- vascular agents to reduce blood viscosity and expand the microvasculature and improve cerebral blood flow;
- neuroprotectors, nootropics and antioxidants to improve metabolism in brain cells, reduce their sensitivity to ischemia, and normalize cognitive functions;
- anticholinesterase drugs and ginko biloba preparations for dementia in order to reduce the progression of dementia in the elderly and increase daily activity;
- In Alzheimer's disease, memantines are used to improve mnestic functions.
For patients with mental disorders, antidepressants, antipsychotics, tranquilizers, and mood stabilizers are used. They help normalize behavior, restore control over the biological rhythm, improve mood during depression, and eliminate anxiety, phobia, and anxiety.
Dr. Isaev’s clinic uses only proven, certified drugs with minimal side effects. They must be taken strictly according to the course prescribed by the doctor.
If a tumor, hematoma or cyst is detected in the brain, it is surgically removed. Methods of psychotherapy allow, in combination with medication, to accelerate the recovery of the patient’s memory. In the absence of organic disorders, hypnotherapy helps to restore memories. These patients use a cognitive-behavioral technique that allows them to identify negative mental dogmas and replace them with positive ones. With its help, a person relates to his problem more easily and this helps him speed up his recovery.
With the psychogenic form of amnesia, the goal of treatment is not so much to restore memory, but to help the patient accept its loss. The method of psychoanalysis eliminates psychotraumas coming from early childhood, and family therapy improves relationships between loved ones and helps optimize the prognosis for amnestic syndrome. For people with a lack of inclination to demonstrate their feelings and experiences, creative types of treatment in the form of art therapy and fairy tale therapy help. Help for alcoholics with amnesia is provided in the form of the use of vitamins and means for detoxifying the body.
How to deliberately lose memory: the possibility of artificially acquiring amnesia
In this case, the individual may want to get rid of a specific negative memory, erase a difficult period. Let’s say right away that this is possible, but it is unknown which areas will be affected. For example, you can use hypnosis. But its result depends entirely on the skills of a specialist who can remove unpleasant emotions from the past. Moreover, this method is absolutely safe.
On some sites, the list is supplemented with such options as intentional injury, intoxication, and taking medications that can cause amnesia. But such options are dangerous to health, and most importantly human life, and can cause death. Therefore, be as careful as possible if you want to erase your memory at home.
If the problem is really serious and bad memories do not allow you to live normally, then it is better to consult a psychologist. In my consultations, I will help you deal with negative emotions, and you will be able to sleep peacefully at night again.
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Suicide Prevention
To prevent suicide, you need to contact specialists in time, or independently recognize suicidal behavior in yourself or other people. Treatment of persons with suicidal tendencies must necessarily take place under the supervision of suicidologists. In this case, you can save a person by preserving the most priceless gift of nature - life.
To reduce the likelihood of recurrence of suicidal behavior in the future, it is necessary to lead a healthy lifestyle: establish a daily routine, increase physical activity, work through all internal and external conflicts, find your meaning in life and surround yourself with understanding and loving people.
Treatment
Our specialists: psychologist, neurologist and psychiatrist will help you restore hope for success and the desire to live the way you, your loved ones or friends want. Depending on the current psychological state, they will help solve mental problems through psychological work on oneself, medicinal support and improving the overall level of health.
If you have a desire to commit suicide, or you have discovered these thoughts in a loved one or a casual acquaintance showing symptoms of suicidal behavior, write to us at:
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All the doctors at our clinic are true professionals in their field and know methods that have helped many people get out of a mental crisis. Our specialists will help restore the joy of life and open up new opportunities for personal development for the client of the Transfiguration clinic.
Yes, times are changing, and many aspects of Russian life have become less extreme. However, many suffer from the disease anxiety and fear, requiring diagnosis and treatment in Moscow.
Does it make sense to get rid of events?
The main motivators for resorting to this process are traumatic events: crimes, accidents, loss of a loved one. Such an experience can drive you into a depressive state, provoke insomnia and prevent you from leading a calm life.
It is impossible to lose your memory forever, but for a while, yes. For this, various techniques are used, including hypnosis, which I will talk about in more detail a little later.
You can also do this yourself with some effort. An unpleasant situation, first of all, must be accepted. Try to understand why it arose. Perhaps if you survived a disaster and survived, this will be the path to self-knowledge. Despite the fact that the phenomenon was terrifying, you are alive - and this is already good.
Any negative event is a life lesson that gives experience. Taking advantage of it helps to remove bad feelings and emotions and thus stop releasing them.
However, in seeking knowledge of how to create amnesia, it is important to understand that deleting an episode from the past will lead to changes in you as a person.
How to proceed
It is unlikely that you will be able to completely escape from memories. Perhaps you should act according to the saying “I can’t forget, but I can forgive.” If what happened was traumatic, try to let it go.
You definitely cannot go back in time and change what has already happened. But today you still have the power to influence your own life.
Contact a professional: free yourself from negativity with the help of a specialist
Elena Kalachikova is a professional memory development trainer, head of the Shaleniy Ravlik school, a teacher of the highest category with sixteen years of experience. Elena works with children from 5 years old, schoolchildren, students, adults, foreigners and people of retirement age. The trainer claims that he knows everything about memory and can easily teach not only to remember the necessary information, but also to forget negative experiences.
Elena guarantees forgetting negative information using the image of water, rubber band or fire, and also uses the method of repeatedly speaking out an unpleasant situation. We will be glad to see you at the Shaleniy Ravlik school. There is strength in everyone!
Interesting articles
- We train your child's memory and improve his academic performance! Elena Kalachikova participates in the role of an eidetics expert in the program “EVERYTHING WILL BE GOOD.” STB channel.…
- Training memory and attention, “Komsomolskaya Pravda”, June 2014 Publication in the newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda”.
- Game "PHOTOGRAPHER" Game "PHOTOGRAPHER" for training visual and photographic memory.
Known methods
In science, a combination of such methods is called “reconsolidation”. There are several options for getting amnesia at home.
Hypnosis
The process is based on the ability of the human body to process received information naturally. With its help, harmony and balance of the mental organization are achieved.
After all, when a person encounters a phenomenon that is traumatic in nature, her brain cannot always process this situation at the neurophysiological level. It’s as if he puts up a barrier, hiding data in dark corners, but still periodically returns to it. This causes psychological problems.
The hypnosis practitioner seeks to remove this blockage. It evokes in the patient painful emotions associated with an unpleasant event so that the brain can adapt these images.
Meanwhile, memory, conceptualized as a flexible system, generates new memories of what happened in the past. As a result, what previously seemed negative and caused pain is transformed into experience and gradually forgotten.
NLP programming
This is a category in psychology that studies ways to influence a person's opinion, memorable moments and will. The impact is carried out thanks to psychotechnics and special training. Exercises help process information for further assimilation, but in a new way.
Thus, through neurolinguistic influence, it is not the memories themselves that disappear, but the feelings and emotions associated with them.
Replacement data
Creating false situations in your head is a common procedure. The brain can form them itself, trying to recreate a complete picture of the event, especially if some of its details have not been preserved.
But such thoughts can be instilled artificially. The implantation process is about using your imagination as much as possible, to the maximum extent possible. Meanwhile, the contour between the memory function and fantasy begins to blur. This method is best suited for trusting individuals who are easily suggestible.
Chemical intervention
This is a rather dangerous option for how to delete memory. After all, the drugs will not affect a specific event. Their effect extends to all brain activity, making it impossible to predict the outcome of the process.
Medicines stop the functioning of protein kinase, an enzyme responsible for memories. Neural connections are weakened, and the ability to keep past events in mind is lost. Such a drug, for example, is scopolamine. This is a narcotic substance used before anesthesia, and also as a sedative or antidepressant.
What is memory?
A person receives a lot of information throughout his life. There is a theory that even those memories and sensations that we received while in the womb can subsequently influence our life and the formation of our personality. What is memory? This is not a book in which absolutely all emotions, knowledge or sensations are recorded. This is a living phenomenon during which certain neural connections arise and then disappear in the cerebral cortex. The very first connections to disintegrate are those that are not activated or are activated extremely rarely. Simply put, this is information that we do not use.
It rarely happens that the process of forgetting becomes a defensive reaction of the body. Traumatic information is removed by memory, destroying negative emotions along the way. This is why, for example, children forget that they were raped. This reaction is triggered in cases where the event is associated with severe fear. This phenomenon is called reconsolidation.
Even with such a mechanism for protecting the psyche, although information fades into the background, moving into fictitious images, the nervous disorder caused by real fear will remain. If you look in history or folklore, you will find a lot of evidence of this: the abduction of people by elves-witches, and now by aliens. The memory was replaced, but the feeling of fear remained.
How to induce amnesia at home
To do this, you can use lightweight algorithms from the field of NLP. But effectiveness depends on:
- suggestibility;
- insignificance of events;
- lack of prejudice.
If, due to traumatic emotions, the psyche is disturbed, then it is necessary to consult a psychologist. Self-medication can only make the problem worse.
Temporarily
The most effective way to temporarily lose memory is to stress your own nervous system. For example, try an extreme sport, travel, decide on important tasks in the service. All this will help fill the brain with a lot of feelings and new information. In the meantime, he will assimilate and process it, then he will stop paying attention to unpleasant moments.
Forever
When a joyful event happens in life, you can tirelessly tell your friends and family about it. For the first time, a flurry of positive emotions will fall on you, and from the fifth - they will fade, after the tenth - the story will no longer seem so interesting and significant.
Ask a question
Try this on bad memories too. After all, as long as we forbid ourselves to think about them, they appear before us in a terrible light. But once you scroll through it in your head, look at it from different angles, the fear will go away, and your view of what happened will change dramatically.
Memory recovery after alcoholism
Roughly speaking, memorization is the transmission of impulses along nerve fibers to certain parts of the brain, where they are “processed.” Under the influence of drinking, this process is disrupted. Yes, new neural connections are formed quite quickly, but how to restore the old ones? And what to do for this?
The standard recommendation from a neurologist to improve cognitive function is a course of nootropic and vitamin therapy . But naturally, if we are talking about amnesia after a one-time drinking session, there is no point in long-term drug treatment, but repeated alcoholic memory loss can be completely prevented. To do this, they advise:
- do not neglect snacks;
- Do not mix alcohol of different strengths;
- do not drink alcohol with carbonated drinks;
- pay attention to the quality of alcohol;
- and the main thing: know when to stop.
It is much more difficult to cope with cognitive impairment in chronic alcoholism. In such a situation, drug treatment is clearly not enough. First of all, it is necessary to eliminate their main cause—systematic drunkenness.
Therefore, therapy begins with comprehensive detoxification. The optimal result can be achieved by combining medicinal cleansing of the body from ethanol with hardware (ILBI, plasmapheresis, hemosorption, etc.). This will help relieve withdrawal symptoms and weaken the psychological craving for drinking for a while. They advise you to immediately start a course of psychotherapy and get coded.
After improving general health, the patient needs a comprehensive examination in a specialized clinic and consultation with a neurologist. In addition to standard clinical tests, EEG, Dopplerography of the head and neck vessels, computed tomography, and psychological testing are prescribed.
Treatment tactics are determined based on diagnostic results. The basis of treatment is nootropics and drugs to improve cognitive functions. Additionally, vitamins, medications to normalize metabolic processes, and general strengthening agents are prescribed. For cerebral blood flow disorders, antithrombotic and lipid-lowering drugs are indicated.
But this treatment allows not to restore, but to slow down the processes of alcoholic personality degradation. Doctors warn that alcohol irreversibly impairs memory, so you should consult a narcologist as early as possible, without waiting for complications. The problem of addiction will not resolve itself; the patient needs qualified medical care.
Exercises
I offer a number of trainings to help cope with the problem.
"Visualization"
Imagine negative moments in the form of dust sticking to your body. And then mentally pour water on yourself to wash away this dirt and, thereby, cleanse your consciousness.
Another option is to write down the event in detail on paper and burn it. Try to go into detail to “pull out” the negative feeling from yourself. If there is an object that reminds of a traumatic event, the memory can be buried.
"Perception"
The technique is to understand the situation like an episode from a movie:
- Play it through your head, putting yourself in the shoes of each participant.
- Do the same, but imagining that you are looking at the screen, change the playback speed from low to high.
- Color the picture in different colors: blue, greenish, red.
- Change the size of those participating in the dialogue.
Experience shows that this reduces the significance of the moment and the people in it.
Symptoms indicating memory impairment
Memory bells that should alert you:
- forgetfulness, manifested in everyday matters;
- difficulty focusing on a specific object;
- problems with learning and remembering information, with its reproduction;
- disruption of the thought process, loss of logical connections, loss of mental acuity;
- confusion and uncertainty;
- autism, social maladjustment;
- foggy consciousness.
Often, memory problems begin against the background of deteriorating general health. However, they can be combined:
- with headaches;
- with pressure surges;
- with hand tremors;
- with muscle spasms;
- with dizziness;
- with a decrease in visual acuity.
If, in the presence of 2-3 of the above problems, memory has decreased, you should urgently seek medical help, since these symptoms signal rapidly developing brain pathologies.
Description of aircraft
The word comes from “let”, meaning the river of oblivion. The technique is used to suppress annoying thoughts or get rid of information that has lost its relevance.
There are two ways:
- Suppression. The more a person tries not to remember, the more annoying the phenomena become. Describe them on a piece of paper, based on all the details. Try to throw out the negativity on paper, visualizing what happened. Then burn the note and watch the fire. At the same time, try to realize that the moments of the past turn into ashes and crumble.
- Delete. Unnecessary data can be eradicated by the “flight rag” exercise. If information is represented in your head by images, mentally pick up the cloth and erase them. Think about how they disappear and are no longer there.
Visual problems
If you have any things that remind you of bad things, then it is better to get rid of them immediately. A person’s thought is repelled from the material – the visual component of perception is too strong. Therefore, if you see a scratch on the door left after your girlfriend threw a vase at you, it would be better to change the door. Things are, of course, simpler, but it’s still a shame to throw them away. The thing costs money. Then resell, give to friends, donate to charity - whatever. You will console yourself with the fact that you did not get rid of the thing in vain.
Pleasant things to do
Now try to think about all these details while doing something very pleasant for you. This will allow you to connect sad events with pleasant associations. It is important to be able to create a stimulus of pleasure by thinking about how you were worried about failure at school or how hard it was to break up with a once loved one. This could be music that is pleasant to you, or a fragrant, bubble bath, a glass of champagne, or a walk in pleasant places.
At this stage, we make painful moments from memory less bitter. Some experts advise listening to white noise at high volume as an alternative to creating new associative connections. To follow this advice, turn on any white noise machine at full blast and immerse yourself in memories.
Not everyone knows how to erase memory.
