ABSTRACT
Having spent most of my professional life living and working with individuals suffering from amnesia, I have become overly sensitized to the parallel that exists between my own discipline and these unfortunate individuals. An inability to remember the past creates a situation where each day is a blank page without notations to help guide future action. Like amnesic patients, researchers in psychology (including neuropsychology) seem capable of operating without recourse to the past but also, unfortunately, without a clue as to what the future may bring. As one of my amnesic patients would repeatedly say, “It’s as if I’m just coming to.” Or, as one of Elizabeth Warrington’s patients used to write in his log every ten minutes, “I’m just waking up and becoming aware of where I am.”
