ABSTRACT
Formal neuropsychological assessment, carried out for the first time four months post-onset, revealed a case of focal retrograde amnesia. Damasio postulated that encoding autobiographical incidents involved the formation of multiple neural configurations, which are located in separate primary sensory and motor cortices. The patterns of neural activity of feature fragments located at that level have combinatorial arrangements, which occur synchronously during the experience of the event. The patient’s preservation of episodic autobiographical memory was thought to reflect, at least partially, normal functioning of structures in the right temporal lobe. This assumption is in accord with the two published works, involving medial temporal lobe epilepsy, and which reported spared right hippocampal formation in patients who presented with preserved episodic autobiographical memory coupled with impaired public semantic memory. CH and JR have a pattern of cognitive performance that differs from people with intact brains, but they had the same cognitive systems before their neurological conditions.
