ABSTRACT
Amnesia Convincing evidence that there are several longterm memory systems comes from the study of brain-damaged patients with amnesia. Such patients have problems with long-term memory, but if you are a movie fan you may have mistaken ideas about the nature of amnesia (Baxendale, 2004). In the movies, serious head injuries typically cause characters to forget the past while still being fully able to engage in new learning. In the real world, however, new learning is generally greatly impaired. In the movies, amnesic individuals often suffer a profound loss of identity or their personality changes completely. For example, consider the fi lm Overboard (1987). In that fi lm, Goldie Hawn falls from her yacht, and immediately switches from being a rich, spoilt socialite into a loving mother. Such personality shifts are extremely rare. Most bizarrely,
We have an amazing variety of information stored in long-term memory. For example, long-term memory can contain details of our last summer holiday, the fact that Paris is the capital of France, information about how to ride a bicycle or play the piano, and so on. Much of this information is stored in the form of schemas or organised packets of knowledge, and is used extensively during language comprehension. The relationship between schematic knowledge and language comprehension is discussed in Chapter 10.
