ABSTRACT
Autobiographical amnesia has become recognised as an important feature of memory disorder in neurological patients. N. Kapur et al. found that in their patient with bilateral temporal lobe pathology, more marked in the right temporal lobe, and dense retrograde amnesia, the only anterograde impairment of note was a faces memory deficit. The autobiographical memory loss shown by our patients with temporal lobe epilepsy contrasts with the minimal or patchy autobiographical memory loss shown by other cases with temporal lobe epileptic lesions who displayed loss of memory for past public events and past knowledge. The temporal lobe damage was considered to include both medial and lateral temporal lobe structures, with posterior portions of temporal lobe gyri being more severely affected than anterior portions. This chapter examines the occurrence of autobiographical memory symptoms in a number of patients where it was one of the major presenting clinical features.
