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She barely recognized her family and friends or where she put the milk, yet she was able to drive a car which implies both skills and knowledge of some laws? P

She barely recognized her family and friends or where she put the milk, yet she was able to drive a car which implies both skills and knowledge of some laws? P.S. The article doesn't mention a big gap between her return home and the moment she started driving again: To complicate matters, for weeks after the injury Su could not make new memories. She would awaken each day to a house full of strangers. It would be years before she could remember where she had parked the car at the mall. This text implies that remembering where she parked took years, not driving itself.

dudurocha 15y ago
she spent another 22 years learning how to do the things that she knew before. At first she could barely ride a bike, after that she was growing up.
gjm11 15y ago
1. The article actually says she lost the ability to drive. 2. Different sorts of memories are represented in different ways and in different parts of the brain. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear of a case of brain damage that destroyed huge amounts of "factual" memories without depriving the victim of the ability to drive. Or vice versa.
- ciupicri 15y ago
  The second point makes sense, but given the scale of the damage I'm still surprised.
whimsy 15y ago
It sounds like she lost a cognitive faculty called "object permanence." This is something children develop 8-12 months after birth. Before developing it, if they can't see an object, as far as they are concerned it doesn't exist. I imagine it would be a pretty frightening way to live.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  Baillargeon's study was able to detect object permanence as early as 3.5 months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence As we've gotten cleverer at constructing methodology, we've found that babies acquire knowledge faster than Piaget thought in almost all areas.
  - whimsy 15y ago
    Interesting. Perhaps she was lacking something else, then, or perhaps the time it took for her to develop object permanence was a testament to her brain damage.
vacri 15y ago
Different memory types resides in different parts of the brain. Driving is a classic example - when you first start, you're trying to keep it all in your mind at once, and it's living mostly in your short term / working memory, which tends to be in your frontal lobe (bit above your eyes). The more you use a physical skill, the more it gets into your "muscle memory" and this is in effect transferring to the cerebellum, the small plum-like 'add-on' at the base of the brain (below the knobbly bit at the back of the skull). It's quite common for memory damage to spare things like 'muscle memory', partly because it lives somewhere else. Another curiosity is that vocabulary is resistant to damage - if the person can still speak (which in turn can be prevented by a huge variety of neural injury), you can get an idea of the level of their pre-event education by listening to the level of words they use. Neurology is fascinatingly complex and we've really only scratched the surface of what we can learn about the brain. It is very unlikely that you would hear anyone that worked in neurology flat-out refute any combination of symptoms. I used to work in a seizure clinic and heard of a guy that had a seizure when he saw orange circles. No other colour circle or other shape orange, just specifically orange circles. This was confirmed through EEG testing. Never heard of another case like it, but you get unique things like this reasonably often in neurology.

dudurocha 15y ago

she spent another 22 years learning how to do the things that she knew before. At first she could barely ride a bike, after that she was growing up.

gjm11 15y ago

1. The article actually says she lost the ability to drive. 2. Different sorts of memories are represented in different ways and in different parts of the brain. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear of a case of brain damage that destroyed huge amounts of "factual" memories without depriving the victim of the ability to drive. Or vice versa.

ciupicri 15y ago
The second point makes sense, but given the scale of the damage I'm still surprised.

whimsy 15y ago

It sounds like she lost a cognitive faculty called "object permanence." This is something children develop 8-12 months after birth. Before developing it, if they can't see an object, as far as they are concerned it doesn't exist. I imagine it would be a pretty frightening way to live.

Alex3917 15y ago
Baillargeon's study was able to detect object permanence as early as 3.5 months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence As we've gotten cleverer at constructing methodology, we've found that babies acquire knowledge faster than Piaget thought in almost all areas.
- whimsy 15y ago
  Interesting. Perhaps she was lacking something else, then, or perhaps the time it took for her to develop object permanence was a testament to her brain damage.

vacri 15y ago

Different memory types resides in different parts of the brain. Driving is a classic example - when you first start, you're trying to keep it all in your mind at once, and it's living mostly in your short term / working memory, which tends to be in your frontal lobe (bit above your eyes). The more you use a physical skill, the more it gets into your "muscle memory" and this is in effect transferring to the cerebellum, the small plum-like 'add-on' at the base of the brain (below the knobbly bit at the back of the skull). It's quite common for memory damage to spare things like 'muscle memory', partly because it lives somewhere else. Another curiosity is that vocabulary is resistant to damage - if the person can still speak (which in turn can be prevented by a huge variety of neural injury), you can get an idea of the level of their pre-event education by listening to the level of words they use. Neurology is fascinatingly complex and we've really only scratched the surface of what we can learn about the brain. It is very unlikely that you would hear anyone that worked in neurology flat-out refute any combination of symptoms. I used to work in a seizure clinic and heard of a guy that had a seizure when he saw orange circles. No other colour circle or other shape orange, just specifically orange circles. This was confirmed through EEG testing. Never heard of another case like it, but you get unique things like this reasonably often in neurology.