He met with each family to try to spark recognition, but without success. Some 300 families, desperately looking for missing loved ones, claimed Mangin as their own. In 1920, a newspaper published a feature with the pictures of several unidentified patients. He gave his name as “Anthelme Mangin.” He was diagnosed with a form of dementia and placed in an asylum in France. Unlike most, however, Mangin was not carrying any identification. In 1918, he was sent home suffering from amnesia, along with 65 other casualties, all of whom had, literally, lost their minds. However, when the sheet music calls for him to repeat a section, he will repeat it over and over again, forgetting each time that he has already played it.Īnthelme Mangin was a French soldier who fought in World War I. He continues to be able to read and play music. He has kept a diary of his thoughts over the years, which has consisted of repeated variations of the same sentence: “Now I am awake.” Īstonishingly, however, Wearing’s ability to play the piano has not diminished. Wearing also remembers little of his life before 1985, except his love for his wife. He cannot understand what has happened to him, and when people try to explain, he has forgotten the question long before they reach the end of the answer. The condition has left him in a constant state of confusion.
His loss of memory is so profound that he can hold on to current memories for no longer than 30 seconds. The virus attacked his central nervous system, damaging his ability to store new memories. 7 Clive WearingĬlive Wearing was an accomplished classical musician when, in 1985, he contracted herpesviral encephalitis. Doctors treating him hope that this means they will be able to build on this to help him create new, happier memories. It is thought that his powerful grief forced itself along the memory tracks of his brain, when everything else just slipped away. has only managed to remember one new thing: his father’s death. Neuroscientists are baffled as to why the anesthetic might have caused the memory loss. His wife has written notes of major events for him in a file labeled “First Thing-Read This.” He wakes up every morning believing that it is still 2005. W.O., who is believed to suffer from anterograde amnesia, can remember getting into the chair and being injected with local anesthetic but nothing from that point onward. Neuroscientists are baffled as to the cause of the condition. Since that time, however, he can only store memories for 90 minutes before they are wiped out again. could remember his life as well as anyone else. In fact, his fugue-state self seems to have been remarkably boring.Ī patient, identified only as “W.O.” or “William,” visited the dentist in March 2005 for root canal surgery. He made very little capital out of his adventure.
In fact, he spent most of his time selling sweets and going to church. Though many people doubted the truthfulness of Bourne’s account of his “lost weekends,” there seems to be little to suggest that he was doing anything disreputable while he was away. Bourne’s is probably the best known case of disassociative fugue and may have been Robert Ludlum’s inspiration when he came to naming his character in The Bourne Identity. The fugue state is most often brought on by trauma, and there is no treatment, though the condition is often temporary. People in this state often adopt a new identity and travel long distances. The last date he remembered was two months prior to his arrival in Norristown, Pennsylvania.īourne is said to have experienced a disassociative fugue, causing him to forget his own identity. In 1887, he “woke up” to find himself running a general store, without any knowledge of how he had arrived there. He even donated his brain to science after his death.Īnsel Bourne was an evangelical preacher. This has resulted in major discoveries about how we make and store memories. Henry Molaison allowed neuroscientists to study his brain for over 50 years, until his death in 2008. He would wake every day without any memory of the day before. He also lost the ability to make new memories. However, he had trouble remembering things from roughly a decade preceding the surgery. He even remembered the Wall Street Crash of 1929. He knew his name and those of his family. Though the surgery was a success as far as controlling the epilepsy went, Molaison was left with profound amnesia. The seizures continued until 1953, when he was offered an experimental procedure which would remove parts of the left temporal lobe. His seizures increased in severity, and by the time he was 16, he was suffering major seizures daily. as he was referred to in medical journals, had suffered epileptic seizures since the age of ten, possibly as a result of being run over by a bicycle at age seven.