My interest in psychology piqued from a young age. Ever since I was little, I had always paid close attention to people’s behaviors, moods, and interactions which would in turn cause me to think; what happened that caused them to elicit those emotions and thoughts? This habit would actually come in handy several times later in life unbeknownst to my younger self. I was having a conversation with my grandmother about the final book in the Harry Potter series, which had just been released in the summer of 2007. She had bought it for me as one of my birthday presents and we were discussing our thoughts on J.K. Rowling’s ending of the series. As I was explaining what I thought of the book, I referenced several parts of the story. The first …show more content…
few times I talked about a scene in the book that she had asked me to remind her of. I had thought nothing of it at first because it is completely normal to forget aspects of a book. So I reminded her and continued with my review. I started to notice, however, that not only did she not remember most of the book, but she was also starting to forget what we had said at the beginning of the conversation. This started to make me wonder if perhaps there was something more going on in her head than just the normal amount of forgetfulness. It had turned out that she was beginning to suffer from dementia. As we have learned both in class and reading from the textbook, semantic memory is the process by which the brain stores facts.
This knowledge is what makes me assume that she had semantic dementia. While she was able to remember experiences, such as my past birthday parties, she was unable to remember what she had bought me for gifts, like the final Harry Potter book. The inability to retrieve that kind of information is also an example of how she started to forget what is known as autobiographical memory, the combination of both semantic and episodic memory, especially the semantic portion of those memories, which are known as personal semantic memories. An example of a personal semantic memory is the book that she had bought me for my birthday. After learning and seeing how Clive Wearing interacted with other people this interaction struck me as quite similar, but of course much worse than what my grandma had experienced. While he was completely unable to create long term memories she was still able to recall some things, such as our visit for Christmas. Both semantic and autobiographical memory are stored in long term memory and not short term memory. This helps to explain why she was able to have full conversations with me and yet not be able to remember them
later. With this knowledge of how memory is stored, it is much easier for me to understand how she had trouble recalling information, as well as storing it in the first place. After learning and seeing that memory loss can be much worse, it made me realize that forgetting small details here and there is not nearly as bad as I thought it was.
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