Memory impairment in psychology: causes and treatment. Memory Features

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

Memory is a set of information in psychology that displays events, emotions, any knowledge experienced by an individual earlier.

What is memory and its violation

Thanks to her, we have experience, and a person is the person that others know him to be. Loss of memory or its disturbances cause great discomfort to the individual.

Memory impairment in psychology is a fairly common disorder that brings a lot of problems to a person and, of course, worsens the quality of his life. This disorder underlies many mental illnesses.

Main types of memory disorders

There are two main types of human memory impairment.

Qualitative dysfunctions imply confusion in the patient's head associated with the inability to distinguish between genuine memories and fantasies. The patient does not understand which events are real and which are the fruit of his imagination.

Quantitative defects are displayed in strengthening or weakening of memory traces.

There are a huge number of varieties of memory disorders. Most of them are of short duration andreversibility. They can be caused by such banal reasons as overwork, frequent stressful situations, drug abuse, and alcoholic beverages.

Others require serious treatment.

Causes of memory impairments

What are these causes that can cause memory impairment? In psychology, there are several of these.

For example, the presence of asthenic syndrome in a person, which is accompanied by rapid fatigue, exhaustion of the body. It can be a consequence of craniocerebral injuries, prolonged depression, beriberi, alcohol and drug addiction.

In children, memory disorders are most often the result of underdevelopment of the brain, head trauma of a physical or mental nature. These children have problems remembering information and then reproducing it.

Features of memory in children are such that violations manifest themselves mainly in the form of amnesia. Amnesia is the loss of certain memories. In children, it occurs as a result of an unfavorable situation in the family or in the children's institutions that they attend. Also, the causes of amnesia include frequent acute respiratory diseases and hypovitaminosis.

Besides this, children's features of memory are manifested in the fact that, starting from birth, it is constantly developing, as a result of which it becomes vulnerable. Problematic pregnancy and childbirth, as well as improper stimulation of the development of memory processes can lead tomemory corruption.

Diseases associated with the blood supply to the brain, such as diabetes, atherosclerosis, Parkinson's disease affect memory.

Aging. If this physiological process does not lead to serious diseases, then memory deterioration occurs slowly. At first, it becomes difficult for a person to remember old events from life, and newer events and experiences are gradually erased. The above diseases, as well as Alzheimer's, schizophrenia and neurosis, significantly increase memory impairment.

In psychology there is such a term as ''repression''. It means the denial or special forgetting by a person of especially difficult moments of his life. It is a defense mechanism of the psyche.

Iodine deficiency and thyroid disorders increase the tendency to depression and apathy, which in turn is fraught with a violation of memory processes. Therefore, it is so important to properly compose a diet in order to fully receive all the necessary vitamins and minerals.

Memory as a psychological phenomenon

Memory is a function in psychology that fixes, stores and reproduces various events and experiences, and also gives the ability to constantly replenish data and use existing experience.

As you know, depending on the functional load, there are several types of memory.

Types of memory

Figurative memory deals with what allows you to fix in memoryvarious images. The motor does the same, but in relation to the movement. Emotional memory focuses on experienced emotions.

Symbolic is peculiar, but thanks to it we can remember words, thoughts, ideas. Everyone knows about short-term and long-term memory. The first contributes to the memorization of a large amount of information for a short period of time, after which it is eliminated or goes into the long-term section.

Arbitrary and involuntary memory. The first is triggered by a preliminary instruction to memorize, and the second does it arbitrarily, without any commands.

For each of these types there is a memory impairment. In psychology, Korsakoff syndrome, for example, is a short-term memory disorder.

Types of memory disorder

What are the symptoms of memory impairment? This is forgetting and the inability to reproduce events from personal or other people's experience.

Paramnesia is a loss in time when an individual confuses the events of the past and the present, cannot understand which events in his head took place in the real world, and which are fictional, projected by the brain based on the information once received.

Dysmnesia is a disorder that includes hypermnesia, hypomnesia, and amnesia. The latter is characterized by forgetting individual information and skills for a certain period of time. Memory problems are episodic, after which memories partially or completely return. Amnesiamay also affect acquired skills, such as the ability to drive a car, ride a bicycle, cook any kind of food.

Types of amnesia

Retrograde amnesia is manifested in forgetting events for some period of time prior to the onset of the injury. For example, a person with a head injury may forget everything that happened to him a week or more before the accident.

Anterograde amnesia is the opposite of the previous one and involves loss of memory for a period after injury.

Fixation amnesia is when the patient is unable to remember incoming information. He quite adequately perceives reality, but forgets the information within a few minutes or seconds after receiving it. This causes problems in temporal orientation, as well as in remembering the people around.

With total amnesia, a person is unable to remember anything from his past life. He does not know his name, age, address, who he is and what he did. As a rule, such a disorder of the mental function of memorization occurs after a severe skull injury.

Palimpsest occurs as a result of alcohol intoxication, when an individual cannot remember certain moments.

With hysterical amnesia, a person forgets difficult, painful or simply unfavorable memories. It is characteristic not only of mentally ill people, but also of he althy people of the hysterical type.

Paramnesia is a type of memory impairment in whichgaps are filled with different data.

Ekmnesia and cryptomnesia

Ecmnesia is a phenomenon when a person lives long past events as a phenomenon of the present time. It is characteristic of older people who begin to perceive themselves as a young person and are preparing for university, marriage, or other events that were experienced at a young age.

Cryptomnesia is a disorder in which a person passes off ideas they hear or read as their own, sincerely believing in their authorship. For example, patients can appropriate the books read by great writers in their imagination, assuring others of this.

A type of cryptomnesia can be a phenomenon when a person perceives an event from his own life as read in a book or seen in a movie.

Treatment of memory disorders

Classification of memory disorders is a fairly large amount of information in psychology, there are many works on the study of such phenomena, as well as methods for their treatment.

Of course, it is easier to engage in preventive actions than the treatment itself. For these purposes, experts have developed many exercises that allow you to keep your memory in good shape.

Proper nutrition and lifestyle also contribute to the normal functioning of the brain.

As for the direct treatment of memory disorders, it will depend on the diagnosis, the degree of neglect and the causes. Treatment with drugs begins only after a thorough diagnosis by a specialist doctor.