Amnesia

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Separation of autobiographical self from autobiographical time

Amnesia causes the “bedrock of autobiographical memory [to be]... eroded and… eventually just as wiped out as in patients with massive destruction of the temporal lobe” (Damasio, 2010, p. 230). Based on the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, amnesic patients would therefore have future goals based solely on the present and their autobiographical narratives would change with the affliction even though the chronological facts of their lives remain the same. Since distant futures are less reliant on past episodes, though, it would be interesting to see if amnesic patients would be able to better imagine a distant future and work towards that instead.

Those with anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories, would have a frozen concept of futurity, as the unchanging chunk of memories have no new elements to modify the autobiographical self. A case study of one such patient had his autobiographical time stuck in 1945 (Sacks, 1984). The memory traces, however, allowed for some degree of alteration of his autobiographical self even though he could not explicitly state them in his autobiographical narrative. Perhaps, then, autobiographical time can be disconnected from the autobiographical self if there is a discrepancy between which events the individual places significance on in her narrative based on her understanding of her own past, present, and future and the events that actually affected her past, present, and future. In fact, because most individuals cannot recall all of the events that occur in their life, some events may subconsciously alter the protoself and are thus a part of the autobiographical self, but are not brought up in the autobiographical narrative and are thus not a part of the autobiographical time. In this sense, perhaps there is only one true autobiographical self, but multiple autobiographical times.