This morning I watched the movie The Vow for the first time, and it was a blatant example of most of chapter 6. In the movie, the actress suffers from memory loss and never regains it back, although her husband tries and tries to no avail. What is curious about her memory loss is that she only loses the memories she has with her current husband. She is stuck in a moment which, which she is engaged to a different man, has a different career choice, and is still in touch with her family.
The part of her brain which was damaged is the temporal lobe. I believe it to be this lobe because this is where autobiographical memory is stored. She lost much of her autobiographical memories, such as birthdays and dates, over an extent of numerous years. It is supposed to store memories of our past, and in this case their was a lesion which erased part of her past. During the diagnosis of the impairment, the doctor describes the problem to be in her frontal lobe however. She said there was swelling which may have put pressure upon her lobe causing the loss in memory.
Not only does this movie represent a quick review of the brain's functions, but also the idea of plasticity. Plasticity is the capability to heal and return to an original state. Plasticity is greatest when a person is in infancy and decreases with age. Given the woman's age in the movie, her plasticity is not wondrous. A woman in her twenties does not have much chance of regaining her lost memories, but she is still capable of functioning without.
While in the hospital and going through the process directly after the accident, the doctor performs and fMRI on the actress, which was really neat to actually see because the book's visuals do not compare to the action of performing such a concept. fMRIs are supposed to measure the blood oxygen levels within the brain and specific areas within. It was with this machine, the doctor was able to diagnose where teh most damage was done and also to explain what was happening to the husband.
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