When people lose their memory from accidents injuries, why do they forget the experiences they’ve been through without forgetting the language that they speak?
In: Biology
Long Term Memory *consolidation* is a biochemical process that needs specific chemical conditions and at least a half hour to fully progress.
Stress or the loss of consciousness will interfere with that biochemistry.
You can use this fact to your advantage when studying, by reviewing information during the first half hour of memory consolidation, and in the day that follows, in a stress-free environment.
By rough analogy, a newly encoded memory is like first painting a sign with water that evaporates quickly, but if you can maintain certain ideal conditions, while ideally retracing the fading painted marks a few times, the marks engrave to last long-term.
Ones you learn a skill such as language or how to ride a bike for example that information is stored in a different part of the brain to that of your memories.
Different parts of your brain are set up to do and store different things. For memory, maybe only their memories of the past was impacted, but their working/skillset memory wasn’t.
It’s often not as clean-cut as that. They often *do* lose language skills as well – but it’s not as obvious from the outset.
Real-life brain injuries don’t look like Hollywood brain injuries, where a person will wake up perfectly articulate but have no idea who they are and have to re-discover what love is and fall in love with their wife again through a series of adorable shenanigans.
Real-life brain injuries tend to be a distressing fog of lost or blurry memories, sometimes significant chunks of time. Everyone and everything in that chunk of time will be lost. That can be as mild as not remembering the night of the accident or as extreme as having to re-learn how to use a toothbrush.
But language doesn’t escape it, it’s just not as immediately obvious. We begin learning language before we are even born, so it’s hard to go back to “before” you’ve learned a language entirely. But you will find that even people with minor brain injuries will struggle to find words and will substitute a related word for the one that they meant without even realising what they were doing.
They might speak more slowly. Be slower to enter a conversation, be slower to pick up on non-verbal cues from others, and less able to understand the subtleties of a conversation. These are all examples of subtly “forgetting” the language they spoke as a result of their brain damage, and it’s very, very common.
TLDR: they do, the memory loss is just more dramatic and easier to spot from the outset.
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