Anterograde Amnesia in the Shower
October 8, 2007 – 7:35 pmAnterograde Amnesia
I talked to someone this weekend, but I do not remember who she was. I remember we were in the shower when we talked and I thought she was someone else, which is how the conversation started. I walked into the shower and she was in the stall next door. She must have heard me talking to someone before entering because she called my name. I recognized her voice as the woman who I had talked to earlier while I was closing up my booth.
I left the shower and she was still in the shower. It was a particularly long shower with a particularly odd conversation, so I commented on it later. One of the things I commented on, was how long the woman was in the shower. She had been there when I arrived and waited on a stall to open. She was there when I left and there was still a line for the shower.
During the conversation of how odd the shower conversation was, a woman at the table informed me that she was the person I was talking to but she left before I did. So all I can figure is the reason the conversation seemed so weird was that I was in fact speaking with two or maybe more women who had moved in and out of the shower, but I seemed to have not noticed the change. The woman who started the conversation with me said that she had said good bye and we had talked about where we all hang out at night, so it seems more likely that the later conversation pushed that out of my memory.
I call this reoccurring event in my life to be the ‘shinny thing’ syndrome. If I stay focused on something, I can function fairly normally. But if I am distracted by something else, it seems that what I was doing prior to being distracted is gone and never to return. I think this is called anterograde amnesia.
From what I understand, this is the stuff the movie Momentum was based on. Although the condition the patient in the movie suffered from is either non-existent or practically non-existent, it is described in its pure state for theoretical discussion. You see people who suffer from Anterograde Amnesia do not really have a 100% inability to form new memories, it is that they are impaired from doing so to some degree. In the case of the movie, something as traumatic as the events of his life and his determination to find his wife’s killer, well those things are great candidates for things the guy would have remembered as he was clearly staying focused on them for some time. Make sense?
So now, who was that woman in the shower?
