Towards a Neural Network Hypothesis for Functional (Dissociative) Amnesia: Catastrophic Forgetting

Author Info

Andrew Larner

Corresponding Author

Andrew Larner
Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Department of Brain Repair & Rehabilitation, Institute of Neurology, University College London, UK

A B S T R A C T

Functional amnesia, also known as dissociative amnesia, psychogenic amnesia, or mnestic block syndrome, is a rare disorder which, although clinically heterogeneous, is most often characterised by dense retrograde amnesia mainly affecting the episodic-autobiographical domain but with relative preservation of anterograde memory function, a pattern dissimilar to that seen in other amnesic disorders. The pathogenesis of functional amnesia remains unknown. Here, appeal is made to the study of artificial neural networks in the hope that, as in other mnestic disorders, this might give insight into the mechanisms underpinning functional amnesia. Specifically, the observation of catastrophic forgetting or catastrophic interference occurring in artificial neural networks, that is the abrupt and complete loss of previously learned information when learning new information, is extended to the human nervous system to develop a novel hypothesis: the Catastrophic Forgetting Hypothesis of functional amnesia.

Article Info

Article Type

Review Article

Publication history

Received: Fri 15, Jul 2022
Accepted: Tue 02, Aug 2022
Published: Fri 19, Aug 2022

Copyright

© 2023 Andrew Larner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hosting by Science Repository.
DOI: 10.31487/j.NNB.2022.03.02