In the movie 50 First Dates, Lucy had a car accident which left her unconscious. After the accident, she managed to retain her long term memory prior to the accident but was unable to remember the accident and retain new memories. Therefore, she continued to live the day of the accident and did not know that time had passed by. She met Henry who fell in love with her and started to understand more about her condition.
Lucy suffered from anterograde amnesia and slight partial graded retrograde amnesia. Parkin (2000) defined anterograde amnesia as the inability to retain new information in short term memory (STM) or the inability to convert STM to long term memory (LTM). She could retain her LTM like her childhood and family. However, those memories which were the most recent before the accident were likely to be lost due to the effect known as Ribot Law (Parkin, 2000).
Amnesia is mostly caused by traumatic head injury during car accidents where the brain is impaired. Lucy suffered anterograde amnesia when she was involved in an accident. In the case study of K.C (Rosenbaum et al., 2005), he had severe memory loss after he was involved in a motorcycle accident. His brain was severely damaged due to large lesions in the hippocampal regions which resulted in an acute loss of memory.
There are also medical causes of amnesia. Consumption of benzodiazepines to treat anxiety can cause anterograde amnesia to occur (Mejo, 1992). A possible explanation is that memories are not converted into long term storage and thus are not consolidated by the hippocampus. The hippocampus is an important part of the brain which is involved in memory consolidation. Scoville and Miller (1957) did a case study of a man named H.M who had seizures since young. Scoville removed the part of the temporal lobe where the hippocampus was located during an operation. After the operation, H.M could not recall the recent memories that he had and he was unable to retain any...