The Relationship between Learning and Remembering
The relationship between learning and remembering is a function of the memory. Memory refers to the mental ability to store information which is learned by a person and retrieved for use in the future. Amnesia refers to a disorder of the memory and the systems for acquiring information in cognitive neuroscience (Warrington \ Baddeley, 2017).
Retrograde Amnesia and the Consolidation Theory
In the case of Clive Wearing, the study will focus on the retrograde amnesia in humans and the consolidation theory. The theory highlights the cognitive dysfunctions that human amnesic patients experience and is characterized by long-term changes in remembrance (Ryan et al 2015). The flat retrograde amnesia is made up of an even memory shortfall for information in instances where the patient is experiencing paramnesia symptoms. The consolidation theory has a complete upsurge in the strength of the memory over some period of time and in other cases involves a decline in trace fragility (King \ Rice, 2016). The general concept of the consolidation theory is the retrievability across time and putting into consideration the memory trace and decay in retrograde amnesia (Parkin, 2016).
The Impact on Clive Wearing's Memory
The brain of Clive Wearing, which controlled his memory, was completely attacked by a virus over time. The end outcome of the permanent destruction of Clive’s brain made him not to remember most of the things in his past, though he managed to remember his wife. Some of the features to describe his condition match the empirical evidence for the consolidation theory. Clive Wearing was diagnosed with some knowledge loss, behavior change, intact procedural memory, and confabulation that affected his memory and form part of the anterograde amnesia (Chen \ Wyble, 2016). The life of Clive Wearing could be described as a typical amnesiac void where he could not remember some learned information and could not gain any memories. Consolidation is an unconscious process that is beyond the control of the patient, as in the case of Clive Wearing.
References
Chen, H., " Wyble, B. (2016). Attribute amnesia reflects a lack of memory consolidation for attended information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42(2), 225.
King, A. B., " Rice, M. J. (2016). Disruption of Memory Consolidation May Explain Patterns of Memory Better Than Emotion-Induced Retrograde Amnesia in Study by Chen et al.
Parkin, A. J. (2016). Memory: Phenomena, experiment, and theory. Routledge.
Ryan, T. J., Roy, D. S., Pignatelli, M., Arons, A., " Tonegawa, S. (2015). Engram cells retain memory under retrograde amnesia. Science, 348(6238), 1007-1013.
Warrington, E. K., " Baddeley, A. D. (2017). Amnesia and the distinction between long-and short-term memory 1. In Exploring Working Memory (pp. 18-38). Routledge.
