"Amnesia" is a general term for the inability to recall certain memories, or in some cases, the inability t0 form new memories. Some types of amnesia are due to neurological trauma; but in other cases, the term "amnesia" is just used to describe normal memory loss, such as not remembering childhood memories.
Amnesia from Brain Damage
Amnesia typically occurs when there is damage to a variety of regions of the temporal lobe or the hippocampus, causing the inability to recall memories before, or after, an (often traumatic) event. There are two main forms of amnesia: retrograde and anterograde.
Amnesia
There are two main forms of amnesia: retrograde and anterograde. Retrograde prevents recall of information encoded before a brain injury, and anterograde prevents recall of information encountered after a brain injury.
Retrograde Amnesia
Retrograde amnesia is the inability to recall memories made before the onset of amnesia. Retrograde amnesia is usually caused by head trauma or brain damage to parts of the brain other than the hippocampus (which is involved with the encoding process of new memories). Brain damage causing retrograde amnesia can be as varied as a cerebrovascular accident, stroke, tumor, hypoxia, encephalitis, or chronic alcoholism.
Retrograde amnesia is usually temporary, and can often be treated by exposing the sufferer to cues for memories of the period of time that has been forgotten.
Anterograde Amnesia
Anterograde amnesia is the inability to create new memories after the onset of amnesia, while memories from before the event remain intact. Brain regions related to this condition include the medial temporal lobe, medial diencephalon, and hippocampus. Anterograde amnesia can be caused by the effects of long-term alcoholism, severe malnutrition, stroke, head trauma, surgery, Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, cerebrovascular events, anoxia, or other trauma.
Anterograde amnesia cannot be treated with pharmaceuticals because of the damage to brain tissue. However, sufferers can be treated through education to define their daily routines: typically, procedural memories (motor skills and routines like tying shoes or playing an instrument) suffer less than declarative memories (facts and events). Additionally, social and emotional support is important to improve the quality of life of those suffering from anterograde amnesia.
Other Types of Amenesia
Some types of forgetting are not due to traumatic brain injury, but instead are the result of the changes the human brain goes through over the course of a lifetime.
Childhood Amnesia
Do you remember anything from when you were six months old? How about two years old? There's a reason that nobody does. Childhood amnesia, also called infantile amnesia, is the inability of adults to retrieve memories before the age of 2–4. This is because for the first year or two of life, brain structures such as the limbic system (which holds the hippocampus and the amygdala and is vital t0 memory storage) are not yet fully developed. Research has shown that children have the capacity to remember events that happened to them from age 1 and before while they are still relatively young, but as they get older they tend to be unable to recall memories from their youngest years.
Neurocognitive Disorders
Neurocognitive disorders are a broad category of brain diseases typical to old age that cause a long-term and often gradual decrease in the ability to think and recall memories, such that a person's daily functioning is affected. "Neurocognitive disorder" is synonymous with "dementia" and "senility," but these terms are no longer used in the DSM-5. For the diagnosis to be made there must be a change from a person's usual mental functioning and a greater decline than one would expect due to aging. These diseases also have a significant effect on a person's caregivers.
The most common type of dementia is Alzheimer's disease, which makes up 50% to 70% of cases. Its most common symptoms are short-term memory loss and word-finding difficulties. People with Alzheimer's also have trouble with visual-spatial areas (for example, they may get lost often), reasoning, judgement, and insight into whether they are experiencing memory loss at all.