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Asked by eggy169 to Fiona, Joanna, William on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: General.
Question: how do you lose short/long term memory, for example sometimes after a heart attack??? what happens inside your brain which means that this happens?
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Fiona Randall answered on 24 Jun 2010:
You lose memory when the part of the brain that memories are made or stored is damaged. This can either be the result of banging your head, or a stroke or in a disease like Alzheimers where brain cells stop working properly.
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William Davies answered on 24 Jun 2010:
A heart attack deprives your brain of glucose/oxygen for a short period. your brain cells need these to work efficiently, so if they are lacking your brain won’t function as well. if glucose and oxygen are lacking for too long, the brain tissue will die, and as neurons can’t divide, it won’t be replaced so you’ll lose some brain function for ever.
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Joanna Brooks answered on 24 Jun 2010:
Hiya again! Well, it’s possible to lose memory function in a number of different ways. One way is if the person has a stroke which can happen when the blood supply is cut off to a certain part of the brain – blood supply can be cut off by a blockage (a blood clot) or because the person has a leak in their brain (maybe they banged their head very badly). This causes part of the brain to become kind of ‘brain dead’ (because oxygen cannot get through) and this can happen in the part that controls memory.
Or a person can lose memory because they develop a neurological disorder like Alzheimer’s disease which is a mainly genetic condition which causes the person to lose their memory. Inside the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease scientists find lots of ‘tangles’ in the memory cell networks – this means that the cells become all tangled up like hairs on a hair brush for example. These tangles stop people from forming new memories and also stop them from retrieving old ones.
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