Police received a lead suggesting that Skeid was a French model named Georges Lecuit, but subsequently discovered that the real Lecuit’s passport had been stolen in 1998. He moved to Vancouver and met with a lawyer in order to lobby for a Canadian citizenship and eventually married the lawyer’s daughter. Skeid’s photographs and fingerprints were circulated in an attempt to uncover his identity, but he refused all offers of treatment for his amnesia. The young man went through various name changes throughout the years, but finally settled on Sywald Skeid. Nobody stayed at a shelter for a few weeks before being taken in by an Ontario couple. Nobody.” After being released from the hospital, Mr. When the press picked up on his story, they gave him the nickname “Mr. He was treated by doctors, who diagnosed him as having post-concussive global amnesia. The man spoke with a foreign accent, but carried no identification and claimed to have no idea who he was. He had a broken nose and appeared to be the victim of an attack. On November 28, 1999, a young man in his mid-twenties wandered into the emergency department of a hospital in Toronto, Canada. It sounds like a nightmarish situation, but Wearing has managed to live day-to-day life under these difficult circumstances for the past 28 years.
However, his procedural memory is still intact, meaning that even though he cannot remember his musical background, he still knows how to play the piano. While Wearing can still remember that he loves his current wife, he often forgets that they’re married. He can recall that he had children from a previous marriage, but cannot remember their names. Wearing also cannot remember most of the details of his life before 1985. As a result, his brain can only store new memories for several seconds before he forgets them again.
The virus severely damaged Wearing’s hippocampus, the area of the brain that transfers memories from short-term to long-term. As a result, Wearing cannot remember events from his past or store new memories in his brain. On March 27, 1985, the 46-year-old Wearing contracted herpesviral encephalitis, a very rare form of the herpes simplex virus that attacks the central nervous system. However, a British musicologist named Clive Wearing has the dubious distinction of suffering from both forms of amnesia at the same time. While this condition is real, it is far less common than retrograde amnesia, which involves losing memories from one’s past. Even though he still remembers his past, he is unable to create new memories. Brown again.Īfter suffering a serious brain injury, the protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed film Memento is afflicted with anterograde amnesia. After the hypnosis, Ansel Bourne lived out the rest of his life without incident and never assumed the persona of Albert J. It was probably the first documented case of a psychiatric disorder known as the “fugue state,” a dissociative form of amnesia that causes a person to lose their identity for a period of time before their memory suddenly returns. The hypnotized Bourne told a back story about Brown that was similar to his own, but denied knowledge of anyone named Ansel Bourne. Under hypnosis, he would assume the persona of Albert J. After returning home, Bourne was studied by the Society for Physical Research. In his mind, it was still January 17 and he had no memory of his previous two months in Norristown. He became very confused when residents told him his name was Albert J. When Bourne woke up on the morning of March 15, he had no idea where he was. While there, he decided to open up a variety store under the name Albert J. However, for unexplained reasons, he ended up withdrawing his savings instead and traveling to Norristown, Pennsylvania.
Ansel Bourne was an evangelical preacher from Greene, Rhode Island, who took a trip to visit his sister in Providence on January 17, 1887. So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to learn that Jason Bourne was named after one of the first known amnesiacs. One of the most well-known amnesiacs in pop culture is Jason Bourne, a character who is forced to uncover his past as a government assassin after losing his memory. We’ve already profiled the story of Benjaman Kyle, a middle-aged man who lost his memory after an assault and still hasn’t uncovered his true identity, but his is not the only bizarre case of amnesia (not by a long shot). But when these cases do occur, they make for some interesting stories, even when they turn out to be a complete hoax. Of course, in real life, amnesia cases don’t happen nearly as often as they do on soap operas, and they come in many different forms. One of the most popular plot devices in fiction is for a character to develop amnesia and lose their memory.