Theoretical Question about Amnesia

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The big five are entirely different tests. They break down human traits along five lines, extraversion, openness, neuroticism(or whatever it is named now), conscientiousness, and agreeableness.

They're more scientifically accepted than the MBTI or Enneagram. Part of the issue is that they don't measure "types" like distinct disjoint personas, but rather they only focus on degrees of a trait, which avoids a lot of issues involving whether reality cleaves to have a specially separare INFP and ESTJ and all of that. And as such, they don't compare very well, all that one could potentially do is try to translate things in terms of the Big Five, but not in favor of the others.

I find your lack of knowledge of the scientifically preferred method kind of amusing though.

What is the scientifically preferred method of reconstructing tense and aspect markers in a protolanguage? Say something I should be amused.

So I - being who I am having gotten here by path A - have not heard of this "Big Five" tpo which you refer. How amusing.

So flitting to the web with nothing but your phrase I hit a site which professes to be running a Big Five Personality test. And from the look of it I say this is likely not THE test, looks like a lite, but see what it does. And it turns out a set of beads on wire ratings.

Well, that was amusing.

Eventually I may track down, while you snicker, the battery of tests in question and see what gives.

But meanwhile - It is pretty clear that you [snigger] are not up [chuckle] on what gives in serious enneagram circles, let alone modifications in use in the Ingroup [haw!]. I will sujspend judgement on the Big Five till I ffind evidence on the real thing - but I will tell you from a scientific point of view [snort] placement on continua are not much help in taxonomy. Fine if all you want is a rough measure of similarity [Yeehaw!]

AND I do not genuflerct when I sat "scientific" or bow to lab coats.

[heeheehee]

I just wonder if total amnesia took away what bad things happened to use would our genes still have as big a say in the matter. Look at Ray Langston from CSI you can definitely tell he has anger issues because of a specific gene but unlike Nate Haskell he isnt a total murderer. Nate might have been a different person if he didnt grow up in a household where he could hear his father beating his mother and then killing her. Amnesia is a interesting subject. Can a person change because they forget everything before that exact moment.

Well, I think... wait, what was the question?

Is a killer or rapist or whatever the same person they were before they had total amnesia. I mean amnesia where they forget who they were for the rest of their life. Who we are is it more nature or nurture?

i've seen a documentary about exactly this. a man gets amnesia and never recovers his episodic memory at all of himself prior to the incident (which he does not remember, so no one knows why).

he changes dramatically. it's very interesting.

it's called "Unknown White Male"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436864/

i saw this movie years ago and just discovered there are claims it is a hoax. no one has proved it if so.

Thank you I will have to rent that some time.

Read Kopelman on functional/psychogenic, read van der hart, Bremner, markowittz, Brown etc. amnesia exacerbated by pre-existing information processing issues, ptsd and intensity of triggering trauma. McNally makes a difference between motivated forgetting and actual global amnesia which remains unresolved. Traumas are not forgotten nor is identity or personality but emotions for family may become deadened possibly as coping mechanism especially if a measure of abuse was part of the picture to begin with. Moms are not always enchanted by their unresponsive, arrogant, and odd children that bring them nothing but shame.

A criminal with amnesia would forget facts about his life.

He would not recognize his dad, or uncle, or be confused as to which was which.

Even non-amnesiac people have "amnesia" about traumas in their lives.

But your hypothetical amnesiac criminal would have the same basic personality and basic character ( or lack thereoff).

An amnesiac Ted Bundy would likely still have sadio-sexual urges to murder.
An amnesiac John Giotti, might have no memory of having run the mob, but if you annyed him he would still plot to have your limbs broken.

Also- your assuming that criminal behavior is a neurosis that results from childhood trauma-like your daddy rapeing you as a child.

It maybe so- but many non-amnesiac people loose consious memory of childhood traumas, and whether have access to memories of specific bad events in childhood or not- you would still have the reflex mechanisms- the personality molded by trauma- and the survival mechanisms- even if you had amnesia about specifics.

Or- the above is what I would assume.


Like Philogos said its curious how individual amounts of memory loss affects individual people.
I just had a curious experience with such a person.

Sis and I just had christmas dinner with mom at her assisted living home that specializes in folks with dementia.

One of mom's newest Co-residents is a pleasant spry gentlemen of 90.
When the dinner was served he wouldnt stop remarking with wide eyed amazement about how "ive never SEEN food like this before!" And "I cant figure out how to eat it".

It was a regular american turkey dinner- with mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce.

At one point he held up a turkey bone with twig like ligaments sticking out and said "how am I supposed to eat this?" We assured him that "it was just gristle- you dont have to eat it.. you already did a great job biting the meat off!"

The point is that you would expect someone to forget who the president is, or even who their child is, but not general things about their culture- like which gender wears which kind of clothes say.- or- how to eat an american style turkey dinner.

So who really knows?

There are different kinds of memory, and different kinds of memory loss.

I've always been curious about cultural amnesia; like if whole cultures could forget past atrocities would their aftereffects cease to hold back the descendents? I'm thinking like slavery or the British/Irish history or religious/ethnic animosity in the Balkans; would people today be better off not knowing?

The OP seems to be exercising a pretty uncritical understanding of amnesia. I'm neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist so I leave it to other professionals to provide the detail. But suffice it to say that memory, as we understand it, is not confined to a single type of storage.

There's our short-term memory, or our "RAM" as it were. This is the ability to remember what is happening around you, and your ability to rationalize this information with other stimuli. What was the last thread you read before this one?

There's our long-term memory--more particularly, declarative memory or our "hard drive." This is our ability to store information and to retrieve it for use later on. What was your family's telephone number when you were a child?

Then there's our procedural memory, our "operating system." This is our ability to walk, to hold a fork or chopsticks, to write and all the other skills that we use on a daily basis without consciously thinking about them.

Some of those skills are learned through explicit memory--where the situmulus is directly linked to the skill being memorized. But there are other skills that we learn through implicity memory--making connections between different stimuli without being consciously aware of the connection.

There is the whole realm of the unconscious. What did you dream about last night?

Amnesia can take many forms, but to suggest that retrograde amnesia affecting our declarative memory would somehow negate an individual's personality does not appear consistent with clinical experience. Even in a presentation as acute as transient global amnesia a patient will still retain deeply embedded memory.

Amnesia is a common a disease in soap operas. As common as tooth decay is real life.
And the epidemic spreads into police dramas, like the one the OP watched, occosionaly as well.

But it is extremely rare in real life.

The whole human race produces amnesiacs with about the same frequency that it produces astronauts who walk on the moon- a hundful a centurey.

So even the experts, with so few specimens to study, know little about it.