Theoretical Question about Amnesia

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If you had total amnesia and forgot who you were for the rest of your life would you still be the same person? You wouldn't remember being beaten as a child, or raped by your uncle, or other heinous things done to you. Yes you would still have the same genes that caused you to be a serial killer in the first place. But could a person change if they forgot everything such as what heinous crimes they committed. I am just wondering if you had total amnesia would you still be the same person?

as i recall amnesia can present with some very peculiar effects.
some people only lose episodic memory and as such retain all familiar skills, a golfer would have the same swing(bar the difference in emotional state) for an example.
i dont know how this translates or if this is always the case as i have only read about it when it caught my interest.

it is a fascinating subject.

I am talking where someone forgets totally who they are. Its like a criminal minds episode except that person ended at the end going to where he stashed his dead bodies because he regained his memory. I am asking what if the serial killer, or rapist or whoever forgot all that happened before that exact moment. Would they still be who they were before the amnesia based on their genes?

I have never - that I can recall - big joke - had amnesia nor knowingly met anyone who had.

I have of course forgotten a lot.

BUT my father with advanced Alzheimer's at least has no practical access to much of his memory. He is very much the same person only with less unhappiness / bitterness.

HIS father had a stroke such that he did not recognize his family. He, I am told, was the same person only angrier / more acid.

Until further data come in, I would expect basic personality to remain in place - minus some of the upmessings based on btter experience.

On the other hand, certain types are less fixed, apparently. We are told the ennea-9 is statistically more likely to do the multiple [personality thing. If such a person were amnesiac, the dominant surface personality might be replaced by one of the others.

well both your relatives probably(i have no way of knowing) some access left to something, i think this would lways be the case.
i wonder if a complete personality wipe is possible?

Depends on the amnesia. I mean, the difficult thing is that there are interconnections. I mean, I suppose a blank slate person could reinvent themselves, but there are limits even to that. Personality traits have high genetic components. Severe emotional damage likely crosses multiple neural systems, not just memory.

that was what i tried to convey with my previous post, i dont know how big a genetic component there is to personality, i think it would be more subtle than what we can easily see.

You read of cases where the person is apparently blank slate - but over time shred keep coming in, because yes, it is a very complex network with all kinds unexpected redundancies and linkages you would not believe.

The bit where a smell brings you back to one hour of a day 14 years ago.

I do not know how far studies of amnesia have gotten, but it is hard to believe you can get a totally unrecoverable drive and still have enough brain to live.

Yes, I just might not ever again recall.

Would I then nevertheless still think and act like "myself"?

All of that seems subject to certain other things such as you and others here have mentioned.

In the sense you are talking about, nobody is the same person day to day there's always changes going on.

No, i don't think amnesia makes a person become somebody else. It does change who they are, but so does everything else. An individual's personhood is not defined by their ability to remember who they are.

Aha. Oho.

Look well, O wolves! A Daniel. Mark him.

[Daedelus1138 - this is not a dig nor an impertinence, just a slightly grimly satisfied chuckle in no way at your expense]

My thought is that amnesia would change a person in ways that their personality is the result of past experience.

For example, I might be angry or bitter towards someone or something because I had a bad experience. If amnesia takes away all knowledge about that experience, I might become a very different person because the memory trigger is gone.

However, if I'm just an angry and bitter person in my base personality, I'd still be so with total amnesia because the trigger has nothing to do with my memories or experiences.

50% of the variability in personality is explained by genetics.

Is that an off the top ballpark or from the horse's mouth, and if the latter what are they using for a definition on personality?

A big problem is the identical multiple similarities and differences, which should also be majot key to what is / ain't genetic. Nathan Hale regrets he does not even have one life to spend on that research,

That's pretty standard from behavioral genetics research. What is done is that they measure personality by the Big 5, and then do studies based upon identical twins, and other family relations. While the 50% isn't exact, the issue is that pretty much every personality trait I've heard tested measured has 50% variability correspond to genetics.

You mean identical twin research? Yes, they're doing that.

Never heard of the Bog Five thing before.

The version I went to was easier to take than standard Enneagram or MBTI - better defined questions.

I suspect the outcome loses some definition and would be rather harder to compare.
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