Kalbe, E., Brand, M., Thiel, A., Kessler, J., & Markowitsch, H.J. (2008). Neuropsychological and neural correlates of autobiographical deficits in a mother who killed her children. Neurocase, 14, 15-28.
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Kalbe, E., Brand, M., Thiel, A., Kessler, J., & Markowitsch, H.J. (2008). Neuropsychological and neural correlates of autobiographical deficits in a mother who killed her children. Neurocase, 14, 15-28.
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In Kalbe, a woman who killed her two children as a form of “extended suicide” was examined. The woman claimed that she had no personal identity and did not feel emotionally connected to her past. Similar to people with depression and anxiety, the woman had trouble remembering specific details in emotional memories. Her symptoms were also compared to those of amnesiacs. Like amnesiacs, she had no identity, but instead of forgetting events in a certain period of time, she could only recall events that repeated more than once. She had difficulty remembering events that happened only one time.
What I am most interested in though is her claims that her condition is hereditary. She killed two of her children because she believed that they were just like her and did not have their own identities. I wonder if her condition is genetic and if her children inherited her condition or if she just could not perceive another person having an identity because she could not understand the emotions of other people. It would be very interesting if the researchers were able to perform the same tests on the remaining child and see if the results match up with that of the woman.
On a side note, it is really cool that the article included pictures of the brain imaging, even though I am unable to understand what the pictures mean. They just look super cool.
Interesting that overgenerality does not change with your state. Even after the depression has remmited, one continues to have a general memory. It would seem that after the depression has receded, one would begin to remember in a more specific way. Something that was not quite clear was whether it was possible that these patients had always had an overgeneral memory. I understand that there were control subjects, but could it also be possible that some of these patients always answered questions in this manner? Or is this completely implausible?
Williams and Drtischel found an association between fluency tasks and categoric and extended memory errors. People who are bad at semantic fluency tasks are more likely to make categoric memory errors because they do not have the executive capacity to override them. I did not quite understand this argument. However, it was interesting to see the finding that the more “self-focused” the retrieval query was, the more likely it was that mnemonic interlock occurred. This is when retrieval becomes deadlocked and moves across the hierarchy instead of becoming more specific. Although, it is possible to give people more imageable cues, which would decrease the likelihood of a generic memory.
Towards the end of the discussion the author suggests that this research shows that you can predict how long a person will stay depressed. How does this happen?
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About the episode of Radiolab-
The discussion about the constant competition between emotional and rational brain was amazing. In the given experiment, people were given either a two-digit number or a seven-digit memory and told to memorize it. They were then told to go to another room and recall the number. On the way someone asked them if they wanted either cake or fruit. Most of the people with the seven-digit number chose chocolate cake and the people with the two-digit number chose fruit! This is because those people with the seven-digit number confuse their rational brain and the emotional brain “wins”. So in the super market people often confuse their rational brain and make emotional decisions instead!
They tell us a story where a man and a woman are watching a storm and there is a sudden knocking sound. The man says that it must be the study door, the woman goes to see what it is and two minutes later the window comes crashing down. The man then associates wind coming through a window with this memory for a long time. This is because the brain wants to keep you safe and creates a pattern. The wind coming through a window constantly brings up that memory. The same thing happens with cereal in a super market. All the memories that are associated with a particular thing are brought up and “bubble up” into a feeling and you make a decision.
It’s so interesting that AJ’s hyperthymestic syndrome is so closely akin to abnormal brain functioning associated with autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Her date-oriented semantic memory superiority is similar to the domain-specific proficiencies of autistic savants, and her uninhibited replay of memories, as well as her need for order and her anxiety are within the realm of the obsessive-compulsive spectrum. It’s amazing that these patterns and anomalies which could have resulted in dysfunction have yielded this phenomenally rare capacity for autobiographical memory.
It’s also curious that AJ’s memory is able to subvert the concept of childhood amnesia, as she has recall from the age of three, even stating that she wanted to be a wife and mother from the age of three. It’s amazing that at such a young age she was able to conceive of the future in such a way, while she expresses difficulty looking forward now as she spends so much time reviewing that past. This is part of why the proposition that AJ may have a variant of neurodevelopmental frontostriatal disorder makes sense. Developmentally speaking, a three year old should not be able to conceive of such things. It’s also interesting that AJ is so self-aware concerning her memory, having attributed it to her ‘traumatizing’ move across the country, and being able to identify shifts in her memory capacity during her adolescence.
It’s of interest that AJ’s journaling began out of her fear that she would be unable to retain what wasn’t written down, considering that she has such difficulty with rote memorization. It would be interesting to examine if her fears prove accurate, though it’s a catch-22 as without filming or otherwise documenting her life 24/7 there would be no way to verify memory accuracy.
This article also poses a question as to which types of memory superiority are beneficial in day-to-day life, as AJ’s phenomenal memory was not conducive of scholastic achievement or any particular occupational advantage. This is particularly pertinent when considering our society’s current quest for memory enhancing drugs.
Though this question is somewhat sinister, I am curious as to why AA, a woman who claimed to be incapable of emotion and unable to encode the emotions of others, killed her children in such a calm way, sedating them prior to drowning, while she took a blade to her own wrists? In spite of reduced limbic activation during recall of the event, I’m curious as to whether AA was incapable of feeling, or rather was unable to somehow register her emotions on a cognitive level.
The Baddeley, et al. reading discussed the difference between confabulations and delusions and showed examples of five different schizophrenic patients’ memories. What interested me most was the conclusion. It said that although the patients deviate from social norms in order to make sense of extraordinary experiences, which result in their confabulations and delusions, we must remember that these norms have been socially constructed (427). Baddeley, et al. further concludes that the way schizophrenic patients reconstruct reality may teach us an important lesson on how we construct our autobiographical memories. Although the five patients’ delusions and confabulations were bizarre, it is the way they believe is best to deal with all the information they retain from certain events. We don’t see it this way because we have been taught otherwise. I just find it really interesting to see how large a role society, which is public, plays a role in constructing private, personal memories. Something else I noticed, while reading about the schizophrenic patients, were how similar they were to the people interviewed in “Abducted” in the sense that even though there is an explanation for something weird that they remember happening, because it felt so real, they are adamant about it really occurring and are unwilling to accept any plausible explanations.
When reading Kalbe's article about the woman who killed her two children and attempted to kill herself, I could not help but recall an incident in my country a few years back. A man killed his children and committed suicide because his wife left him. He was devastated when his wife divorced him and would not go back to him after several pleas and decided to seek revenge and maybe, get her attention. In this article, the woman's husband is not mentioned. Could she have done that to get his attention?
Also, what baffles me in this article is that though she claims that she has no sense of herself and that her dysfunction was hereditary, results showed that she could remember episodes from all the time periods in her life.
She is also convinced that she suffered from a genetic defect and that she passed it on to her own children. How could a child be suicidal at such a young age when they have not experienced the real world yet?
I agree that AA suffered from a certain neuropsychological dysfunction but I think her case should be studied further.
“Accordingly, disorders of autobiographical memory usually lead to disastrous consequences of the individuals’ lives as they lose their personal past and consequently their personality” (Kalbe et al., 15). The influence of autobiographical memory on a patient’s personality is interesting. Somehow our identities are vulnerable to suffer if our memories of ourselves are lost or damaged. I don’t see how this logic leads a woman to kill her children. I also don’t accept the term “extended suicide” at face value. It doesn’t matter if this woman saw her children as just as “senseless” as her. She still killed those children. Their murder should not be confused with the term suicide. Damage to the limbic and pre-frontal cortex in the brain is said to have major affects on memory in this article as well as others. This readily embraced “fact” results in a heavy focus of research with brain-imaging aiming to fulfill this hypothesis. But, what if these scientists are missing something(s) really pivotal to our understanding of amnesia and memory as a whole? I am already skeptical of brain-imaging to begin with. I see its use and significance in the field of psychology without a doubt. But, I also believe that scientists should be more aware of their own ignorance of the fairly new technology. Yes a particular part of the brain lights up as a response to different stimuli. But, what does that really mean? Can that really translate into a definite fact about the patient’s psyche? It can tell a doctor something about the damage that has been done to the brain. But, how can it explain a woman’s choice to kill her own children?
The article by Kalbe, et al. describes the autobiographical memory dysfunction in a woman who previously killed two of her three children, in an 'extended suicide'. The authors describe the variety of tests administered to the patient, AA, and the subsequent results compared with typical averages. What is so interesting in reading through the study is the data in Table 1 comparing the test results with the average scores. Specifically, the large gap in AA's scores in autobiographical memory categories. The suggestion of a direct neural correlation seems strengthened greatly by this data, making for a very interesting and convincing case. However, in reading through the article, though compelling, I find myself curious about AA's background and personal history. That is, the act of killing her children (and the motive and mental state surrounding it) is a rather extreme behavior, which seems somewhat isolated, as presented. Her emotional disconnection and autobiographical dysfunction makes me wonder if there was a certain point in her life which could be identified as the 'onset' of such feelings. After all, this is a middle-aged woman with three children and a job, suggesting that her emotional past may be different from her present. I realize it's not the most significant aspect of the article, but the strength of the data presented makes me curious about prior circumstances. Wouldn't a comparison to lifelong behaviors be useful in such a case, at least as a reference point in further research?
I was especially interested to read this article because the title was just so horrifying. The patient is referred to as A.A., and she claims to feel no emotion or any connection to her past or to other people, and because of this deficit, planned to kill her children and then herself. She believed her children had inherited her same problem, and that was her reason for killing them. It sounds like AA has a host of psychological issues, which could range from schizophrenia to a sociopathic disorder. The researchers did multiple brain scans, including measuring regional cerebral blood flow with positron emission tomography during an autobiographical memory paradigm (3), during which fictional and actual episodes from her life were described to her (not having to do with her crime), and she was asked to identify what had really happened to her. They found she could remember general events but few details, and these general events were not emotionally evocative.
The article also mentioned that “criminal offenders can have neuropsychological dysfunctions including deficits in emotional processing and memory” (3), and that there is a growing interest in analyzing the brains of people who conduct violent behavior. This makes me wonder about how common AA’s plight may be among violent criminals, and how perhaps she just had a more severe dysfunction that most, coupled with other mental issues, which drove her to commit this crime. While the brain functions of violent criminals have been studied in the past, this article leads me to believe that with further examination, scientists could discover the root of this problem and put an end to violent crime by regulating the brain.
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