Patients with anterograde amnesia may have episodic, semantic, or both types of explicit memory impaired for events after the trauma that caused the amnesia. This suggests that memory consolidation for different types of memory takes place in different regions of the brain. Despite this, current knowledge on human memory is still insufficient to "map out" the wiring of a human brain to discover which parts of which lobe are responsible for the various episodic and semantic knowledge within a persons memory. Amnesia is seen in patients who, for the reason of preventing another more serious disorder, have parts of their brains known to be involved in memory circuits removed, the most notable of which is known as the medial temporal lobe (MTL) memory system, described below. Patients with seizures originating in the MTL may have either side or both structures removed (there is one structure per hemisphere). In addition, patients with tumors who undergo surgery will often sustain damage to these structures, as is described in a case below. Damage to any part of this system, including the hippocampus and surrounding cortices, results in amnesic syndromes. This is why after a stroke people have a chance of developing cognitive deficits that result in anterograde amnesia, since strokes can involve the temporal lobe in the temporal cortex, and the temporal cortex houses the hippocampus. Finally, anterograde amnesia can be the first clinical sign that Alzheimers disease develops in within the brain.
Capital punishment
Historically, starvation has been used as a death sentence. From the beginning of civilization to the Middle Ages, people were immured, and died for want of food. In ancient Greco-Roman societies, starvation was sometimes used to dispose of guilty upper-class citizens, especially erring female members of patrician families. In the year 31, Livilla, the niece and daughter-in-law of Tiberius, was discreetly starved to death by her mother for her adulterous relationship with Sejanus and for her complicity in the murder of her own husband, Drusus the Younger. Another daughter-in-law of Tiberius, named Agrippina the Elder (a granddaughter of Augustus and the mother of Caligula), also died of starvation, in 33 AD; however, it is unclear if her starvation was self-inflicted. A son and daughter of Agrippina were also executed by starvation for political reasons; Drusus Caesar, her second son, was put in prison in 33 AD, and starved to death by orders of Tiberius (he managed to stay alive for nine days by chewing the stuffing of his bed); Agrippinas youngest daughter, Julia Livilla, was exiled on an island in 41 by her uncle, Emperor Claudius, and her death by starvation was arranged by the empress Messalina. It is also possible that Vestal Virgins were starved when found guilty of breaking their vows of celibacy. Ugolino della Gherardesca, his sons, and other members of his family were immured in the Muda, a tower of Pisa, and starved to death in the thirteenth century. Dante, his contemporary, wrote about Gherardesca in his masterpiece The Divine Comedy.