In the TV series Perception, an episode revolved around a crime victim with this condition. The main character Latro in Gene Wolfes novels Soldier of the Mist, and the anime characters Vash the Stampede from Trigun and Index and Tōma from A Certain Magical Index had both retrograde and anterograde amnesia. The disorder has also been portrayed in music by English the Caretaker in Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia (2005).In the 1965 film 36 Hours, Rod Taylor plays Nazi Major Walter Gerber, a psychiatrist who has developed an effective method for treating German soldiers with what is now known as PTSD – and for painlessly extracting information from Allied prisoners. The technique involves convincing patients that years have passed, the war is over, and that they have anterograde amnesia, which supposedly can be cured with talk therapy. A few days before D-Day, U.S. Army Major Jeff Pike (James Garner) is drugged, kidnapped and taken to what appears to be a hospital run by American Occupation Forces, where his appearance is altered overnight. Pike knows that the invasion is aimed at Normandy, not Pas de Calais, as the Nazi high command expects. He buys Gerbers explanation of anterograde amnesia – using the double doors of a wardrobe as illustration – and speaks casually of Normandy. Salt in a papercut alerts him to the horrible truth, and the drama proceeds from there.
When alcohol is consumed at a rapid rate, the point at which most healthy peoples long-term memory creation starts to fail usually occurs at approximately 0.20% BAC, but can be reached as low as 0.14% BAC for infrequent drinkers. The exact duration of these blackout periods is hard to determine, because most people fall asleep before they end. Upon reaching sobriety, usually after waking, long-term memory creation is completely restored.Chronic alcoholism often leads to a thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency in the brain, causing Korsakoffs syndrome, a neurological disorder which is generally preceded by an acute neurological condition known as Wernickes encephalopathy (WE). The memory impairment that is pathognomonic to Korsakoffs syndrome predominantly affects the declarative memory, leaving non-declarative memory that is often procedural in nature relatively intact. The disproportionate severity in anterograde episodic memory processes in contrast to other cognitive processes is what differentiates Korsakoff syndrome from other conditions such as alcohol-related dementia. Evidence for the preservation of certain memory processes in the presence of severe anterograde episodic memory serve as experimental paradigm to investigate the components of human memory. Pathophysiology
The pathophysiology of anterograde amnesic syndromes varies with the extent of damage and the regions of the brain that were damaged. The most well-described regions indicated in this disorder are the medial temporal lobe (MTL), basal forebrain, and fornix. Beyond the details described below, the precise process of how we remember – on a micro scale – remains a mystery.