Remote Memory in Retrospect

Abstract

I first encountered the phenomenon of remote memory early in my sabbatical leave in San Diego in 1984. Nelson was preparing a lecture on the neuropsychology of alcoholic Korsakoff’s (AK) syndrome, and as was his habit, he practiced the talk at a meeting of the Psychology Service. His delight when he showed the slide of Charlie Chaplin to introduce the segment on remote memory was unmistakable. No less interesting to me was the clear temporally graded retrograde amnesia (RA) function for the group of AK patients reported by Albert, Butters and Levin (1979). Of even greater importance were the then unpublished findings on patient PZ. PZ, as you will recall, was a famous research psychologist who developed AK a few years after publishing his autobiography. Nelson and his colleagues (Butters & Cermak, 1986) were able to show that PZ exhibited the usual temporally graded RA for Famous Faces and Public Events. Furthermore, PZ showed an entirely comparable pattern of loss of memory for details of his professional life (as reported in his autobiography) and even for the facts and theories of experimental psychology. For example, PZ could describe the trichnomatic theory of color vision in precise detail, but appeared completely unfamiliar with the ideas of the opponent process theory, which was not widely known until the late 1950s.