Is dana kiger faking her amnesia?!
Question:
Is dana kiger faking her amnesia?
whether purposely or subconsciously?
Answers:
Sometimes the most experienced clinician or scientist in the world still has to say he or she doesn't understand some phenomenon.
Traditionally head trauma as described in the ABC article on Dana Kiger does not cause loss of personal identity or memories close to that, unlike how amnesia is falsely portrayed in movie and TV scripts. If you look up the work of memory researchers like Larry Squire at UC San Diego, they can document a retrograde amnesia prior to a head injury that goes back many years (for adults). There is still a little difference between patients and controls as far back as 15 years before the injury in their recall of public events. But before that the memories of the two groups are the same. That's what it's like for almost all patients with head injuires, that very old memory isn't wiped out with any injury that allows someone to be normally conscious in the present.
One thing that's strange is that Dana Kiger has more than amnesia. Asking, "What is lettuce?" is a cognitive problem that's more than just losing one's event-based memories as one usually means in talking about the amnesia that follows a head injury. There's another story like this where a girl couldn't use a spoon any more after a head injury, what's called apraxia. That's something different than what neuroscience means by "amnesia".
I find it hard to believe that Dana Kiger could fake this sort of difficulty convincingly. I don't think I could, and I'm a retired neurologist, so I'd have some sense of how to do that. It would be very difficult to be consistent enough at it to fool experts.
Regarding the question of it being something subconscious, one could do galvanic skin responses while showing her family pictures. If her unconscious brain recognized real pictures from ones not of her family, then there would be a basis for saying some part of her remembers, even if her consciousness doesn't. I don't know if anyone's tried that with her. If she had no skin responses, that would be indication that her memory loss is from brain injury.
I'm sure researchers will be writing more about this sort of condition eventually. It's not something one sees from an ordinary head injury.