The website of the UK-based organization The Impairment of Memory in Epilepsy (TIME) describes an attack this way: ĭuring an attack, the person is usually unable to remember things that have happened over the past days or weeks. In half the cases reported, behavior includes repetitive questioning to attempt to orient experience as the brain fails to lay down new memories or recall a range of recent experiences. Frequently, however, there is no warning.ĭuring the attack the person's cognitive functions are not generally impaired perception, communication, attention are normal for most of the duration of the event. A quarter of attacks involve a brief period of unresponsiveness. Somewhat less than half the cases include olfactory or gustatory hallucinations, and slightly more than a third involve motor automatisms. In attacks that begin when an individual is fully alert, olfactory hallucinations or a "strange taste" or nausea have been reported. Three-fourths of cases are reported upon awakening. Some people report short-lived retrograde amnesia so deep that they do not recognize their home or family members, though personal identity is preserved. Symptoms Ī person experiencing a TEA episode has very little short-term memory, so that there is profound difficulty remembering events in the past few minutes ( anterograde amnesia), or of events in the hours before the onset of the attack, and even memories of important events in recent years may not be accessible during the amnestic event ( retrograde amnesia). Though descriptions of the condition are based on fewer than 100 cases published in the medical literature, and the largest single study to date included 50 people with TEA, TEA offers considerable theoretical significance as competing theories of human memory attempt to reconcile its implications. Transient epileptic amnesia ( TEA) is a rare but probably underdiagnosed neurological condition which manifests as relatively brief and generally recurring episodes of amnesia caused by underlying temporal lobe epilepsy.
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