The hippocampus initially processes both types, but episodic memories move to the cortex, while procedural ones go to the cerebellum. That's because your motor skills and instinctive physical memories - like riding a bike - are stored separately from your episodic memories. Amnesia patients retain their personality and identity, along with their implicit, or procedural, memory. With both anterograde and retrograde amnesia, it is important to understand that people's explicit, or episodic, memory is normally what's lost. Normally causing only cold sores, in rare cases it can attack the spinal cord or brain. On March 29, 1985, Wearing, then an acknowledged expert in early music and at the height of his career with BBC Radio 3, fell ill with a herpes simplex virus. For example, damage to Broca's area, which houses language information, would likely cause language-related memory loss. Clive Wearing (born 1938) is a British citizen suffering from an acute and long lasting case of anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories. Retrograde amnesia usually follows damage to areas of the brain besides the hippocampus because long-term memories are stored in the synapses of different brain regions. It happens because the neural pathways of newer memories are not as strong as older ones that have been strengthened by years of retrieval.

This pattern of destroying newer memories before older ones is called Ribot's law. The more severe the case, the farther back in time the memory loss extends. Retrograde amnesia targets your most recent memories first.

How to play amnesia on piano