My Peer Paper

Annotated Bibliography

Traumatic Brain Injury. Edited by Erin D. Bigler. Austin, Texas: Pro-Ed, 1990. Print.

 Erin Bigler is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University and he has also studied the role of neuroimaging variables in cognitive and neurobehavioral disorders such as traumatic brain injuries, anoxic brain injuries, and acquired injuries of the brain. In addition, he is an Adjunct Professor Psychiatry and Radiology for the University of Utah and has authored and edited nine textbooks and published many peer-reviewed articles. His book, Traumatic Brain Injury, focuses primarily on the mechanisms of damage, assessment, intervention, and the outcome of these injuries. This defines a brain injury and the extent of damage you actually need in order to obtain any possible symptoms of a concussion and then the extent to amnesia. “In a motor vehicle accident, the rapid deceleration on impact may set up a variety of sources in the cranium that can produce a significant brain injury from acceleration-deceleration effects” (16). This particular citation will help define the car accident that occurs in 50 First Dates where Lucy is first associated with a brain injury and defines her amnesia. There is also a chapter on organic memory disorders which will help define the disability to form new memories or in other words, the functional short term memory loss that Lucy has from the accident. Patients are able to acquire new facts in their everyday life but cannot apply it to their lives (346). Lucy is able to make new memories with Henry everyday, but is unable to willingly remember or “find” those memories again. She then is able to paint pictures of him without the knowledge of who Henry is or how she knows Henry. The book itself can also perceive this film as a fictional perception of brain injury leading to amnesia, but it does have some accurate portrayals of amnesia and its functions through out the movie. Dr. Bigler strongly associates an injury as a capable factor to memory loss, but concludes the few ways that it can affect the patient and they way how they remember things they have learned in the memory they cannot retain. Organic memory loss is a result of traumatic brain injury and it becomes a part of everyday life. The memory impaired patients are capable of forming new memories and storing them within their memory, but are not capable of retrieving these stored memories at times (346). Bigler shows that memory loss is a dysfunction in the brain solely to a major injury that was caused by a great amount of force to temporal lobes in the brain. The book’s main purpose is to relate causes of memory loss by traumatic brain incidents and how it affects the way those memories are retained. Bigler wants to show that head injuries result in more than just the injury itself, but in “total and permanent incapacities as well” (5). This source will help with defining the case of amnesia in the movie 50 First Dates and how the car accident could have caused damaged to Lucy’s, the amnesic character, brain. Her car wreck is the perfect image of how a car wreck can result in traumatic brain injury and resulting in short term memory loss each day. However, she also retains memories and expresses them in a way that she cannot recognize or comprehend.