A patient recovering from a serious head injury three months ago can recall his life in vivid detail up to the day before the injury, and now shows normal immediate recall on testing (repeating a list of words just given to him), but cannot remember anything from the days spent in intensive care or reliably learn new information day-to-day. Before revealing the answer: is this an amnestic state?
Yes. This is an amnestic state: a persisting difficulty forming new memories and recalling recently learned material, with distant memory (life before the injury) and immediate recall (the word-list test) both preserved, exactly the pattern the phenomenon's own recognition features describe, here following a head injury — one of several recognised causes beyond the classically-associated Korsakoff's syndrome.
References
- Casey, P. & Kelly, B. (2019). Fish's Clinical Psychopathology, 4th ed. Ch. 5, 'Disorders of Memory'.