Kent Cochrane
[2] As a case study, Cochrane has been linked to the breakdown of the single-memory single-locus hypothesis regarding amnesia, which states that an individual memory is localized to a single location in the brain.
After attending a community college to study business administration, he obtained a quality control job at a manufacturing plant, which he held until the time of his motorcycle accident.
A follow-up CT scan revealed a chronic bilateral frontal subdural hematoma, enlarged ventricles and sulci, and left occipital lobe infarction.
[3] Upon arrival at a rehabilitation facility, Cochrane was able to recognize friends and family, but still exhibited slower thinking ability, as well as partial right side paralysis and vision problems with his right eye.
[3] As a result of his neurological damage, Cochrane suffered severe cognitive deficits that hindered his ability to form new episodic memories.
To illustrate this, research conducted on Cochrane has shown that he was able to recall factual information that he learned prior to his accident, such as his ability to know the difference between stalactites and stalagmites.
[4] However, Cochrane was unable to remember emotional details of events from his past such as his brother's death and a dangerous fall he had at his home.
[6] The trauma caused by Cochrane's accident left him with severe anterograde amnesia that has made it impossible for him to remember both new personal experiences and semantic information.
Implications of Cochrane's neuropathology have shown that damage to specific regions of the brain is associated with different forms of memory loss.
As a result of damage to Cochrane's medial temporal lobe, specifically his hippocampus, research suggests that this area functions in processing episodic memory.
This implies that episodic and semantic components of memory could be formed and stored separately, and thus processed by different regions of the brain.
[citation needed] This showed that amnesic patients can learn new semantic information, although slower than normal test subjects.
Episodic and semantic memory are therefore described as showing stochastic independence, ruling out the idea that Cochrane was able to retain information because certain words were of greater significance to him than others.
[11] Nevertheless, Cochrane showed that severe anterograde amnesia does not restrict individuals from retaining knowledge that is more complex than information learned from priming.
