Personality & Memory
Apr. 4th, 2007 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apparentparadoxI recently read "The Face of a Stranger" by Anne Perry.
The main character in the book, William Monk is a detective who has had an accident and lost his memory. This leads to an interesting plot device whereby the detective is not only trying to solve the crime, but also trying to use his detective skills to learn about himself!
One thing that I found odd in the book, however, is that Monk seems to have a different personality after losing his memory than he had before. Monk notices the way people interact with him, and deduces that in the past he must have been a jerk, climbing over people to get ahead, etc. However, post-amnesia, he doesn't seem to be like that, and in fact, he actively tries to behave differently.
Also recently, a friend had to move her mother into assisted care, because her memory was going so much that she couldn't remember basic things like whether she had taken her pills or even whether she had eaten or not. While Ellen says her mother hasn't changed personality much, she does think that when her father went through the same loss-of-memory, that he became different, that he lost some of his "inhibitors" and so said things that before he would have kept inside. I'm not sure whether I would count that as a personality change, though, but maybe I should?
All of this got me wondering about how ingrained personality really is. Could losing your memory really result in a different personality? On the one hand, I can see that all the justifications/rationalizations we make up for our bad behavior might be wiped out, and without remembering those rationalizations, then maybe different behavior would result. But, prior to reading this book, I don't think that I would have imagined that to be possible. I'm pretty sure that I used to consider someone's personality to be a pretty intrinsic trait.
Now I'll have to think about that, especially as it pertains to myself and whether I want to work on any personality changes.
The main character in the book, William Monk is a detective who has had an accident and lost his memory. This leads to an interesting plot device whereby the detective is not only trying to solve the crime, but also trying to use his detective skills to learn about himself!
One thing that I found odd in the book, however, is that Monk seems to have a different personality after losing his memory than he had before. Monk notices the way people interact with him, and deduces that in the past he must have been a jerk, climbing over people to get ahead, etc. However, post-amnesia, he doesn't seem to be like that, and in fact, he actively tries to behave differently.
Also recently, a friend had to move her mother into assisted care, because her memory was going so much that she couldn't remember basic things like whether she had taken her pills or even whether she had eaten or not. While Ellen says her mother hasn't changed personality much, she does think that when her father went through the same loss-of-memory, that he became different, that he lost some of his "inhibitors" and so said things that before he would have kept inside. I'm not sure whether I would count that as a personality change, though, but maybe I should?
All of this got me wondering about how ingrained personality really is. Could losing your memory really result in a different personality? On the one hand, I can see that all the justifications/rationalizations we make up for our bad behavior might be wiped out, and without remembering those rationalizations, then maybe different behavior would result. But, prior to reading this book, I don't think that I would have imagined that to be possible. I'm pretty sure that I used to consider someone's personality to be a pretty intrinsic trait.
Now I'll have to think about that, especially as it pertains to myself and whether I want to work on any personality changes.