AwesomeFawful posted... It absolutely is a thing. Imagine being like 10 and visiting your family on the eastern side of the state, only for you to stay the night and them not recognizing you literally the next morning.
The wikipedia page pretty much confirms that it is NOT a thing: look at the "Causes" section:
Causes[edit]There are three generalized categories in which amnesia could be acquired by a person[citation needed]. The three categories are head trauma (example: head injuries), traumatic events (example: seeing something devastating to the mind), or physical deficiencies (example: atrophy of the hippocampus). The majority of amnesia and related memory issues derive from the first two categories as these are more common and the third could be considered a subcategory of the first.- Head trauma is a very broad range as it deals with any kind of injury or active action toward the brain which might cause amnesia. Retrograde and anterograde amnesia is more often seen from events like this, an exact example of a cause of the two would be electroconvulsive therapy, which would cause both briefly for the receiving patient.
- Traumatic events are more subjective. What is traumatic is dependent on what the person finds to be traumatic. Regardless, a traumatic event is an event where something so distressing occurs that the mind chooses to forget rather than deal with the stress. A common example of amnesia that is caused by traumatic events is dissociative amnesia, which occurs when the person forgets an event that has deeply disturbed them.[20] An example would be a person forgetting a fatal and graphic car accident involving their loved ones.
- Physical deficiencies are different from head trauma because physical deficiencies lean more toward passive physical issues. Examples of physical deficiencies include Alzheimer's disease, neurological paraneoplastic syndromes such as anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, and vitamin B12 deficiency.
Among specific causes of amnesia are the following:- Electroconvulsive therapy in which seizures are electrically induced in patients for therapeutic effect can have acute effects including both retrograde and anterograde amnesia.[21]
- Alcohol can both cause blackouts[22] and have deleterious effects on memory formation.[23]
Forgetting a horrible event or car accident is "amnesia" but it's not "amnesia" as it's depicted on TV and books, comics, games, FF7, etc.