![]() ![]() Although Coleridge was no scientist, he lived in a time when there were no "hard and fast lines between scientific and popular writing," wrote Spiers. Coleridge used a well-known story of a woman whose "ravings" turned out to be forgotten memories, to make his point. Philosopher William James credited poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge with the notion that memories are forever etched in the brain, Spiers wrote. Meanwhile a second idea also was taking hold - that of memory permanence. A physician named Andrew Wigan wrote in an 1844 book of a case where a 16-year-old boy rendered "insensible" by a blow to the head suddenly came out of a coma weeks later after the clatter from someone accidentally dropping fire tongs awoke him. But his theories lived on, and other doctors expanded on them. Ironically, Bichat died of a head injury in 1802. "This was not unusual at the time, to forgo evidence like that." "From my reading of Bichat's work, it seems that he felt that the second trauma amnesia cure was a common occurrence and didn't need the citation of an individual case," Spiers said in a press release. So, if an injury to one hemisphere could cause confusion to the other hemisphere, a second blow should make everything right again. His reasoning was that the two hemispheres of the brain needed to be in balance with each other to function. French anatomist and physiologist Francois Xavier Bichat proposed that a second blow to the head could restore the memory of someone who had a concussion. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, she wrote, scientists thought that the two halves of the brain had the exact same function, much as the body has two eyes. In her 2016 article, " The Head Trauma Amnesia Cure: The Making of a Medical Myth" published in the journal Neurology, Drexel University associate psychology professor Mary Spiers looked at where this belief originated. ![]()
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