<unk>  is not a rare phenomenon – everybody experiences it on a near daily basis as, for much of our knowledge, it is important to remember the knowledge itself, rather than its<unk> . However, there are extreme examples of<unk>  caused by a variety of factors. Phineas Gage exemplifies an individual who suffered frontal lobe damage. A large iron rod was driven through his frontal left lobe effecting changes on his personality. Frontal lobe damage Individuals with frontal lobe damage have deficits in temporal context memory;<unk>  memory can also exhibit deficits in those with frontal lobe damage. It appears that those with frontal lobe damage have difficulties with recency and other temporal judgements (e.g., placing events in the order they occurred), and as such they are unable to properly attribute their knowledge to appropriate<unk> s (i.e., suffer<unk> . Those individuals with frontal lobe damage have normal recall of facts, but they make significantly more errors in<unk>  memory than control subjects, with these effects becoming apparent as shortly as 5 minutes after the learning experience. Individuals with frontal lobe damage often mistakenly attribute the knowledge they have to some other<unk>  (e.g., they read it somewhere, saw it on TV, etc.) but rarely attribute it to having learned it over the course of the experiment. It appears that frontal lobe damage causes a disconnection between semantic and episodic memory – in that the individuals cannot associate the context in which they acquired the knowledge to the knowledge itself. Age-related Elderly individuals have been shown to exhibit<unk> . Compared to younger individuals, in experiments where the individuals are presented with obscure or even made up trivia facts, older people remember less information overall in both recall and recognition tasks and they often misattribute the<unk>  of their knowledge, at time periods of both long and short delays. This effect is potentially due to the neuronal loss associated with aging occurring mainly in the frontal lobes. It has been previously noticed that frontal lobe damage can cause<unk> , so the loss of neurons in this area of the brain associated with aging may very well be the cause of the age-related<unk>  seen. Alzheimer's disease Alzheimer's disease (AD), which is known to be associated with frontal lobe dysfunction, is implicated as a cause of<unk> . In laboratory conditions, one study found<unk>  monitoring to be so poor that the AD participants were correctly performing<unk>  memory attributions at approximately chance. This lack of ability to attribute the<unk>  of memories is likely related to AD patients' deficits in reality monitoring. Reality monitoring, the process of distinguishing whether information originated from an external or an internal<unk> , relies on judgement processes to examine the qualitative characteristics of the information in order to determine if the information was real or imagined. It appears that it is this process that is experiencing the dysfunction, which causes mild confabulation in some AD patients, as well as being related to the<unk>  experienced in some individuals with AD. Schizophrenia Schizophrenia is associated with episodic memory deficits often characterized by a confusion of internal stimuli and real events. It appears that individuals with schizophrenia often display failures in monitoring/remembering the<unk>  of information, especially for self-generated items – that is, they display<unk> . This is a stable trait in this disease – one experiment found that over a two-year period, an individual's rate of<unk>  attributing errors was maintained, despite fluctuations in medication status and the individual's symptoms. This effect is possibly due to the malformation of associations among aspects of an episode needed for remembering its<unk> ; one neuroimaging study found that individuals with schizophrenia had lower activation of areas associated with<unk>  memory. Individuals with schizophrenia who display<unk>  memory deficits often do so due to reality-monitoring dysfunction, which is a contributing factor towards the hallucinations that characterize the disorder. One study found that schizophrenia patients were not only slower, but also less accurate, at tasks involving reality-monitoring. The hallucinations that characterize schizophrenia are a result of deficit in reality monitoring – they exhibit an inability to differentiate between internally and externally derived information. Overall, there is evidence of a relationship between<unk>  monitoring errors and the disorganized thinking that characterizes those who have schizophrenia in that there is a strong tendency for those people with hallucinations to attribute their internally generated events (i.e.: hallucinations and delusions) to an external<unk>  (e.g., the experimenter). That is, schizophrenia is characterized by failing to encode themselves as the<unk>  of the idea, compounded by attributing these ideas/beliefs to an external<unk> , all of which leads to those individuals with schizophrenia exhibiting behaviours typical of those with<unk> ; they misattribute the<unk>  of their knowledge, ideas, or beliefs. Post traumatic stress disorder Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is characterized by intrusive, vivid recollections of the traumatic event and impoverished episodic memory for all other events. Those individuals with PTSD experience memory distortions caused by<unk> , as well as false memory construction and unintentional integration of information that was not present for the original memory. Not only do individuals with this condition experience less vivid and decontextualized episodic memory for all events outside of the traumatic experience, but also, individuals with PTSD have difficulties with identifying the<unk>  of both emotional and neutral information overall. Those with PTSD may have poorer recall for the<unk>  of their knowledge due to deficits in the encoding process which creates weaker relationships between the item and its context. Depression Depression is associated with overly generalized memories and individuals with depression perform more poorly on<unk>  memory attribution tasks as compared to non-depressed individuals. These individuals show a memory bias for remembering negative information, possibly due to enhanced amygdala activity during the encoding of emotional (particularly negative) information. Overall, there is a relationship between the emotional arousal of an episode and its<unk>  memory – there is some evidence that the enhanced processing of negative memories results in poorer<unk>  memory, and thus individuals who are depressed would have increased amounts of<unk> . Hypnosis Hypnosis as a cause of<unk>  involves carrying out hypnosis and having the subjects remember post-hypnotically, experiences they had during hypnosis as tested by asking the individuals about esoteric knowledge that they learned during hypnosis. These individuals typically have no recall of the hypnotic experience whatsoever however, when tested on these obscure pieces of knowledge they are able to supply the correct answer; thus demonstrating they have<unk>  – they are able to recall the knowledge but they lack the capacity to indicate the context in which they learned this knowledge. In fact, the subjects often attribute their knowledge of the obscure facts to learning experiences other than during hypnosis (e.g.: "I read it somewhere," "Somebody must have told me," etc.).
Source amnesia
Body substance isolation
Mood congruence
Psychological dependence
Listener fatigue
Delusion
Self-disorder
Mirrored-self misidentification