Tag Archives: TEA

I was recently diagnosed with transient epileptic amnesia (TEA), which as far as I can gather from witnesses has manifested itself from maybe September 2015.

Clinical information on TEA can be found here.

Generally it manifests itself as a period in which your brain doesn’t take in memories, but you still retain the ability to function more or less normally – although some of the episodes that have happened to me have been rather more dramatic.

At first I was diagnosed with having had an episode of transient global amnesia (TGA) which is often a one-off experience.  But during 2016 I noticed other symptoms associated with TEA, such as smelling strange smells, being able to recall recent or comparatively recent events, and also the bizarre topographical amnesia. Bizarre because I was walking round Oxford and every building and road looked as if I’d never seen it before.

Luckily the prognosis for TEA is good. The doctors have put me on anti-convulsants which, since they’ve kicked, in have resulted me in getting large swathes of my memory back, not all at once but over a period of weeks.

The clinical report I linked to above is interesting because the medic who wrote that piece penned another article where he said that the existence of such a condition has implications for the understanding of memory in general.  ♠