Agnosia, alexia and a remarkable form of amnesia in an adolescent boy

Childhood cases of global anterograde amnesia, visual agnosia or alexia without agraphia, either alone or in any combination, are extremely rare. Here we report the case of a male adolescent, Neil (a pseudonym), who consequent to a pineal tumour began to exhibit all three disorders in the presence of normal verbal intelligence. The most surprising aspect of Neil's case, however, is his ability to retrieve postmorbid memories through the act of writing without being able to provide any oral account of the content of his written reports. His memory retrieval thus has some of the character of 'automatic writing'. This evidence pointing to Neil's possession of a dissociated form of episodic memory presents a new challenge to our understanding of the organization of memory and of the cerebral systems underlying it.