Final answer:
Common causes of anterograde amnesia include brain trauma and diseases that damage the hippocampus, obstructing the transfer of information from short-term to long-term memory and impeding the formation of new memories.
Step-by-step explanation:
Common Causes of Anterograde Amnesia
The common causes of anterograde amnesia involve some form of brain trauma that results in damage to the hippocampus, affecting the brain's ability to transfer information from short-term to long-term memory. Examples of such trauma include blows to the head, surgeries, or serious accidents that result in brain injuries. Brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, can also lead to anterograde amnesia due to the degeneration of neurons and the presence of beta-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles impacting memory formation and retrieval processes.
Anterograde amnesia causes individuals to have difficulty forming new episodic or semantic memories while, intriguingly, being able to form new procedural memories. This was noted in the famous case of H. M., who, following brain surgery that aimed to control seizures, developed severe anterograde amnesia but still demonstrated the ability to improve at tasks through relearning, even without any conscious memory of having performed those tasks before.
Thus, the causes of anterograde amnesia are generally linked to physical disruptions in the brain's memory-processing centers, which prevent the consolidation of new memories, impacting an individual's capacity to remember contemporary events while leaving older memories relatively intact.