Possible consequences of brain injury on old and new memories. Anterograde amnesia refers to the inability to store new information (usually new biographical events) in long-term, while retrograde amnesia refers to an inability to retrieve old, already stored memories. Retrograde amnesia is usually unequally distributed in that way that the information closer to the present or closer to the significant event represented by the flash symbol is more easily lost than information from the remote past. This distribution was first described by Ribot [156] and is named after him (“Ribot’s law”) or termed the “law of regression.” It was also Ribot who attributed three meanings to memory: “the conservation of certain conditions, their reproduction, and their localization in the past” (page 10).
