Name: Justine C.

Ramos

Course & Section: BA Psychology 2A

The Man Frozen in Time Case Analysis

I. Problem Statement

Have you ever imagined yourself being in a situation where you felt lost and stuck in
time? Imagine how hard it would be for you to not keep up with the present situation and get
drowned by your past? This is exactly the case of a 49-year-old man, Jimmie G. popularly
known as “The Man Frozen in Time” Jimmie G. is a very intelligent man, he excelled in many
different fields especially in math and science. He even worked as a radio operator during his
time in the US navy. His case was quite unusual to begin with, as he only remembers his
experiences and days in his early childhood up until he worked in the navy. In relation to that,
what made the neurologist Oliver Sacks shocked, when he first encountered Jimmie’s case was
that his ability to remember and tell those experiences in detailed. He can tell his address,
contacts and other information about himself perfectly fine. However, Sacks have noticed a
strange thing about how Jimmie tells his experiences, and that is because he uses past tense when
he talks about his days in high school and childhood, while he’s still using the present tense
while talking about his time in Navy. What makes it more interesting is that, things that
happened moments before, people he met recently, and other things that happened minutes ago
seemed to be unrecognizable for him. It was latter found out that Jimmie suffers from a
Korsakoff syndrome, an amnesic condition caused by sever scarcity of thiamine or vitamin B1
(Fama, Pitel & Sullivan, 2012).

The Korsakoff syndrome is very common to people who have chronic alcohol abuse.
This kind of people usually drinks more than the average occasional drinkers do, that is why they
are more prone to acquire and develop the syndrome. (Kopelman et. al, 2009). It is based from a
fact that Jimmie once became a heavy drinker when he was still working in the US navy.
However, this behavior doesn’t justify whether it directly affects the build up of the said disease
or not.

Consequently, it is really important to further study and analyze this specific case,
because it opens up opportunities for other audiences to get to understand people who are
actually suffering from this mental illness. In this way we can treat them as appropriate as they
needed and conduct possible solutions to avoid and prevent this type of mental illness to occur.

II. Analysis of Issues

The neurologist, Dr. Oliver Sacks has confirmed that Jimmie has great cognitive abilities
and motor skills. But the main problem was interconnected with his memory encoding since he is
struggling to remember details from the things he did minutes before.

Similarly, the almost the same situation happened to a 38-year-old male, named WO
where he was not able to form new memories. The only thing he remembers was the time he got
his hour-long root canal operation in 2005. His doctors claimed that there is nothing wrong with
his brain as it is working perfectly fine. But it was later found out that WO has anterograde
amnesia, it was caused by the damage on the hippocampal or diencephalon. This causes the
patients to have rapid forgetting of the episodic memory making it hard for them to recall recent
events and form new memories. (Weisberger, M.,2017). Therefore, this similar case can denote
that amnesia is subjected to brain damage.

Furthermore, to determine the causes of the patient’s chronic amnesia or mental illness,
we must first investigate the prior variable regarding the subject matter which is the misuse of
alcohol and heavy drinking. Excessive drinking of alcohol was said to greatly contributes to the
development of Korsakoff syndrome, since it hinders our body to take enough vitamin B1 and
thus decreases enzyme activities through mechanisms, which results to thiamine deficiency
(Martin et. al, 2003). However, a study of Odagaki (2018) presents that there is still a possibility
for non-alcoholic people to gradually develop Korsakoff syndrome. In his study he presented the
situation of a 38-year-old male patient, that has developed the said syndrome due to malnutrition.
This provides the variation about how the illness can get acquired.
 III. Recommended Actions

There are certain ways to actually lessen or prevent people from getting this mental
illness. As a person living in an advanced generation, technology has stepped up to make human
lives much convenient to live in. In relation to the problem, modern technologies existing up to
this day can examine human brains more accurately. Based on the study of Felman, (2018)
Thiamine supplementation is the most efficient way to cure the basic symptoms like vision
problems, confusion etc. however, this kind of treatment doesn’t solve the issues regarding the
memory loss and cognition of the victims. Improvement in thiamine resulted composed,
clearheaded and energetic but has no influence in memory. (Benton et al., 1997) Regardless, this
will be a great start to treat and reduce the number of people with Korsakoff syndrome, but
further studies and research should be conducted to improve the ways and effectiveness of the
thiamine supplementation.

Moreover, learning to abstain too much drinks alcohol while still maintaining a healthy
lifestyle and diet can be an effective way into a long-term treatment. Improving your tolerance
for alcohol will prevent you from the risks brought by the Korsakoff syndrome.

Furthermore, from the data gathered by WHO, almost 9% of the population in the
Philippines, aged 15 years old and above (estimated 86 million) have an alcohol use disorder.
(Swahn, Palmier, & Sinson, 2013). As per the Korsakoff syndrome interconnects with the
alcohol abuse, our administration should limit the access of the alcohol to our country by setting
policies and laws. By doing such change we can prevent easy access to alcohol and reduce the
general level of alcohol misuse or abuse. In addition to that, we can manage the level of access of
alcohol by increasing the prices of the beverages this can greatly decrease the alcohol abusers
especially the minors. This can control the temptation towards heavy drinking and prevent
alcohol misuse. (World Health Organization, 2019).
 Lastly, conducting more experimental researches regarding this subject could be an
effective process to have a better understanding and eventually lead a way to discover other
convenient ways to solve the Korsakoff syndrome and prevent its negative effects to people.

References:

Benton, D., Griffiths, R., & Haller, J. (1997). Thiamine Supplementation Mood and Cognitive
Functioning. Psychopharmacology 129 (1), 66-71, 1997.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?
scilib=1&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&t=1664072950193&u=%23p%3Dinb-8gdqcmIJ

Burgess, G. & Chadalavada B. (2016). Profound anterograde amnesia following routine

anesthetic and dental procedure: a new classification of amnesia characterized by intermediate-
to-late-stage consolidation failure? Neurocase 22 (1), 84-94, 2016.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?
scilib=1&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&t=1664073377440&u=%23p%3Dtw2uQrVDUhoJ

Fama, R., Pitel, A.L., & Sullivan, E., (2012). Anterograde episodic memory in Korsakoff
syndrome. Neuropsychology review 22 (2), 93-104, 2012.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?
scilib=1&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&t=1664073713160&u=%23p%3DbYm3ucrNJbAJ

Kopelman, M., Thomson, A., Guerrini, I., & Marshall, E.J. (2009). The Korsakoff syndrome:
clinical aspects, psychology and treatment. Alcohol and alcoholism 44 (2), 148-154, 2009.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?
scilib=1&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&t=1664073470357&u=%23p%3DmXt_HfaEQXEJ

Oscar‐Berman, M., Kirkley, S.M., Gansler, D., & Couture, A. (2004). Comparisons of Korsakoff
and Non‐Korsakoff Alcoholics on Neuropsychological Tests of Prefrontal Brain Functioning.
Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 28 (4), 667-675, 2004.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?
scilib=1&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&t=1664073221437&u=%23p%3DZ59FmQ8woT4J
Peter R. Martin, M.D., Charles K. Singleton, Ph.D., and Susanne Hiller–Sturmhöfel, Ph.D.
(2003). The Role of Thiamine Deficiency in Alcoholic Brain Disease. Alcohol Research &
Health. 2003;27(2): 134-42.
https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh27-2/134-142.htm#:~:text=Chronic%20alcohol
%20consumption%20can%20cause,of%20thiamine%20in%20the%20cells.

Smith, S., Smith, H., et al. (2022) Traumatic Brain Injury and Anterograde Amnesia.
https://www.brain-injury-law-center.com/blog/traumatic-brain-injury-and-anterograde-amnesia/

Swahn, M., Palmier, J., & Sinson, F. (2013) Alcohol marketing and drunkenness among students
in the Philippines: findings from the nationally representative Global School-based Student
Health Survey. BMC Public Health. 2013; 13: 1159.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3890547/#__ffn_sectitle

Weisberger, M. (2017) Forget Me Not: History's 17 Most Bizarre Amnesia Cases.

https://www.livescience.com/60551-bizarre-amnesia-cases.html

World Health Organization (WHO), (2019). 10 areas governments could work with to reduce the
harmful use of alcohol.
https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/10-areas-for-national-action-on-alcohol

Zubaran, C., Fernandes, J.G., & Rodnight, R. (1997). Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome.

Postgraduate medical journal 73 (855), 27-31, 1997.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?
scilib=1&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&t=1664073264322&u=%23p%3DRuoF84L3dp0J