The patients know who they are, and can remember the details of their distant past. But they can’t recall most things that have happened in the years since their brains were damaged. The doctor they met a week ago is a stranger, lunch is forgotten as soon as it has been eaten.

Yet, in Asaf Gilboa’s lab, they quickly learn and retain information about exotic fruits or animals they had never heard of before, like an Australian anteater called the numbat.

It’s the way they acquired this new knowledge that seemed to make it stick, said Dr. Gilboa, who is helping patients with amnesia tap into a dormant memory process in the brain. The learning was incidental – the new information was picked in the process of doing something else – and is similar to the way many researchers believe young children add 10 or more new words to their vocabulary every day.

Read the full story in the Globe and Mail by ANNE MCILROY