70% of people with TEA notice a patchy but persistent loss of memories of events from their past personal experiences and this autobiographical amnesia has been reported in all cases in which accelerated forgetting was also present. This memory loss can occur in people whose ability to acquire new memories is intact. Studying this 'autobiographical amnesia' or 'focal retrograde amnesia' or 'delayed onset amnesia' has been challenging because people do not always realize they have forgotten events or periods of time until they have difficulty in retrieving memories of specific significant events, and find they cannot form a coherent recollection. At first they might think they have forgotten some isolated events due to normal forgetting, and not realize they have forgotten larger blocks of past time:
